FullLipsDotNose
Proud Member
People from the Czech Rep started complaining that since Brexit and this election there hasn't been any option left as to where to immigrate.
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Donald Trump elected as America's 45th President.
- Thread starter Ms. BlueGangsta
- Start date
FullLipsDotNose
Proud Member
Oh my God. My English teacher from high school (ethnically Czech, born in the US, moved to Czechia as a child) is pro-Trump 
He posted it on his Facebook.
He posted it on his Facebook.LindavG
Proud Member
Allusio;4174268 said:
After every election there are protests but it's not as bad as you make it sound. Hillary didn't mean fighting in the literal sense, after all she said this in her concession speech:
[FONT=&]Compare that to what Republicans said after Obama was elected and re-elected, vowing to make him a one-term president and to obstruct anything he proposes. And they were rewarded for their constant obstructionism with a clean sweep of the Senate, House and Presidency.
I remember the Bush days when there was a lot of cynicism about America and its role in the world. Obama has done a lot to repair that reputation but I'm afraid Trump will cause irreparable damage. We'll go back to when America was feared rather than admired around the world, but then again it seems that's exactly what Trump and his supporters want. That's what it means to be "strong" apparently. [/FONT]
Allusio
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^ Thank you very much for saying that! Hope on that.
It is funny though that these same lines "We'll go back to when America was feared rather than admired around the world..." some people apply to Hillary.
It seems that both sides got confused because I see Trump supporters being afraid of Clinton starting a war and Her supporters being afraid of the same from Trump. And who is actually right? I have no idea. Time will tell.
It is funny though that these same lines "We'll go back to when America was feared rather than admired around the world..." some people apply to Hillary.
It seems that both sides got confused because I see Trump supporters being afraid of Clinton starting a war and Her supporters being afraid of the same from Trump. And who is actually right? I have no idea. Time will tell.
LindavG
Proud Member
I don't think that's true. Consider this graph:
Trump didn't expand his base. The main reason he won is because the Democratic base collapsed. There were 7 million people who voted for a black man in 2012 but didn't vote for Hillary. Racism doesn't explain that. As much as I like Hillary, she doesn't have the charisma or the likeability to energise voters and connect with them. She comes off as cold and calculating, even though I do genuinely believe she means well and has good policy proposals.
I wouldn't hope for an impeachment. Donald Trump is a lunatic but he can be manipulated, especially by appealing to his fragile ego. He doesn't seem to have any consistent principles or values. Mike Pence on the other hand is a full-blown Christian fundamentalist who supports things like anti-gay conversion therapy and legalised discrimination against LGBT people on the basis of religion. What a pair -_-
Ms. BlueGangsta
Proud Member
I've seen stats for the election before, but with the things Trump said I believe that the people who DID vote for him regardless of how many did, did it out of racism and stupidity.I don't think that's true. Consider this graph:
Trump didn't expand his base. The main reason he won is because the Democratic base collapsed. There were 7 million people who voted for a black man in 2012 but didn't vote for Hillary. Racism doesn't explain that. As much as I like Hillary, she doesn't have the charisma or the likeability to energise voters and connect with them. She comes off as cold and calculating, even though I do genuinely believe she means well and has good policy proposals.
And I say this because he really isn't fit to run a country, and often times used nothing but pathos mixed with bigotry in his speeches to appeal to people's emotions whilst ignoring real logic, which to me was a clever trick to cover up how unfit he truly was.
I mean come on, one of the things he harped on the most was building a big ass wall, and he was very racist and sexist with the things he said about women and minorities.
At some point common sense has to kick in and make you realize that it's better to not vote for the person who hates anyone that isn't like himself, and who thinks he can grab women's privates because he's rich.
Which is why I can't help but think that the people that did vote for him did it mainly because they wanted a racist in the white house that shared the same views as themselves.
I agree though, if the chart you've provided is accurate then now truly was NOT the time for democrats to abstain from voting.
While it doesn't SEEM like Trump has any consistent values he IS obviously racist and bigoted in general, so any discriminatory view he holds wouldn't surprise me.
Both him and Pence disgust me, your right though even if Donald was impeached we'd still be screwed.
