Why are we surprised by this turnout?

Nov 10, 2016 13:39

Do we blame this surprise on a "prestige" vote? On people being too mortified to speak their preference for Trump in public, and then going out and voting for him anyway? Or is there something else going on ( Read more... )

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garote November 11 2016, 07:25:01 UTC
Um, no dude, the hearings are done, and so is the Attorney General. Loretta Lynch closed the investigation four months ago. It is not being re-opened. There is no need for it to be re-opened.

Your "trying to be objective" paragraphs contain a great number of distortions that I am not interested in going through with you, because you're clearly a grownup who can do your own fact-checking. That you bothered to assemble so many distortions in one place tells me something else: You are doing exactly what I described above. Combing your filter bubble for only what reinforces your feelings, and then passing that construct along. Welcome to the club: There are already millions, and millions, of members.

I'm going to assume you are asking your question seriously, and not rhetorically.

If you're wondering why the other half of voters are not as upset about Clinton's emails as you are, well, all you need to do is look at the mirror-image of that question, the one that I've seen asked incredulously - even rhetorically - all the time in my own social circle:

Why aren't the other half of voters more upset about Trump's multiple bankruptcies, his absolutely reprehensible statements about women, his total lack of foreign policy knowledge, his total lack of humility, his utterly inane promises about building a border wall across the entire southern portion of the United States, his refusal to release his tax returns followed by his false claims about being "unable" to followed by his not actually releasing them at all despite claiming he would, and his ridiculous tax plan that threatens to balloon the deficit to massive levels while also - coincidentally - lining his own pockets, and so on, and so on...?

Followed by rampant speculation, like, "are they just idiots?" "Are they racists, and xenophobes?" "Are they low-information voters?" Et cetera.

You need to understand that this is exactly what the other half has been doing with regard to your candidate when they look at him, and rather than being "unable to find anything damning", the list is actually quite long and diverse. You can go down that whole list item-by-item if you like, finding some reason to ignore - for example - the fact that he is a racist, on record making a plethora of racist statements, on record being sued for racial discrimination. (And the fact that he threw money at the lawsuit to make it go away is immaterial.) ... But you still won't be absorbing the basic lesson here: You are guilty of the same filtering as everyone else. You are not above it. You are not a champion of truth; you are selectively building - and passing around - the narrative that lets you feel like one.

There is a whole smorgasbord of stuff to loathe about Trump. It goes on for pages, and decades. Did you really just vote for a guy who is due in court for fraud three weeks after his election? Yes, you did. If you are interested in "the scientific theology", why don't you investigate that first? Tell me how that changes your outlook.

Yeah, I voted for Hillary. Yeah, I'm pissed about the email scandal. I've also patiently done a lot of reading about it, and decided that it has been blown way the hell out of proportion. It was already out of proportion even before the attorney general investigated it, and when she dropped it, I was fine with that. Yet, here you are. You are one of the people continuing to blow it out of proportion. I'm sure you feel the same way about my above identification of Trump as a racist. Sure, it bothers you, but it doesn't bother you enough to actually vote differently. Sure, a bunch of priests are pedophiles, but that doesn't convince anyone to stop being Catholic. See what I'm getting at?

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sab123 November 12 2016, 02:48:32 UTC
> Um, no dude, the hearings are done, and so is the Attorney General. Loretta Lynch closed the investigation

Not sure if you're aware of it but Loretta Lynch is finally getting fired.

> Why aren't the other half of voters more upset about Trump's multiple bankruptcies, ...

Because none of these are CRIMES. Everyone can make their own opinions about whether they bode well for presidency according to their preferences. Half of this list aren't actually facts, they are your opinions (also apparently largely based not on the direct observations but on the prejudiced re-telling and villification by Trump's opponents). But what Clinton has done are crimes. Outright crimes. A criminal must not be a president. A criminal must be punished.

> the list is actually quite long and diverse.

I've seen this list. Nothing on it is "damning". Nothing. It's basically a collection of prejudiced bullshit. None of the supposed Trump's actions on the list are even wrong, let alone "damining". The only person this list is damning for is its author.

> But you still won't be absorbing the basic lesson here: You are guilty of the same filtering as everyone else. You are not above it. You are not a champion of truth; you are selectively building - and passing around - the narrative that lets you feel like one.

Everyone is building a narrative but there are different gradations of how far these narratives are away from reality.

