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Trump Clinton Demographics

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Robert Tulip

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Re: Trump Clinton Demographics

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DWill wrote:Let's take Charles Taylor's column by paragraphs in consideration of how you've characterized it:
On the face of it, your suggestion seems a perfectly reasonable way to analyse an article. However, here we are not dealing with perfectly reasonable matters, we are trying to understand a political polemic. It is standard practice in such polemic to use rhetorical methods of persuasion accompanied by sly and insidious statements. So the ideal for such an article from the author's perspective would be that 99% would be sweet reason and sense, providing the padding within which 1% of extreme malevolence can be packaged. Where a main point is objectionable, the aim of the author is like an assassin who seeks to insert and remove the rapier unseen, in order to inflict the deadly wound but avoid detection. Surrounding a vile comment with reams of guff is to be expected.
DWill wrote:
since the presidential election, in the guise of tolerance and understanding and that most useless of bromides, “having a dialogue,” we are being told that there should be no shame in not knowing. The emerging narrative of this election is that Donald Trump was elected by people who are sick of being looked down on by liberal elites. The question the people pushing this narrative have not asked is this: Were the elites, based on the facts, demonstrably right?
After the introduction, he gets to his thesis, which of course is partly an opinion, but also based on the solid fact that Trump's committed voters expressed anti-elitism.
What you call “having an opinion” reads to me as a statement of bigoted prejudice, namely that “having a dialogue” with Trump supporters can be called “that most useless of bromides.”

In speaking of the shame in not knowing, here is the wiki definition of bromide, something made illegal forty years ago before most people alive today were born: “Bromide compounds were frequently used as sedatives in the 19th and early 20th century. Their use in over-the-counter sedatives and headache remedies (such as Bromo-Seltzer) in the United States extended to 1975, when bromides were withdrawn as ingredients, due to chronic toxicity. This use gave the word "bromide" its colloquial connotation of a boring cliché, a bit of conventional wisdom overused as a calming phrase, or verbal sedative.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromide#Medical_uses

So Taylor argues that dialogue between red and blue is a boring cliché, a verbal sedative, ie something impossible since, he insidiously implies as he warms up to his hateful main point, the blue democrats have all truth and the red republicans are sub-moronic fascists.
DWill wrote:
… the charges of Clinton’s lying and Trump’s business genius were both the sheerest fictions. That Trump voters chose an easily disprovable myth over readily available facts is one sign of their willful ignorance.
So far we're still waiting for the part where Taylor incites hatred. You may not agree that the media was somehow "craven" (I would reject that myself, as it sounds a little too much like Trump himself), but he's only doing his pundit thing.
'Pundit' has its origins in Hindu religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pundit#Origins but has morphed into a partisan ability to convey reliable confidence.

Taylor and you are failing to distinguish between tactical and strategic issues in the election. For the Trump campaign, the fictions of Clinton’s lies were a tactical means to sow public doubt about her broader reliability as Commander In Chief, namely the ability of the Democrats to adequately defend America’s strategic national interests given their ideological views.

That overall view of security and national interest is a highly complex question, relating to defence, economics, foreign policy and the Supreme Court. It is convenient and effective to bundle up these difficult policy questions, where voters must make a binary choice, into an easily understood statement that Clinton is a crooked liar, even if that is an oversimplification. But as Clinton’s more serious supporters have now started to say, ‘the campaign is the campaign’ and the task is to work with Trump, putting the inflammatory rhetoric aside. Similarly, Trump’s olive branch on election night shows a retreat from his extreme campaign rhetoric.
DWill wrote: Racism and xenophobia (not misogyny so much) were in full force, at least with what I call the committed Trump supporters.
That is clearly the case, illustrated by the popularity of the “Build the wall” chant at Trump rallies such as this two minute clip from Cadillac, where Trump’s observation that his opposition to illegal immigration struck a deep nerve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfIKzP_IRwQ
It remains to be seen if it will be possible for Trump to channel this negative parochial sentiment into something constructive. Obviously part of it reflects economic illiteracy surrounding mercantile arguments which are profoundly ignorant about the benefits of trade for America. But the core issue is the need for American power to advance American interests. Just castigating opponents of illegal immigration and critics of dubious trade deals as xenophobes does not clearly advance national interests.
DWill wrote:Any politician doesn't need to exactly mirror the sentiments of a bloc of supporters; he or she needs only to come closer to identifying with the group than the available alternatives. Taylor is challenging a kind of cultural relativism that counsels respect for the group's values, whatever they may be.
That is a new use of cultural relativism, which is more often used as a term from anthropology to mean that primitive cultures are just as valid as modern cultures. Trump supporters reject prevailing cultural relativist ideas as political correctness, so turning that charge back on them looks a neat trick.