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barbee0715
Proud Member
Pence is way worse. He terrifies me.
Krshna28
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I don't think that's true. Consider this graph:
Trump didn't expand his base. The main reason he won is because the Democratic base collapsed. There were 7 million people who voted for a black man in 2012 but didn't vote for Hillary. Racism doesn't explain that. As much as I like Hillary, she doesn't have the charisma or the likeability to energise voters and connect with them. She comes off as cold and calculating, even though I do genuinely believe she means well and has good policy proposals.
I wouldn't hope for an impeachment. Donald Trump is a lunatic but he can be manipulated, especially by appealing to his fragile ego. He doesn't seem to have any consistent principles or values. Mike Pence on the other hand is a full-blown Christian fundamentalist who supports things like anti-gay conversion therapy and legalised discrimination against LGBT people on the basis of religion. What a pair -_-
What's the total electorate? i.e. The total number of eligible voters in the US.
Because according to the graph the turnout was a disaster. What is the point to everyone complaining about the result if no one bothers to vote? This is so disappointing.
To be honest, the only credible candidate was Bernie Sanders. But again nobody voted for him. So now the World is stuck with the most unlikable person in decades.
Edit:
Eligible voters is 231 million, Turnout is 131 million.
100 million didn't bother to vote.
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HIStory
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I don't like a lot of things Trump said, but I think it is worth sometimes to take a look at the other perspective - in this case the perspective of the people who typically voted for Trump. This is a great article on that - one of the few which do not try the usual annoying liberal tactic of putting shaming labels on people just because they don't agree with the liberal worldview and trying to demonize them. I think this article is excellent in delivering a more sensible approach in understanding what drove the Trump vote (and no, it is not racism).
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/
[h=1]How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind[/h]
I'm going to explain the Donald Trump phenomenon in three movies. And then some text.
There's this universal shorthand that epic adventure movies use to tell the good guys from the bad. The good guys are simple folk from the countryside ...
... while the bad guys are decadent assholes who live in the city and wear stupid clothes:
Lionsgate Films
In Star Wars, Luke is a farm boy ...
Lionsgate Films
... while the bad guys live in a shiny space station:
LucasFilm
In Braveheart, the main character (Dennis Braveheart) is a simple farmer ...
LucasFilm
... and the dastardly Prince Shithead lives in a luxurious castle and wears fancy, foppish clothes:
Paramount Pictures
The theme expresses itself in several ways -- primitive vs. advanced, tough vs. delicate, masculine vs. feminine, poor vs. rich, pure vs. decadent, traditional vs. weird. All of it is code for rural vs. urban. That tense divide between the two doesn't exist because of these movies, obviously. These movies used it as shorthand because the divide already existed.
Paramount Pictures
We country folk are programmed to hate the prissy elites. That brings us to Trump.
[h=2]6
It's Not About Red And Blue States -- It's About The Country Vs. The City
[/h]I was born and raised in Trump country. My family are Trump people. If I hadn't moved away and gotten this ridiculous job, I'd be voting for him. I know I would.Mark Makela/Getty Images
See, political types talk about "red states" and "blue states" (where red = Republican/conservative and blue = Democrat/progressive), but forget about states. If you want to understand the Trump phenomenon, dig up the much more detailed county map. Here's how the nation voted county by county in the 2012 election -- again, red is Republican:
Holy cockslaps, that makes it look like Obama's blue party is some kind of fringe political faction that struggles to get 20 percent of the vote. The blue parts, however, are more densely populated -- they're the cities. In the upper left, you see the blue Seattle/Tacoma area, lower down is San Francisco and then L.A. The blue around the dick-shaped Lake Michigan is made of cities like Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Chicago. In the northeast is, of course, New York and Boston, leading down into Philadelphia, which leads into a blue band which connects a bunch of southern cities like Charlotte and Atlanta.
Blue islands in an ocean of red. The cities are less than 4 percent of the land mass, but 62 percent of the population and easily 99 percent of the popular culture. Our movies, shows, songs, and news all radiate out from those blue islands.
And if you live in the red, that ****ing sucks.