> Did you really just vote for a guy who is due in court for fraud three weeks after his election?

I've read on it and I don't see any fraud. Some morons decided that if they didn't become real estate moguls from a short course, it must be a fraud. I see a frivolous lawsuit. How stupid and disgusting can these people be? Hey, it gets even funnier: I've recently read about a case where a bunch of law graduates who went there to make the big bucks after graduation but couldn't get these big bucks, have brought a lawsuit against their university for fraud. Every single university can be sued for fraught, and for really big bucks, not like Trump's peanuts.

> identification of Trump as a racist. Sure, it bothers you, but it doesn't bother you enough to actually vote differently.

Nope, it doesn't, for multiple reasons. First of all, this label has been attached to him though pretty weird logical manipulations: "if he says that the illegal immigrants are criminals, this means that he says that all the Mexicans are criminals!". Don't you see that it's the person who applies this kind of logic is the racist one? Because this logic makes the assumption that all the Mexicans are illegal immigrants. That's a very offensive assumption made by someone who has a deep prejudice against the Mexicans. Since you seem to agree with that assumption, you must be racist, not Trump.

The same goes about equating all the immigrants with the illegal immigrants. I'm a _legal_ immigrant and I find such equations quite offensive. The presence of the illegal immigrants had made my immigration process more complicated, and I have a strong dislike for them. And yes, I've met a few of them , and in my direct experience they do tend to be crooked.

Second, I want all sides to be treated by the same criteria. Do you agree that the BLM are racist? If you consider Trump racist, you definitely must consider BLM racist too. Clinton supported BLM, so she supported racism by the bucket. Yes, KKK expressed their support for Trump but Trump disavowed them, unlike Clinton.

By the way, do you have any issues with Madonna's objectification of women? It's kind of strange that I don't see any loud complaints in the press. And since Clinton didn't disclaim nor chastise Madonna, she could be held accountable for this objectification too.

Third, the pretty much same argument as you make about the Catholics: if we go into the absolutes, everyone is racist. Everyone prefers their own family, clan and so on. It's normal. The real question is about the degree of it, what amount is OK and what amount is too much?

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garote November 12 2016, 04:11:05 UTC
Yeah, your response is about what I figured it would be.
Your criteria for choosing what's important to you is, "is it a crime", huh? Well, sorry, but careless handling of email is not a crime. So now it's time for you to reframe your argument into some other form that still maintains your An Hero status.

Also, your "all sides be treated by the same criteria" demand is a little too close to the "teach the controversy" shtick that creationists have been using to try and crowbar Genesis into science classrooms. Your understanding took a tumble right out of the starting block, by equating Black Lives Matter to the KKK. They are two very, very different movements. You might wanna go track down a black person and ask them to explain it to you.

If you have the guts to approach one.

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sab123 November 15 2016, 03:35:10 UTC
Careless handling of the classified information (and in a clear violation of instructions) is a crime. Just ask all the people who went to prison for this.

Violating the law of the record keeping is a crime. OK, maybe people didn't go to prison for this but ask the companies who have been fined.

Obstructing the justice is a crime. You can start with asking Martha Stewart.

So how come that you want the special exceptions made for Clinton?

> your "all sides be treated by the same criteria" demand is a little too close to the "teach the controversy"

How come that the socialists always demand equality when they're losing but not when they're winning?

> They are two very, very different movements.

Of course they are. KKK was born to protect the population from the criminals when the Yankee occupants not only dropped the police protection but encouraged the attacks. The order has been restored long since then and the purpose had disappeared, but at the start the KKK served a noble goal. BLM was born to protect the criminals. It has no noble goals. It's pure evil.

> You might wanna go track down a black person and ask them to explain it to you.

Any decent black person would disclaim BLM.

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garote November 15 2016, 03:38:52 UTC
Um. Wow. Yeah, I'm done with you.

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kita0610 November 15 2016, 22:16:01 UTC
Props. You lasted longer than I could have. Damn.

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garote November 16 2016, 02:58:16 UTC
It was the BLM comment that did me in. This is a guy who thinks his filtered, spun, and groomed "news" sources are a more accurate source for information on a movement than the people who are actually members of the movement. What the hell can you do with that but walk away?

I'm sure he thinks that my banning him is a sign of "intolerance". But I see it more like removing a dog with rabies from a public park.

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