The Trump view of American superiority does not mean the values of his voters have no faults, which your monolithic formulation of his attitude almost implies, but more that American traditional culture should be respected as the foundation of American success.
DWill wrote:
Time was when battered women were told by police or by their priests that they must try not to antagonize their abusive husbands. That is exactly how Americans of color, gay Americans, undocumented immigrants, and women are now being addressed: They’re being told they must respect people who believe they have the right to jail, deport, or beat — if not yet kill — anyone who makes them uncomfortable. Because, of course, unlike the black or brown or queer people on the coasts, those Trump voters are the real America.
I really don't think, Robert, that this review of Taylor's piece justifies your calling it " ridiculous lying exaggeration which is becoming all too common in the bubble parallel universe of political polarity today." It is within the bounds of reasonable discourse, and I would challenge your accusing Taylor of lying. It is similar in strength to opinions that you express all the time.
I am simply asking that the statement you quote here from Taylor be examined in its appalling literal meaning, which foreshadows Trump as a military dictator rounding up and murdering minority populations in a process of ethnic cleansing. Taylor’s statement that minorities are “being told they must respect people who believe they have the right to jail, deport, or beat — if not yet kill — anyone who makes them uncomfortable” is not “within the bounds of reasonable discourse.” It is the concealed stiletto at the heart of his ostensibly reasonable article.

Can you provide any evidence that any Trump supporters who wish to “beat and jail” people just for “making them uncomfortable” are demanding respect from minorities? That what is happening today is "exactly" like former demeaning disregard shown to battered women? Or that Trump or those close to him are saying such genocidal attitudes deserve respect? It is completely outrageous, but readily imaginable for those whose vivid fantasies compare Trump to Hitler and his supporters to Brownshirt thugs. Did Hitler say Jews must respect the Gestapo? That is the equivalent in its grotesque extremism of what Taylor falsely alleges without evidence. We should engage with what people actually say, not with what we imagine they think as distorted through our tinted ideological lenses.
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Re: Trump Clinton Demographics

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It is completely outrageous, but readily imaginable for those whose vivid fantasies compare Trump to Hitler and his supporters to Brownshirt thugs.
http://usuncut.com/politics/trump-suppo ... h-threats/

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/d ... ers-222302

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/27 ... supporters

http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/u-s-e ... 6/1.748032

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/ ... es-carrier

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/201 ... on-twitter

This man is dangerous, Robert. All he has to do is name you in a tweet and you're a target and he does not hesitate to do that. He did it to an 18 year old girl, Robert. He doesn't care! I've said this a thousand times--he doesn't care about you!!! Once you cross him, he will single you out and you become a target. If you don't think anonymous death threats aren't scary, try receiving a few hundred aftr Trump singles you out in a tweet. You think he doesn't know what he's doing when he tweets and do you think he cares he who scares the beejeebers out of?

He isn't Hitler? His chief of staff is a openly rightwing race ideologue along the lines of Alfred Rosenberg. How much of a Hitler does this man have to be before you open your eyes?? No other president in the history of the U.S. has been so open in his racism, xenophobia and misogyny all at once. And we're talking about the days when racism was accepted and fashionable! Trump wants to back to 1882 when Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Well maybe you don't see anything wrong with that but I do. You are proof positive that white privilege is real. I am increasingly becoming very suspicious of you and what the hell it is you are trying pull here, son!
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Re: Trump Clinton Demographics