See, I'm from a "blue" state -- Illinois -- but the state isn't blue. Freaking Chicago is blue. I'm from a tiny town in one of the blood-red areas:
As a kid, visiting Chicago was like, well, Katniss visiting the capital. Or like Zoey visiting the city of the future in this ridiculous book. "Their ways are strange."
And the whole goddamned world revolves around them.
Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes -- either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.
"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.
Warner Brothers PicturesYou're not allowed to visit a dentist if you live more than 10 miles from the highway, apparently.
But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.
To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. "Are you assholes listening now?"
[h=2]5
City People Are From A Different Goddamned Planet
[/h]"But isn't this really about race? Aren't Trump supporters just a bunch of racists? Don't they hate cities because that's where the brown people live?"
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Look, we're going to get actual Nazis in the comment section of this article. Not "calling them Nazis for argument points" Nazis, but actual "Swastikas in their avatars, rooted against Indiana Jones" Nazis. Those people exist.
But what I can say, from personal experience, is that the racism of my youth was always one step removed. I never saw a family member, friend, or classmate be mean to the actual black people we had in town. We worked with them, played video games with them, waved to them when they passed. What I did hear was several million comments about how if you ever ventured into the city, winding up in the "wrong neighborhood" meant you'd get dragged from your car, raped, and burned alive. Looking back, I think the idea was that the local minorities were fine ... as long as they acted exactly like us.
.If you'd asked me at the time, I'd have said the fear and hatred wasn't of people with brown skin, but of that specific tribe they have in Chicago -- you know, the guys with the weird slang, music and clothes, the dope fiends who murder everyone they see. It was all part of the bizarro nature of the cities, as perceived from afar -- a combination of hyper-aggressive savages and frivolous white elites. Their ways are strange. And it wasn't like pop culture was trying to talk me out of it:
It's not just perception, either -- the stats back up the fact that these are parallel universes. People living in the countryside are twice as likely to own a gun and will probably get married younger. People in the urban "blue" areas talk faster and walk faster. They are more likely to be drug abusers but less likely to be alcoholics. The blues are less likely to own land and, most importantly, they're less likely to be Evangelical Christians.
Ruthless Records"... And Into Some Nightmares"
In the small towns, this often gets expressed as "They don't share our values!" and my progressive friends love to scoff at that. "What, like illiteracy and homophobia?!?!"Mario Tama/Getty Images
Nope. Everything.
[h=2]4
Trends Always Start In The Cities -- And Not All Of Them Are Good
[/h]The cities are always living in the future. I remember when our little town got our first Chinese restaurant and, 20 years later, its first fancy coffee shop. All of this stuff had turned up in movies (set in L.A., of course) decades earlier. I remember watching '80s movies and mocking the "Valley Girl" stereotypes -- young girls from, like, California who would, like, say, "like" in between every third word. Twenty years later, you can hear me doing the same in every Cracked podcast. The cancer started in L.A. and spread to the rest of America.Brian Blanco/Getty Images
Well, the perception back then was that those city folks were all turning atheist, abandoning church for their bisexual sex parties. That, we were told, was literally a sign of the Apocalypse. Not just due to the spiritual consequences (which were dire), but the devastation that would come to the culture. I couldn't imagine any rebuttal. In that place, at that time, the church was everything. Don't take my word for it -- listen to the experts:
Church was where you made friends, met girls, networked for jobs, got social support. The poor could get food and clothes there, couples could get advice on their marriages, addicts could try to get clean. But now we're seeing a startling decline in Christianity among the general population, the godless disease having spread alongside Valley Girl talk. So according to Fox News, what's the result of those decadent, atheist, amoral snobs in the cities having turned their noses up at God?
Chaos.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images, Scott Olson/Getty Images, Darren McCollester/Getty Images
The fabric has broken down, they say, just as predicted. And what rural Americans see on the news today is a sneak peek at their tomorrow.
The savages are coming.
Blacks riot, Muslims set bombs, gays spread AIDS, Mexican cartels behead children, atheists tear down Christmas trees. Meanwhile, those liberal Lena Dunhams in their $5,000-a-month apartments sip wine and say, "But those white Christians are the real problem!" Terror victims scream in the street next to their own severed limbs, and the response from the elites is to cry about how men should be allowed to use women's restrooms and how it's cruel to keep chickens in cages.
