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Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S.

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S.

#981

Post by komali2 »

tobltobs wrote: post #597
tmptmp wrote: post #162

It's not surprising. The left-liberal camp was always turning a blind eye towards many important national issues and importantly about the issue of Islam. This reminds me a talk given by Sam Harris about the blunder being done by left-liberals regarding their dishonest/spineless treatment of Islam. His video titled "Sam Harris : Liberals failure to talk honestly about Islam is responsible for the rise of Trump" is ve…

> The left-liberal camp was always turning a blind eye towards many important national issues and importantly about the issue of Islam. First I wanted to say something about that "issues of Islam" might not be the biggest problems we have, but then I looked at your profile page and now I guess you would disagree. The seeds of the brainwashing start to grow. I am scared about our future.

I want to have a serious discussion with people about how to tackle the second coming of hyper nationalism without people laughing me off and calling me an SJW, cuck, or quoting "Everyone I disagree with is Hitler, a child's guide to politics."

It is clear that we're about to have a second wave of prejudice based on race, religion, and sexual orientation/preference, and I want to be ready to tackle this intelligently.

Re: Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S.

#982

Post by avisser »

estefan wrote: post #120
l33tbro wrote: post #55

Call Trump what you will, but he played the media like Hendrix. They took the troll-bait and reported every outrageous soundbite gleefully, all in pursuit of a few clicks and ad-bucks. Meanwhile, Trump gained more and more of a platform and eventually established a cult of personality.

Given all the barefaced lies told during the Brexit campaign and the US campaign it does lead to questions about democracy, i.e. should the average man on the street really decide? To be sure I'm not advocating Communism but perhaps up until 20 years ago the lack of social media helped contain outright lies and extreme views, perhaps with people asking the intellectual(s) in their social circles about candidates. The…

> should the average man on the street really decide?

I've always thought the issue was how big the street was. I trust the average man on the street in my town. I would be _very_ suspect of elites running a city of 50k.

But at scale... Personally I have no fucking clue how India runs itself.

I would trust something like the United States of New England to elect good, representative leaders. Maybe that's where we'll end up in 100 years.

Re: Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S.

#983

Post by iwintermute »

lyschoening wrote: post #565
smackay wrote: post #102

Jeez, everybody is all bent out of shape on this. The Republican establishment hate Trump nearly as much as they hate Clinton so with Republicans controlling The House and The Senate how much "damage" is President Trump going to be able to do. The really interesting part of all this was reading Scott Adams blog who proposed the idea that Trump is a master persuader (probably this is just a fancy name for populist). H…

For one Trump will give them at least one, more likely two even more Supreme Court Justices, so some of the most right-wing conservatives we've seen in the past half century will decide the law of the land for the next twenty to thirty years. The Republicans will have control of all three branches of government for the next few years and there is a whole lot that they can do with that. As a foreigner, what worries me…

Re: Russia can also be expected to threaten Europe with more confidence; hopefully our defense spending will increase to pick up the slack.

Any real threats to Europe will lead to nuclear conflict. It's not 1910 - you don't need to be afraid of rifles and spending money on tanks.

You can say - but the Ukraine! - well, it's not European country, and it has no valuable partners that deeply invested and pledged to protect it.

Re: Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S.

#984

Post by bennettfeely »

mason240 wrote: post #868
nostromo wrote: post #51

Such a watershed moment. A few things strike me: * A Republican just won without being very religious and being wishy-washy on abortion. * The loser out-spent the winner by huge amounts. Does money really buy elections? Maybe, but not this one. * The rich abandoned Republicans, but many poor and working-class abandoned Democrats. [1] 1: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/elections/e...

Now that religious social issues like gay marriage and abortion have been essentially settled, we have been in the beginning of a trend where left-wing politics begins to align with religion. We are already seeing with people using religious arguments for things like social programs and environmentalism. FFS the Pope said people should vote for Hillary.

> FFS the Pope said people should vote for Hillary.

He didn't. And he wouldn't do that either.

Re: Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S.