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I looked at all those links. They illustrate that the USA has a disturbing neo-nazi movement that supports Donald Trump. They do not in the slightest show any evidence that Trump himself or those close to him support this neo-nazi movement. To portray Trump as a neo-nazi is a paranoid delusion.
DB Roy wrote: This man is dangerous, Robert. All he has to do is name you in a tweet and you're a target and he does not hesitate to do that. He did it to an 18 year old girl, Robert. He doesn't care! I've said this a thousand times--he doesn't care about you!!! Once you cross him, he will single you out and you become a target. If you don't think anonymous death threats aren't scary, try receiving a few hundred aftr Trump singles you out in a tweet. You think he doesn't know what he's doing when he tweets and do you think he cares he who scares the beejeebers out of?
Nothing in the links above indicates that Trump incited any of the violent hatred directed towards the young woman. All he did was call her arrogant and a Jeb Bush supporter for asking him a hard question at a rally. I agree with you that the Trump movement has a highly disturbing and insane fringe element. But the problem is how to contain and manage that element. As I have said for a long time, I compare the USA today to the late Roman Republic, on the path towards civil war with the explicit creation of an empire as occurred following the careers of Marius and Sulla in the Social Wars. Trump reminds me of those demagogues. But that means he is reflecting those major social forces of political upheaval. You do not contain a volcano with a wine cork. My view is that it is better to engage with those social forces in a constructive way, which I think is possible with Trump.
DB Roy wrote: He isn't Hitler? His chief of staff is a openly rightwing race ideologue along the lines of Alfred Rosenberg. How much of a Hitler does this man have to be before you open your eyes??
Well, I googled information about Rience Priebus, and found not one article comparing him to Rosenberg, let alone any statement by him “openly” (to use your term) indicating this comparison. Instead, Priebus stated in July that GOP will never support David Duke. Hardly the work of a Rosenberg, whose career is described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Rosenberg.
DB Roy wrote: No other president in the history of the U.S. has been so open in his racism, xenophobia and misogyny all at once. And we're talking about the days when racism was accepted and fashionable! Trump wants to back to 1882 when Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Well maybe you don't see anything wrong with that but I do.
Your comments here are very exaggerated, reflecting a denial of the real history of the USA, which in the nineteenth century had major historical movements that were explicitly racist. I found it interesting quickly looking at views on slavery to find http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/slave05.htm providing the strong early Presidential support for abolition. But in a nation that did not give women the right to vote nationally until 1920, the extremes of racism among Presidents make Trump’s views appear positively modern and enlightened – see http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties ... o-fit-bill
By the way, Trump’s recent positive meeting with Silicon Valley CEOs described at http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/d ... ley-232599 shows that your paranoid comment about Chinese Exclusion is completely ridiculous – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
DB Roy wrote:You are proof positive that white privilege is real. I am increasingly becoming very suspicious of you and what the hell it is you are trying pull here, son!
I am interested, DB Roy, in discussing ways that the current system of white privilege can be reformed to provide equal opportunity for everyone. My view is that robust advocacy of the values which enabled the success of the western world will do more to advance all people equally than anything else. Suppressing these values, as per the Democrat political correctness model, involves invention of claims along the lines you have demonstrated in the points I quote in this post.
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Re: Trump Clinton Demographics

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Let's not engage in hand-waving eye-spinning foaming hysteria like right wingers do. Every time a democrat is elected president right wingers claim the country instantly changes from Shangrila to pure hell. The president is then demonized as the anti-christ who wants to confiscate all guns, totally destroy our military, encourage muslims to impose sharia law, assist Russia in applying communism, and homos to force perverted sex on everyone. Even that's no longer enough so they go even further, making claims such as a candidate has personally raped, killed, and chopped up children in a demonic frenzy. That type of rhetoric makes it impossible for one side to listen to, let alone understand or interact with the other side. Let's not go there.

Yes Trump will indeed be horrible, but he is not president yet and he will have to contend with quite a few moderating forces as well as the gridlock / inertia of gigantic bureaucracies. We'll see how all this sorts out soon enough...
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Re: Trump Clinton Demographics