Madness. Their heads are so far up their asses that they can't tell up from down. Basic, obvious truths that have gone unquestioned for thousands of years now get laughed at and shouted down -- the fact that hard work is better than dependence on government, that children do better with both parents in the picture, that peace is better than rioting, that a strict moral code is better than blithe hedonism, that humans tend to value things they've earned more than what they get for free, that not getting exploded by a bomb is better than getting exploded by a bomb.
Or as they say out in the country, "Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."
The foundation upon which America was undeniably built -- family, faith, and hard work -- had been deemed unfashionable and small-minded. Those snooty elites up in their ivory tower laughed as they kicked away that foundation, and then wrote 10,000-word thinkpieces blaming the builders for the ensuing collapse.
[h=2]3
The Rural Areas Have Been Beaten To Shit
[/h]Don't message me saying all those things I listed are wrong. I know they're wrong. Or rather, I think they're wrong, because I now live in a blue county and work for a blue industry. I know the Good Old Days of the past were built on slavery and segregation, I know that entire categories of humanity experienced religion only as a boot on their neck. I know that those "traditional families" involved millions of women trapped in kitchens and bad marriages. I know gays lived in fear and abortions were back-alley affairs.Mario Tama/Getty Images
I know the changes were for the best.
Try telling that to anybody who lives in Trump country.
They're getting the shit kicked out of them. I know, I was there. Step outside of the city, and the suicide rate among young people ****ing doubles. The recession pounded rural communities, but all the recovery went to the cities. The rate of new businesses opening in rural areas has utterly collapsed.
See, rural jobs used to be based around one big local business -- a factory, a coal mine, etc. When it dies, the town dies. Where I grew up, it was an oil refinery closing that did us in. I was raised in the hollowed-out shell of what the town had once been. The roof of our high school leaked when it rained. Cities can make up for the loss of manufacturing jobs with service jobs -- small towns cannot. That model doesn't work below a certain population density.
If you don't live in one of these small towns, you can't understand the hopelessness. The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called "Cost of Living." Let's say you're a smart kid making $8 an hour at Walgreen's and aspire to greater things. Fine, get ready to move yourself and your new baby into a 700-square-foot apartment for $1,200 a month, and to then pay double what you're paying now for utilities, groceries, and babysitters. Unless, of course, you're planning to move to one of "those" neighborhoods (hope you like being set on fire!).
In a city, you can plausibly aspire to start a band, or become an actor, or get a medical degree. You can actually have dreams. In a small town, there may be no venues for performing arts aside from country music bars and churches. There may only be two doctors in town -- aspiring to that job means waiting for one of them to retire or die. You open the classifieds and all of the job listings will be for fast food or convenience stores. The "downtown" is just the corpses of mom and pop stores left shattered in Walmart's blast crater, the "suburbs" are trailer parks. There are parts of these towns that look post-apocalyptic.
I'm telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive.
And if you dare complain, some liberal elite will pull out their iPad and type up a rant about your racist white privilege. Already, someone has replied to this with a comment saying, "You should try living in a ghetto as a minority!" Exactly. To them, it seems like the plight of poor minorities is only used as a club to bat away white cries for help. Meanwhile, the rate of rural white suicides and overdoses skyrockets. Shit, at least politicians act like they care about the inner cities.
[h=2]2
Everyone Lashes Out When They Don't Have A Voice
[/h]It really does feel like the worst of both worlds: all the ravages of poverty, but none of the sympathy. "Blacks burn police cars, and those liberal elites say it's not their fault because they're poor. My son gets jailed and fired over a baggie of meth, and those same elites make jokes about his missing teeth!" You're everyone's punching bag, one of society's last remaining safe comedy targets.
They take it hard. These are people who come from a long line of folks who took pride in looking after themselves. Where I'm from, you weren't a real man unless you could repair a car, patch a roof, hunt your own meat, and defend your home from an intruder. It was a source of shame to be dependent on anyone -- especially the government. You mowed your own lawn and fixed your own pipes when they leaked, you hauled your own firewood in your own pickup truck. (Mine was a 1994 Ford Ranger! The current owner says it still runs!)
