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The smug style in American liberalism

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Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#371

Post by zigzigzag »

foldr wrote: post #339
zigzigzag wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the US is now run by a guy who thinks the EU sucks, that Brexit was great, and whose best buddy in Europe is Nigel Farage. And is it not the case that the most popular politicians in other core countries are all anti-EU? Let's see how this plays out.

Ah I see, so their plan was for Trump to win the presidency and for the entire EU to collapse before we make a deal. Sure, let's see how that plays out. Third time lucky?

"Let's get out before the EU implodes" was actually a campaigning point, though not one that affected my own decision much. I would be surprised if the EU collapses. But then again, almost everyone was taken by surprise when the USSR disintegrated, and the conventional wisdom was that neither Brexit nor Trump could happen. So we'll see. Suffice it to say that there are structural weaknesses there.

Regardless, sometimes you have to leave a social group if that group is becoming self-destructive, even if it hurts in the short run.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#372

Post by DefaultUserHN »

CalChris wrote: post #112
wojcech wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I pointed out above, the status quo is actually pretty good. For you. And me. But we are not the majority. The majority does not benefit from automation, globalisation etc. as much as you and me. And it doesn't matter if in absolute terms we are all better of(for which citation would be needed, specifically for the lowest income bracket), it matters that the benefits of this new age are not spread around to thos…

"I love the poorly educated." This wasn't about the economy at all which is pretty good. This was a demagogue preying on gullibility. Y'all just elected him, citation unnecessary.

>"I love the poorly educated."

Well, Hillary Clinton and her supporters hate the poorly educated, and look where that got them.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#373

Post by zigzigzag »

usmeteora wrote: post #359
zigzigzag wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hillary was undone by her own sexism. Her loss and Trump's win is the final bankruptcy of feminist ideology, reaping what it sowed. When Obama ran, did he repeatedly suggest people should vote for him because he was black? I don't recall so. I remember him talking about his policies and beliefs. Hillary's campaign rapidly devolved after the primaries to "vote for me because I'm not Trump and I'm a (in my view) super…

yeh so, I was not at all trying to defend Hillary, at all, as I mentioned in the first sentence, so I'm not sure why I need to reagree with you on all of this you just said, because I do, entirely, which is why me and almost every female I know, most of whom are highly educated and work in tech/male dominated fields, did not vote for her. I agree with you about this and so do most of the women I know. She absolutely…

In that case you sound like my kind of feminist!

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#374

Post by artimaeis »

xupybd wrote: post #304
artimaeis wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so you can bend to "life of the mother" exception. I can follow this a bit further then. How do you handle and account for miscarriages? A sizable number of pregnancies end in miscarriage - especially if we view life as beginning at conception. So in miscarriage the mother has ended the life of the child. What's the framework with which you believe this should be dealt with? What's to be done with people who ha…

How is a miscarriage any different to an infant dying of natural causes? Sometimes babies die naturally it's sad, but there is a huge difference between dying naturally and dying due to intervention or neglect. Surly you can see there is a big difference between a woman having medically difficulty bringing a child to term and an abortion? In the one case she has done all she can to provide for the child in the other…

Of course I see the difference. But think of the perspective of the state here. The state must protect the life of the child, as it is a full citizen of the state.

When an infant dies of natural causes it's usually trivially simple to rule out murder. But in the case of miscarriage/abortion the procedure for early-term abortion simply causes a miscarriage. So in order to adequately protect the life of the child we'd need to be able to determine if the miscarriage was forced or not.

What, in your view, is the ideal role of the state as a protector of life in this situation?

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#375

Post by DefaultUserHN »

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.

Seems like you hate the poorly educated, and you're just attributing that to Trump.

Now only that, you're assuming that uneducated people are gullible. You're stereotyping a broad group of people without any evidence.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#376

Post by DefaultUserHN »

Asdfbla wrote: post #140

Pretty hard to not look down on those people when you know that the facts are on your side, since for certain things there are established facts. I wouldn't be ready to be patient with someone who thinks the moon is made out of cheese or something. But I suppose the article is still right and competent politicians should have the empathy to relate even to those people. I couldn't do it.