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Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote:Let's take Charles Taylor's column by paragraphs in consideration of how you've characterized it:
On the face of it, your suggestion seems a perfectly reasonable way to analyse an article. However, here we are not dealing with perfectly reasonable matters, we are trying to understand a political polemic. It is standard practice in such polemic to use rhetorical methods of persuasion accompanied by sly and insidious statements. So the ideal for such an article from the author's perspective would be that 99% would be sweet reason and sense, providing the padding within which 1% of extreme malevolence can be packaged. Where a main point is objectionable, the aim of the author is like an assassin who seeks to insert and remove the rapier unseen, in order to inflict the deadly wound but avoid detection. Surrounding a vile comment with reams of guff is to be expected.
I suppose that could be one way of looking at it. Another way is to grant that a writer makes sense and uses reason up to a certain point, after which he goes beyond the mandate of his facts. But often in such cases it's still possible to take something of value from the writer or at least to concede that the POV is valid. It seems to me we do this all the time; otherwise we'd have to insist on complete agreement and the exercise would become solipsistic. I don't call Richard Dawkins, to name an example, a mere partisan polemicist just because I disagree with some of his judgments on religion. The points he scores aren't invalidated by what I might see as misperceptions. So with this piece, I'm not denying that it's polemical, but I would deny that approach is a bad thing. If you call someone a liar, don't you need to be sure that the person is willfully stating a mistruth? We've seen a lot of that going on, from the "alt-right" and unfortunately a measure of it from Trump himself. Taylor doesn't come under that heading.[
Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote:After the introduction, he gets to his thesis, which of course is partly an opinion, but also based on the solid fact that Trump's committed voters expressed anti-elitism.
What you call “having an opinion” reads to me as a statement of bigoted prejudice, namely that “having a dialogue” with Trump supporters can be called “that most useless of bromides.”
But your slant on the "most useless of bromides" phrase is a misread. You may feel that the writer isn't interested in learning anything about these voters--you may even be right--but that's not what he's saying on the page. He is criticizing the release from responsibility these voters are given, as though the origin of their anger and resentment must be assumed to be someone else's fault.
So Taylor argues that dialogue between red and blue is a boring cliché, a verbal sedative, ie something impossible since, he insidiously implies as he warms up to his hateful main point, the blue democrats have all truth and the red republicans are sub-moronic fascists.
Taylor is making a generalization about excusing substantial faults "under the guise of" opening dialogue. It's a way of leveling the field of discussion. But when one side hasn't wanted to honestly confront the reasons and motivations for the conditions it complains of, the dialogue may be premature. This is a situation he says applies in general. He's not saying that to dialogue with the Trump voters would be a bromide. That wouldn't make much sense.
Taylor and you are failing to distinguish between tactical and strategic issues in the election. For the Trump campaign, the fictions of Clinton’s lies were a tactical means to sow public doubt about her broader reliability as Commander In Chief, namely the ability of the Democrats to adequately defend America’s strategic national interests given their ideological views.