Not like those hipsters in their tiny apartments, or "those people" in their public housing projects, waiting for the landlord any time something breaks, knowing if things get too bad they can just pick up and move. When you don't own anything, it's all somebody else's problem. "They probably don't pay taxes, either! Just treating America itself as a subsidized apartment they can trash!"
The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying, and you smirk and say what they really mean is that blacks and gays are finally getting equal rights and they hate it. But I'm telling you, they say their way of life is dying because their way of life is dying. It's not their imagination. No movie about the future portrays it as being full of traditional families, hunters, and coal mines. Well, except for Hunger Games, and that was depicted as an apocalypse.
So yes, they vote for the guy promising to put things back the way they were, the guy who'd be a wake-up call to the blue islands. They voted for the brick through the window.
It was a vote of desperation.
[h=2]1
Assholes Are Heroes
[/h]"But Trump is objectively a piece of shit!" you say. "He insults people, he objectifies women, and cheats whenever possible! And he's not an everyman; he's a smarmy, arrogant billionaire!"Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Wait, are you talking about Donald Trump, or this guy:
You've never rooted for somebody like that? Someone powerful who gives your enemies the insults they deserve? Somebody with big fun appetites who screws up just enough to make them relatable? Like Dr. House or Walter White? Or any of the several million renegade cop characters who can break all the rules because they get shit done? Who only get shit done because they don't care about the rules?
Marvel StudiosMake The Avengers Assemble Again.
"But those are fictional characters!" Okay, what about all those millionaire left-leaning talk show hosts? You think they keep their insults classy? Tune into any bit about Chris Christie and start counting down the seconds until the fat joke. Google David Letterman's sex scandals. But it's okay, because they're on our side, and everybody wants an asshole on their team -- a spiked bat to smash their enemies with. That's all Trump is. The howls of elite outrage are like the sounds of bombs landing on the enemy's fortress. The louder the better.
Already some of you have gotten angry, feeling this gut-level revulsion at any attempt to excuse or even understand these people. After all, they're hardly people, right? Aren't they just a mass of ignorant, rageful, crude, cursing, spitting subhumans?
Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesAnd when cameras record said elites BFFing with their supposed enemy, even better.
Gee, I hope not. I have to hug a bunch of them at Thanksgiving. And when I do, it will be with the knowledge that if I hadn't moved away, I'd be on the other side of the fence, leaving nasty comments on this article the alternate universe version of me wrote.
It feels good to dismiss people, to mock them, to write them off as deplorables. But you might as well take time to try to understand them, because I'm telling you, they'll still be around long after Trump is gone.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/
LindavG
Proud Member
I don't think most Trump supporters are stupid either. In fact, Trump won college-educated white voters by a wider margin than Clinton. The problem is not stupidity, it's ignorance. People live in a bubble and don't trust anything the mainstream media tells them, instead they get their news from social media or straight from Donald Trump. They sincerely believe Hillary wants to take their guns away, increase taxes on poor and middle class people, ordered the killings in Benghazi, should have been in prison for the email scandal, etc. It's not based in fact but for many people, this is all they hear and they don't trust the counter-message from the media and the "establishment". As Obama said the other day, "if all I watched was Fox News, I wouldn't vote for me either." It's not a uniquely right-wing thing either. Many liberals live in their own bubble too and don't realise their opinion is not fact. I've seen many liberals smugly assume Trump couldn't possibly win because they don't know anyone who would vote for him. Up until a day before the election, the NYT had Hillary's chances at 84%. I think that partially explains the low turnout for Hillary; people who weren't too enthusiastic about her didn't vote or voted third party because they thought she'd have this in the bag anyway.
That said, it's undeniable that racism and misogyny also played a major role in Trump's campaign. I don't agree with you that Trump's supporters don't think he's racist. They know he is, they just don't care. It's hard to accept but for many people, racism just isn't a disqualifying factor. If anything, it attracts people who otherwise don't care much about politics. And racism does not necessarily go hand in hand with low education and poverty. People can be wealthy and accomplished but still hold deeply intolerant views. Which leads me to another myth about Trump voters by the way, the idea that these are disenfranchised blue collar folks who are struggling because they lost their manufacturing/coal mining job. I'm sure that's part of his base but the average Trump voter in the primaries had a median household income of $72,000, which is more than Clinton and Sanders voters in the primaries who made $61,000. It's also significantly more than the median household income in the US as a whole, which is around $56,000. Genuinely poor and disenfranchised people don't participate in elections at all, let alone cross the country to attend a Trump rally.
