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The smug style in American liberalism

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Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#191

Post by goda90 »

clifanatic wrote: post #184
scarmig wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full disclosure: I'm a Hillary voter, after much internal fretting about voting third party or writing in Obama. Looking at the reactions on my Facebook feed, the large majority of people seem to be taking from this experience the learning that Trump voters are all disgusting misogynistic racist pigs, and America deserves to be damned for its sins against the pro-Clinton media orthodoxy. It's tiring, because in terms…

I remember my Facebook feed from 8 years ago - my liberal friends were celebrating, and my conservative friends were disappointed, but trying to be (somewhat) conciliatory. Now, my conservative friends are celebrating but my liberal friends attitude is "screw America, I hope you choke in your own vomit, you racist bastards".

Remind them that the DNC actively worked to get both Trump and Clinton into the candidacy, thinking that their corrupt status quo candidate could beat an unsavory populist. Just pushing negative media about Trump validated the scapegoats of many disenfranchised people and has increased the hate in this country.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#192

Post by LanceH »

ant6n wrote: post #55
yummyfajitas wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other reasons to support Trump. Being an unorthodox person who they perceived as nonjudgemental, quite a few people have confided in me that they like him. Only one of these people was white, several were female, and none are particularly racist. Reasons I've been told include: - A "fuck you" to the establishment and orthodoxy. - A belief that Hillary is corrupt. - Entertainment value. One Trump voter I kno…

I've done a fair bit of arguing with the folks here on HN, it's interesting because it doesn't match the echo chamber I have on twitter or facebook. There seem to be a lot of Trump supporter here, which I find very surprising. This idea keeps coming up again and again that using the word 'racist' in the context of the Trump campaign is essentially name-calling, an insult. The problem is, racism is a big, big, big iss…

And we're right back to smug. You smugly state that it's a zero tolerance policy on racism, when it's going to be the progressive cohort who gets to declare things racist. Specifically, they'll cry racism every time someone disagrees with them. Don't like what the president wants to do? Racist. Have an issue with Mexico? Racist. Mildly suggest that college admissions should have a class based adjustment instead of racial quotas...racist.

Or just sit in the wrong place and you get to hear, "all white men are racist." It may guilt some to action, but it makes others disinclined to help.

Look at the #blacklivesmatter. Look at all the people who have been railing against police militarization for decades being called racist by the recent arrivals to the issue just because they say there is a larger problem.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#193

Post by jessaustin »

CalChris wrote: post #186
jessaustin wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the alternative? Hating them? Pretending they don't exist? How did that work out for you?

He loves the uneducated because they're gullible. In fact, he loves them so much that he'll educate them at Trump University.

Trump University is indefensible, but do you really believe categorically that people with e.g. secondary education only are "gullible"? Who told you that?

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#194

Post by foldr »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #179
foldr wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Romney being a racist was not a major (or even minor) theme of Obama's campaign. I don't think you can really be suggesting that alleged racism on the part of the Republican candidate was as big an issue in the previous election as in the present one (where the Republican candidate made widely publicized explicitly racist statements).

I agree that the "$republican is literally hitler", "$republican is racist", etc, is more hysterical this time around. I attribute that to Trump being blatantly on the wrong side of the culture war [1]. I'm just saying that "XXX republican is racist" has lost it's meaning due to overuse. The boy has cried "hitler" about Bush, Romney, etc, and the villagers will no longer come running. [1] I recommend reading Moldbug'…

I think this is wrong in two respects. First, the statement has not lost its meaning but only its effect. Second, the claim that Bush and Romney were racists was not a major strand of political discourse. People talked about Republican policies rooted in racism, but that is a very different thing from having a presidential candidate who is himself, on a personal level, a racist.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#195

Post by CalChris »

lintiness wrote: post #133
CalChris wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, if you look up in the dictionary you'll find that deficit and debt are distinct words: debit: something that is owed or that one is bound to pay to or perform for another deficit: the amount by which expenditures or liabilities exceed income or assets http://www.dictionary.com/browse/deficit http://www.dictionary.com/browse/debt The Federal deficit was about $1.4T when Obama started and its about $600B now…

you are out of your mind. the only reason the deficit is south of a trillion is interest rates are HALF what they were in 08. 2008 fed debt: ~10T 2016 fed debt: ~19T 2008 int exp: ~450M 2016 int exp: ~450M he's spent like a lunatic, and his aca has just gotten started.

Spent like a lunatic would be his predecessor with two unfunded off the books wars, Medicare Part D, the 'Ownership' Society all paid for with tax cuts.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#196

Post by andrewvc »

clifanatic wrote: post #184
scarmig wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full disclosure: I'm a Hillary voter, after much internal fretting about voting third party or writing in Obama. Looking at the reactions on my Facebook feed, the large majority of people seem to be taking from this experience the learning that Trump voters are all disgusting misogynistic racist pigs, and America deserves to be damned for its sins against the pro-Clinton media orthodoxy. It's tiring, because in terms…

I remember my Facebook feed from 8 years ago - my liberal friends were celebrating, and my conservative friends were disappointed, but trying to be (somewhat) conciliatory. Now, my conservative friends are celebrating but my liberal friends attitude is "screw America, I hope you choke in your own vomit, you racist bastards".