That overall view of security and national interest is a highly complex question, relating to defence, economics, foreign policy and the Supreme Court. It is convenient and effective to bundle up these difficult policy questions, where voters must make a binary choice, into an easily understood statement that Clinton is a crooked liar, even if that is an oversimplification. But as Clinton’s more serious supporters have now started to say, ‘the campaign is the campaign’ and the task is to work with Trump, putting the inflammatory rhetoric aside. Similarly, Trump’s olive branch on election night shows a retreat from his extreme campaign rhetoric.
The distinction between tactics and strategy doesn't seem very clear in the real world. In any event, are you really defending the Trump campaign for cynically sowing doubts about Clinton? Okay, it's just politics, I get that. But the outstanding fact in regard to reliability to lead the country was the many indications from Trump himself that he wasn't the one to do this. No need to promote fictions; it all came straight from the man's mouth. Since the "olive branch" on election night, Trump has not acted as a responsible, unifying commander-in-chief. He continues, just for one example, to target individual citizens and companies via twitter. That is absolutely inexcusable. The habit has been called "cyber-bullying" for good reason.
It remains to be seen if it will be possible for Trump to channel this negative parochial sentiment into something constructive. Obviously part of it reflects economic illiteracy surrounding mercantile arguments which are profoundly ignorant about the benefits of trade for America. But the core issue is the need for American power to advance American interests. Just castigating opponents of illegal immigration and critics of dubious trade deals as xenophobes does not clearly advance national interests.
"Negative parochial sentiment" is just a tinge euphemistic. It can't be channeled into anything positive. Once encouraged to spread, it is difficult to put down. It also presents a problem for Trump with his most committed voters, as they will expect a substantial keeping of his promises to them. As for the opponents of trade deals, xenophobia isn't one of the charges leveled against them, at least not by anyone in a position of authority. The arguments are based on the trade treaties being in the long term interest of the U.S. people and the important role that automation has played in the drop in good manufacturing jobs. I agree that on immigration, sometimes political correctness does cause some to want to shut down any dialogue on the matter. Controls and restrictions are what any country needs to have and doesn't mean that foreigners are unwelcome.
Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote:Any politician doesn't need to exactly mirror the sentiments of a bloc of supporters; he or she needs only to come closer to identifying with the group than the available alternatives. Taylor is challenging a kind of cultural relativism that counsels respect for the group's values, whatever they may be.
That is a new use of cultural relativism, which is more often used as a term from anthropology to mean that primitive cultures are just as valid as modern cultures. Trump supporters reject prevailing cultural relativist ideas as political correctness, so turning that charge back on them looks a neat trick.
But I don't think what I said about cultural relativism is too much of a stretch. If we look at the situation of white voters in the Rust Belt or Appalachia (where many Rust Belt immigrants originated) as a cultural type, we can hazard a generalization about the culture they've created.It doesn't matter that they are an indigenous, as opposed ot a foreign, culture. The mantra of cultural relativism, that all cultures are valid in their way, might still be applied. I'm just trying to explain Taylor here, not saying I agree with him.
The Trump view of American superiority does not mean the values of his voters have no faults, which your monolithic formulation of his attitude almost implies, but more that American traditional culture should be respected as the foundation of American success.
I'm sensitive to the "monolithic" comment. I don't mean to claim a monolith in Trump voters. Just what is "traditional American culture"? That is not as monolith, either. Respect for diversity has always meant that the culture can accommodate different views on what is traditional. E pluribus unum expresses the idea of a political unity, but not a sameness beyond that.
Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote:Time was when battered women were told by police or by their priests that they must try not to antagonize their abusive husbands. That is exactly how Americans of color, gay Americans, undocumented immigrants, and women are now being addressed: They’re being told they must respect people who believe they have the right to jail, deport, or beat — if not yet kill — anyone who makes them uncomfortable. Because, of course, unlike the black or brown or queer people on the coasts, those Trump voters are the real America.
I really don't think, Robert, that this review of Taylor's piece justifies your calling it " ridiculous lying exaggeration which is becoming all too common in the bubble parallel universe of political polarity today." It is within the bounds of reasonable discourse, and I would challenge your accusing Taylor of lying. It is similar in strength to opinions that you express all the time.
I am simply asking that the statement you quote here from Taylor be examined in its appalling literal meaning, which foreshadows Trump as a military dictator rounding up and murdering minority populations in a process of ethnic cleansing. Taylor’s statement that minorities are “being told they must respect people who believe they have the right to jail, deport, or beat — if not yet kill — anyone who makes them uncomfortable” is not “within the bounds of reasonable discourse.” It is the concealed stiletto at the heart of his ostensibly reasonable article.

Can you provide any evidence that any Trump supporters who wish to “beat and jail” people just for “making them uncomfortable” are demanding respect from minorities? That what is happening today is "exactly" like former demeaning disregard shown to battered women? Or that Trump or those close to him are saying such genocidal attitudes deserve respect? It is completely outrageous, but readily imaginable for those whose vivid fantasies compare Trump to Hitler and his supporters to Brownshirt thugs. Did Hitler say Jews must respect the Gestapo? That is the equivalent in its grotesque extremism of what Taylor falsely alleges without evidence. We should engage with what people actually say, not with what we imagine they think as distorted through our tinted ideological lenses.
I respect your conviction that Taylor uses extreme rhetoric and is in fact very wrong. (Note that he doesn't make the Nazi connection, though.) Perhaps I am too sanguine about this inflammatory speech. I would go back to where I started in this post, to where I said that we need not go all the way with somebody's thinking, that partial agreement is always possible. I'm not comfortable with what he says, but also not willing to dismiss the point of view altogether. My perspective and experience are necessarily limited. I certainly don't attribute to him the almost malevolent motive and insidious strategy that you do. Vilification will sometimes be justified, but it's not warranted iin this case, in my opinion.
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