Ms. BlueGangsta
Proud Member
I agree with this.
HIStory
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Fox News here or there, but most media is liberal leaning, including the news channels and the major news websites. So it is not like the liberal POV is somehow supressed. If anything the liberal POV is what you see in 90% of the world media, often representes as the unquestionable truth and everyone who disagrees being demonized and labelled, instead of trying to see where they are coming from as a true liberal would IMO.
That people do not trust the mainstream media any more? Well, the media have only themselves to blame. As MJ fans we know more than anyone else that being mainstream doesn't make anyone turstworthy, how agendas play a part in what you read in MSM media and how often blogs and grassroot journalism actually carry more truth than the MSM do. Of course, there is also a lot of BS that you may read from bloggers and grassroot journalists. But the point is, just because it is in the MSM it doesn't make it true, so people have every right to be critical and sceptical of the MSM. They too have their agendas, their leanings, their biases, their sponsors who pay them for certain bias. And like in the above quoted article, many people feel that the liberal snobby elites have their noses way up their asses to notice the real issues people struggle with and to hear their cries or even to acknowledge them.
Trump is not a good answer to that, but there IS a problem and there IS a segment of society that has been ignored and this is the kind of result you sooner or later get when you ignore large segments of societies and their problems. While he is not good, but I feel the comparation to Hitler and fearing that the US now will become fascist is a bit of an overreaction. (But I agree with Barbee that Mike Pence is more worrying than Trump.) This is a wake-up call though, in many ways to the political establishment and to the media. Hopefully they will learn from it.
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Ms. BlueGangsta
Proud Member
This is turning out to be a very informative cool thread.
Overall though, my final thoughts on all this mess is that I hope things end up better then I think they will.
Overall though, my final thoughts on all this mess is that I hope things end up better then I think they will.
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Ms. BlueGangsta
Proud Member
I can't quote the entire article because you posted it as a quote, and I don't feel like copying and pasting it.
Overall though, I find that I agree with some of it and some of it I don't, and that it offers a different perspective which is rather informative. :yes:
LindavG
Proud Member
I disagree. The mainstream media is not liberal, it's corporate. The media doesn't care about liberal or conservative, it cares about ratings. Which is why the Clinton email + Benghazi "scandals" were covered to death even though there wasn't much there. If anything, the media approaches everything in a 'balanced' way which allows false equivalencies to take hold. For all the talk of Benghazi, does anyone remember this?
Liberals are consistently held to a different standard in the media. We all know that Clinton made a mistake in the way she handled her emails but I don't remember the same outrage when the Bush administration used a private RNC server and 22 million emails went "missing" between 2003-2009, many of them related to the Iraq war. There was no FBI investigation, no one was ever punished for it, and the mainstream media didn't pursue it with nearly the same vigour as they did the Clinton emails. I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that the media has a liberal bias. CNN hired Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as a political commentator! Every panel has to be 'balanced' with two liberals and two conservatives, the truth is secondary.
I am interested to see where people with opposing views come from and I thought the article you posted above was very enlightening. That urban/rural divide exists in many countries and growing up in a small rural town of 1200 people I recognise some of it. However, there's a difference between understanding and legitimising. You don't have to be a snobby liberal to be put off by statements like "Mexicans are bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists... and some, I assume, are good people" which is only one of many outrageous things he's said. You just have to have a sense of decency. Not to mention the fact that Donald Trump himself is a thrice-married billionaire from New York so I doubt working class religious folk in the countryside saw him as a natural ally. Must have been something else, I wonder what? :thinking:I refuse to make excuses for these people. Their ignorance is a choice.