#986

Post by Houshalter »

mikeash wrote: post #867
Houshalter wrote: post #265

I hate democracy. Most voters aren't informed at all. Attractive candidates win 2.5 times more often than less attractive ones. Money and crappy 30 second ads apparently influence the outcome. First past the post voting means no one can even vote for what they really want to begin with. It wouldn't be so bad if the president didn't have enormous power. And they aren't supposed to. But it's been growing so much over t…

I'd like to offer a more optimistic view. The true advantages of democracy are things that are rarely talked about and which people are mostly unaware. In my opinion, they are: 1. The availability of non-violent ways to push for change and seek redress. 2. A way to reliably and peacefully transition from one leader to another. These are big problems with non-democratic governments. If people don't feel like they have…

No I agree. Democracy is better than monarchy. But that's a super low bar to pass. Not something to be proud of. I think there are alternative systems that are even better.

Just as a start, switching to an alternative voting system would be amazing. It's been shown that systems like approval voting are a better improvement over plurality voting, then plurality voting is over monarchy (http://rangevoting.org/UniqBest.html#HugePos). And that still works in the framework of democracy. I'd ideally like to get rid of voting entirely and replace it with something like randomly sampling representatives from the population.

Re: Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S.

#987

Post by chillwaves »

angry-hacker wrote: post #917
cryptica wrote: post #832

I'm surprised by how many of my non-US friends are calling Americans 'Stupid' right now on social media for voting for Trump. I think that the Trump victory actually shows the opposite; that Americans are smart enough to think for themselves regardless of what the media tells them. They got to the meat of the information without buying into all the spin that the media put around it. I strongly disagree with several t…

While I never ever wanted Trump because of the geopolitical situation in eastern Europe, I can understand Americans who voted for him. You can't turn a dead eye on half of the population, call them stupid, racist, bigoted (heck, some even argue here democracy doesn't work and the people who voted shouldn't be able to vote, go figure.) and then expect the worst habitual liar, a psycho candidate to win. It was literall…

> I understand the anger of your people for us, Europeans, outsourcing the defense budget to American taxpayers (while it does come with some benefits).

This is not an act of altruism. US global hegemony dictates our military spending, regardless of what Europe does. We (at least the select few elite) reap the benefits of this arrangement. Hell, even the folks complaining in America aren't complaining about the money being funneled into the MIC in their district that creates good jobs to build weapons of war.

Re: Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S.

#988

Post by Houshalter »

pianowow wrote: post #967
Houshalter wrote: post #265

I hate democracy. Most voters aren't informed at all. Attractive candidates win 2.5 times more often than less attractive ones. Money and crappy 30 second ads apparently influence the outcome. First past the post voting means no one can even vote for what they really want to begin with. It wouldn't be so bad if the president didn't have enormous power. And they aren't supposed to. But it's been growing so much over t…

Money did not have the intended effect on this election. Clinton outspent Trump by quite a large margin. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...

Whether or not spending actually influences elections, most politicians certainly believe it does. Or they wouldn't spend so much effort on fundraising, and wouldn't bother with the stupid ads. They clearly believe it works. Surely they know. Modern campaigns track this stuff religiously with polls, statisticians, and A/B tests. And this belief corrupts our democracy.

One example doesn't disprove it anyway. Clinton lost. But she might have lost even worse without the spending. It's impossible to say the spending had no effect. As the election was pretty close in many states, even small effects can make a world of difference.

Re: Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S.

#989

Post by jroseattle »

DanTheManPR wrote: post #980
jroseattle wrote: post #356

Big data and big polling (Nate Silvers) took a major credibility hit in this election. People will be studying this for years. Of course, it's not that big data itself was to blame, just the interpretation of it. Nate, not sure what to tell you but that was a significant miss in this election, going all the way back into the primaries.

On the contrary, FiveThirtyEight came off looking pretty good this year. Where other poll aggregators where giving Clinton very high chances, their models continued to maintain that Trump had something like a 1/3 chance. They also correctly identified the level of polling uncertainty in the rust belt, and how tight the race was in Florida (a state which continues to be the most important swing). There is this ongoing…

Sure, the facts bear that out, but why let that complicate a good story? ;-)

I mean the public perception of data, analytics, pollsters, etc. is now being discussed in the press as something that blatantly misses the "human" element.

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