Oh please. There's been 8 years of racist conservative commentary about Obama. Trump was leading the racist 'birther' movement charge. Don't act like its a double standard.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#197

Post by aaronchall »

pron wrote: post #182
yummyfajitas wrote: post #35

This is definitely the preference falsification election. Those who know me on HN know that I'm an outspoken proponent of unorthodox ideas. I'm regularly shouted down, called racist/evil/etc, downmodded and flagged on HN. I also get a steady stream of private emails: "I wouldn't say this publicly cause of the bullies, but that .gov link with all the data does seem to support you. I think you might be right, I need to…

> Apparently in the privacy of a voting booth, people are willing to express their true beliefs. It appears that Trump won because of working-class people in the Rust Belt, who repeatedly got the short end of the stick by the neoliberal policy of both parties. Democrats should have had their backs, but they'd abandoned them, instead, serving the "professional meritocracy". He did not win because of spoiled, well-off…

> he is racist

Do you mean academically, in the sense that just about everyone is biased, as psych studies and resulting papers continue to tell us? Or that he secretly holds a deep and abiding hatred of anyone who doesn't look like him?

If the former, you're making gratuitous meaningless insults towards a man we just elected president. If the latter, you're an idiot. But I repeat myself.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#198

Post by nostrademons »

gcp wrote: post #111
rbehrends wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When pollsters call the preference falsification continues. I don't buy this. Sam Wang had projected Clinton winning the popular vote by 4.0% (+/- .6%). She's currently projected to win the popular vote by about 1% (the Electoral College margin is an artifact of the electoral system and unrelated to voting preferences). That means that maybe 1 in 60 Americans voted differently from what the polls predicted. So, whi…

the margin of error relative to the electorate was fairly small But was it fairly small in statistical significance? A polling error of 3% is likely big enough to confirm a consistent and very significant bias. It's like throwing a coin and getting 52000 heads and 48000 tails. "Only" a 4% error, but sure as hell evidence your coin is biased.

Typical political polls have a margin of error of between 3-5%. You'd expect to see to see a 3% miss roughly 5% of the time.

What's perplexing to me is that the 3% error occurred in a polling average of dozens, perhaps hundreds of polls. If it were just one poll, a 3% miss is quite within the realm of possibility. But in this case it was a range of polls that centered on Clinton +4% and itself had a roughly Gaussian distribution between Trump +2% and Clinton +10%. This makes me wonder if the polling samples were themselves not independent, or some other form of systematic bias amongst mainstream pollsters.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#199

Post by Sacho »

rbehrends wrote: post #109
yummyfajitas wrote: post #35

This is definitely the preference falsification election. Those who know me on HN know that I'm an outspoken proponent of unorthodox ideas. I'm regularly shouted down, called racist/evil/etc, downmodded and flagged on HN. I also get a steady stream of private emails: "I wouldn't say this publicly cause of the bullies, but that .gov link with all the data does seem to support you. I think you might be right, I need to…

> When pollsters call the preference falsification continues. I don't buy this. Sam Wang had projected Clinton winning the popular vote by 4.0% (+/- .6%). She's currently projected to win the popular vote by about 1% (the Electoral College margin is an artifact of the electoral system and unrelated to voting preferences). That means that maybe 1 in 60 Americans voted differently from what the polls predicted. So, whi…

Sam Wang called a Trump win practically impossible:

https://twitter.com/samwangphd/status/788544053059153924

http://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/11/05/poll-expert-i-wi...

http://election.princeton.edu/2016/10/10/some-secrets-are-no...

Specifically the last link exhibits the smugness this article is talking about. Here's a quote from it:

> This seems like a good time to reveal one of the Princeton Election Consortium’s own secrets. Thankfully, it does not involve an Access Hollywood video. Here it is: poll-based Presidential prediction is not very hard. I guess that is a pretty boring secret. Sorry.

Sam Wang was predicting a 95% chance of winning for Hillary. I guess we're in the 5%. I'd further like to point out that Hillary is right now winning the popular vote by 0.1%, and the NYTimes has adjusted their prediction down to 0.5% when all the votes are tallied.

Obama's win over Romney was slightly less than 4.0%, and he won 332-206 in the electoral college. Here's how Sam Wang describes it:

> President Obama’s re-election in 2012 carried even less suspense: he never lost the lead to Romney. The closest he came was right after the first debate, though even then he was slightly ahead.

The pressure to express a Trump sentiment is not high in a non-swing state; If you are in an entrenched blue state, people do not care about you(guaranteed democrat win anyway). If you are in an entrenched red state, then you have plenty of support around you. The voters in swing states are a much smaller percentage of the total, and preference falsification would have affected those states the most.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#200

Post by saiya-jin »

usmeteora wrote: post #135
yummyfajitas wrote: post #35

This is definitely the preference falsification election. Those who know me on HN know that I'm an outspoken proponent of unorthodox ideas. I'm regularly shouted down, called racist/evil/etc, downmodded and flagged on HN. I also get a steady stream of private emails: "I wouldn't say this publicly cause of the bullies, but that .gov link with all the data does seem to support you. I think you might be right, I need to…

I actually agree with you in some cases here. I'm not a huge fan of Hillary. However, as a young women working in technology and male dominated environments, it's really hard for me to believe the pathological sexism isnt a fundamentally limiting component in making everything better. I don't believe women should get free rides and everything should be equal overnight. I'm not a man hater. I know many educated male p…

there's not much to disagree on, you are completely right and I am sorry if you encountered any of this low idiotic approach before. I presume we come from very different places (me from eastern Europe, currently in Switzerland).

I've never ever seen any negative bias or behavior discussed towards women neither in engineering school, nor in any of the numerous job in my 12 year career. In uni, out of 120 students graduating in IT, there was exactly 1 woman. She was in the center of attention, the teachers were more tolerant to her during exams (not giving free passes though!) and overall she was cherished and very welcomed.

While working, women were/are a bit more common now, and again there is more positive bias towards them rather than equality. Not complaining, far from it, it's refreshing to see slightly different attitude at some times, and more often than not, there is no difference.

To me it seems the whole time tech jobs are just not that interesting to women, too abstract, work too nerdy and who knows what. This seems to be changing, hopefully the trend will continue. Nothing to lose, just gain for all of us.

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