Any comparison to Hitler feels like an overreaction because he was just that extreme. But I am genuinely worried about Trump, especially because there are no checks and balances for him. Another poster here wrote that the President is not that powerful so we shouldn't be so concerned. Wrong. This is the American political system:
Republicans have a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. In other words, they control the legislative branch. The executive branch consists of Trump and Pence, two unabashed authoritarians. Trump will nominate at least one, but likely more, justice to the Supreme Court so it has a conservative majority. Trump has vowed to nominate a justice in the likeness of Antonin Scalia, who said blacks belonged in slower-track schools and believed abortion and gay marriage should be illegal. The justice has to be approved by Congress, which is controlled by Republicans... and so the circle is round. Given all the things Trump has proposed, given the plans that are in the Republican platform, if you think this election was just like any other and nothing much is going to change, you're blissfully naive.
LindavG
Proud Member
I see that you edited your post but I want to address this as well.
This is another talking point that gets repeated and taken for granted but I don't buy it. The Democrats did not ignore the white working class. They have proposed all kinds of legislation to tackle their problems, from raising the minimum wage to paid family leave to stronger labour unions to lower taxes to more affordable health care, I could go on and on. Republicans have obstructed their efforts every step of the way. If this vote was to voice their discontent, it was misdirected. And as I said, the average Trump voter makes a lot more money than the average Clinton or Sanders voter so this whole narrative of Trump's base being poor and disenfranchised blue collar workers is just not true. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/
Ms. BlueGangsta
Proud Member
From Trump's website.
I figured you all might want to see this stuff considering the discussion that's going on.
Here's the link to all of his "policies"
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/policies/
I haven read all of this mess yet.
I'm just posting it here because I think you all might want to know about it especially if your an American.
I figured you all might want to see this stuff considering the discussion that's going on.
Here's the link to all of his "policies"
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/policies/
I haven read all of this mess yet.
I'm just posting it here because I think you all might want to know about it especially if your an American.
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terrell
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Many blacks and others have health care now under President Obama and Trump is planning on moving that. Trump is planning on bringing back search and Frisk. this mean if I just look suspious, you can stop and search without a warrant. I can go on. We will see.
LindavG
Proud Member
Pink Diamond Princess;4174393 said:
A lot of this sounds good in theory but you have to look a little deeper. Let me address it point by point.
No, it doesn't. Black Americans today have lower unemployment, higher wages, better life expectancy and higher graduation rates than at almost any other point in their history. The past forty years have been a steady upward trajectory, although a lot more still needs to be done and inner city crime is obviously a problem. This reminds me of Trump's claim that African American communities are in "the worst shape ever" which is laughable considering slavery and Jim Crow.
Note that he doesn't mention anything about investing in education. Promoting "school choice" is a euphemism for private charter schools at the expense of public schools. And guess who would be most affected by that?
No mention of the tensions between LE and African-Americans and how to resolve that. Donald Trump wants to bring back stop and frisk (which was ruled unconstitutional because it disproportionately targeted blacks and Hispanics) so he doesn't seem too concerned with minorities being able to walk the street in peace.
If that were the case he'd be in prison for fraud and racketeering.
First, the effective business tax is not 35% but closer to 15%, which is one of the lowest rates in the world. Cutting it so drastically is part of the reason economic experts predict his plans will add $10 trillion to the national debt. His plans will increase taxes on the lower and middle class. Childcare tax deductions also favour the rich as you can't deduct something you can't afford in the first place and almost half of all American families don't earn enough to pay income taxes so this doesn't help them. Again, sounds good on the surface but if you dig a little deeper, you see there is no substance there.
There is no way a Republican congress is going to reinstate Glass Steagall. If you believe this, you don't know the basics of politics.
So he wants to raise wages and at the same time force American companies to produce their products in the US. Be prepared to pay twice or three times as much for your products as you do now. This will drive imports through the roof - unless he also wants to impose a tariff on all imported goods? Which will then encourage other countries to do the same with American imports, and then we'll have massive price increases all across the board. Not a great way to reduce the trade deficit.
What "reckless" refugee admissions is he talking about? The vetting process for refugees in the US takes over 2 years and it involves extensive background checks, medical screenings, multiple interviews with federal security officials, etc. The US has the luxury of being an ocean away from most warzones so they can take afford "extreme vetting" as Trump calls it.