Yes, it was pretty hard for the Nazi to not look down on the Jews too. And we all know how that turned out.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#377

Post by DefaultUserHN »

foldr wrote: post #368
DefaultUserHN wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How many of them do you think are able to carefully parse the distinctions between 'Latino', 'Mexican' and 'illegal brown person'? And yet, Trump supporters understands that Mexican and Muslims are not a race. Hence, why they think Trump is not racist. >Trump can't say "I want a white America". But the people who do want this haven't had any difficulty picking up on his hints. Now you're just making up things in you…

> Trump supporters understands that Mexican and Muslims are not a race. Hence, why they think Trump is not racist. So they think he's xenophobic and religiously bigoted instead? How is that better? >Now you're just making up things in your mind about Trump and Trump supporters, and then accusing them of it. I'm not making up the fact that white supremacists supported Trump.

>So they think he's xenophobic and religiously bigoted instead? How is that better?

He is not against all immigrants. He is ONLY against ILLEGAL immigrants. He still supports LEGAL immigrants from all over the world.

Also, he is not against the Islamic religion. He is just against immigration from countries with known ties to terrorism.

>I'm not making up the fact that white supremacists supported Trump.

The KKK also supports Hillary too, so that's just the typical election rhetoric you see every four years.

These are misconceptions by people who have not listened to Trump's rally speeches. They only hear a small part of the quotes without the context and form these misconceptions about him. And now, they're shocked and confused to find that the majority of the country supports him.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#378

Post by DefaultUserHN »

deviate_X wrote: post #116

I have a feeling that this explanation overly complex, more like liberal self-beating and giving far too much credence Simply those who voted for Trump feel like victims of "something" And despite having won "everything" I have the feeling that they will still feel like victims of the undefinable "other" in the up and coming loooong years..

I agree.

Trump supporters won everything by losing their jobs oversea.

Trump supporters won when other people call them racist for wanting to have a job.

Trump supporters won when their kids are sent to die in the Middle East to line up the Rich Elite's pockets with oil money.

Trump supporters won when they return from the war, with missing limbs, and the VA won't even take care of them.

And the smug still can't figure out why Trump supporters support Trump.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#379

Post by pmyteh »

DefaultUserHN wrote: post #358
pmyteh wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not clear it actually exists. Both the 2015 general election and Brexit misses were primarily due to turnout modeling problems: people accurately reported which candidate they preferred, but different groups turned out in different numbers than had happened historically, so the (educated) guess about who would actually vote turned out to be wrong. The British Polling Council postmortem is a very interesti…

>It's really not clear it actually exists. It's pretty clear if you're a Trump supporter.

I get that social desirability bias is a thing, and that those with views considered socially unpopular are less willing to share them. But for a hypothetical Shy Tory effect to have an effect on polling you'd need something like all of the following:

* Tories to be unwilling to admit to voting Tory (plausible);

* Tories to claim to be voting for someone else, instead of refusing to answer, as if they refuse to answer then the demographic weighting will increase the impact of similar respondents who will tend to also be Tories (somewhat less plausible);

* The source of errors from the above to outweigh other known problems such as turnout modelling, non-response bias, demographic variations in telephone/Internet access, late changing of minds, anti-Tories in Tory areas doing the same things for the same social desirability reasons (I suspect it wasn't any more fun being a Hillary supporter in Trumpland than a Trump fan in Hillaryland this cycle), and so on.

Polling is not easy. Its statistical guarantees are only valid under circumstances that basically don't hold, and there is a great deal of variation due to design decisions which cannot be empirically grounded. You don't need a "shy Tory" effect to produce the misses seen recently, and the evidence doesn't support it happening on a scale big enough to have any impact at all.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#380

Post by iainmerrick »

jessaustin wrote: post #273
iainmerrick wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, hang on now, wouldn't you agree that the free market has sometimes left us stuck with cartels and monopolies? (In the US, look at the railroads and telephone network.) Sometimes you need regulations to break out of those traps.

The telephone network hasn't had anything to do with a free market since 1934 at the latest. The Justice Department chose a monopolist winner in 1913. The USA freight rail system exhibited some monopoly through the 1880s, but since has been quite regulated. Perhaps the current level of regulation may not be ideal, but since the USA freight rail system is the best in the world it would seem foolish to tamper with it.

I think we're agreeing?

I didn't mean those are monopolies now, I meant that they had wandered into monopoly territory in the past, and regulation has been somewhat (not entirely) successful in fixing that.

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