Obama has tried to get infrastructure spending done for 8 years but couldn't get it through the Republican congress. You think Paul Ryan & co. are going to agree to a $1 trillion investment in infrastructure? :rofl: Oh, and climate change spending is never "wasteful". I still can't believe that the most powerful country in the world is now led by climate change deniers. SMH.
Protect religious liberty and promote strong families = legalised discrimination against the LGBT community and forced pregnancies.
In other words, wreck other countries and leave them with the mess, like Iraq.
Allusio
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^ Yes, please... Leave other countries!
Edit: anything can be criticized, that's OK but the point is that the man has done nothing yet, good or bad ... Give him time, a chance and we will see. Now to go along the election campaign promises, well, I guess we've should have done so before election to know better. Now we need judge by actions, IMO. Much greater things were promised by greater people and actually were ignored by those great people.
Edit: anything can be criticized, that's OK but the point is that the man has done nothing yet, good or bad ... Give him time, a chance and we will see. Now to go along the election campaign promises, well, I guess we've should have done so before election to know better. Now we need judge by actions, IMO. Much greater things were promised by greater people and actually were ignored by those great people.
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Ms. BlueGangsta
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LOL thanks, but I haven't even truly read it myself yet.
I legit just skimmed it and posted it here because I thought it might have been relevant to the conversation, and I just updated my original post with a link to some more info.
I will check out your assessment though.
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HIStory
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I don't know how true those stats are. It is a bit strange to me that once they say the Democrat voters are the more educated, more cultured, they are the ones living in the cities, the highly educated ones with good degrees etc. They say that when they want to emphasize how much smarter Democrat voters are than Republicans. Then in another article they will say they are poorer than the Trump voters when they want to rebuke "the myth" of Trump supporters being poor. There seems to be a dissonance to me there.
Obviously, no voting base is a monolith. Democrat voters have the highly educated elite with a good income as well as poor inner-city black people or immigrants. But the same can be said of Republicans. Maybe Trump has rich supporters that make the so called "average voter" appear richer, but that doesn't negate the argument that a lot of people who voted for him voted for him for the reasons named in that article I posted and not out of racism. Which is what I saw a lot of times claimed about Trump supporters in the media. And it also doesn't negate the very real problems listed in that article. Racism IS a problem too, but you cannot dismiss people's other problems with some blanket allegation of racism all the time.
And when I talk about the "elite" I don't only talk about the Democratic party. Obviously the Trump vote was just as much a message to the Republican establishment as he is somewhat of an outsider, not a real Republican. And the media, which IMO is a part of that elite and it's time for them for self-reflection as well.
Like I said, I don't think Trump is a good answer to the problems (although I think we should wait and see first), but there are problems that need to be addressed and not just dismissed with labelling 59 million+ people as "racists" and fascists and supporting Hitler. You said Democrats tried to address those problems. Maybe, but maybe those who it was targeted at weren't satisfied with the effort and the outcome. Maybe they don't want welfare but want jobs. Want economy and factories and businesses in their area. Of course, it is easier said than done. Trump definitely has a high mountain to climb if he wants to deliver to those groups of people. It would take a genius to solve this problem because the world economic trends just do not point to a direction where such a system is sustainable. So I am sceptical if he can solve it. But I guess these people felt at least they are finally being addressed. I have actually seen Trump supporters on CNN say they don't mind it if he doesn't deliver on all of his promises, but at least there should be something in that direction.
Ms. BlueGangsta
Proud Member
Both of these statements are true.
However, if he didn't want people to feel so negative about him from the start then perhaps he should have handled some things very differently.
With many of the things he said he was practically asking to be hated, but perhaps that's what he wanted.
He does seem to like being perverse.
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Galactus123
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I'm not from US but I wouldn't choose a racist billionaire reality tv guy with no political experience as a president
Psychoniff
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respect77, the nerve of you to say his followers aren't all racist, yet the things have come out of his mouth are contrary to it. Ask yourself this. would you support a candidate that says he would put Jews in an interment camp? These trump supporters are racist, they know this but cognitive dissonance gets the better of them. White supremacy is in full awing tight now, and hope suffers for electing a man that will bring nothing self-destruction.
Ms. BlueGangsta
Proud Member
This seems like common sense, but apparently it is not. :/