I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

Stop it. You're making shit up to justify your decision making. It's stupid.

No, she wasn't going to flop on Keystone. Probably DAPL, but no, Keystone is dead.

He may not wind up being as terrible as he's promised, but he is going to do things that she would not have. At least in the real world, not the one where you just make up her positions for her.

I'm not making up anything to justify my decision making. I did what I did and I'd do it again.

Keystone was hibernating. With all those costs into it already, there's no way the people behind it weren't going to try to resuscitate it before whomever won the office.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I think "believing in things" too much is a lot of what's wrong with this country. We just watched a tribal exercise where believers ignored facts, and a reality TV star nudged out a cipher funded by corporate interests at odds with 90% of her voters.

Says he who said he couldn't vote for what he acknowledged was the lesser of two evils because he believed too much in individual freedom...

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

Says he who said he couldn't vote for what he acknowledged was the lesser of two evils because he believed too much in individual freedom...

I don't believe in it. I like it and prefer it. And I can make a case for why it innovates and improves our lives. And why an unhealthy limitation of it, which both of these two represented, is problematic.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

There is something to be learned from a dying town: That its residents should have moved out of it long ago.

Yes, that's what I just said.

That's the worst part of Trump's "bringing back jobs" con. He's telling people they are entitled to jobs right where they are, in obsolete skill sets.

Yes, it is. It's also why there's no counter that the Dems can really give. He's telling you a bald face lie. All I've got is education, job training, relocation assistance, and, if we want to stray into fantasy that the GOP will never allow, income support.

I can't win that fight. Those people aren't going to choose me over blaming immigrants and brown people, and I'm not going to adopt those tactics.

So I guess the Dems will just have to find another way.

[(2) Avoids discussing the fact that the Jobs Are Not Coming Back, Ever.

The jobs are not coming back to THERE. The jobs have largely already come back. They're just elsewhere. Move.

[soup sandwich]

Originally Posted by Adder

There's literally nothing to be learned from an individual dying rural town, aside from the fact that its residents should be thinking about moving.

And this is where I get frustrated. Why don't they move? Go to North Dakota and work for a shale oil extractor. Go to Vegas and deal blackjack. Go to California and work in a field picking strawberries. Go somewhere and do something instead of just sitting around vaping and breeding and waiting for the government to save you.

"There's nothing for me in this town, but I am going to stay anyway" makes no sense to me.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by soup sandwich

And this is where I get frustrated. Why don't they move?

Because Americans have a really weird sense of identity tied to geography, I guess. Or at least that's part of it.

[ThurgreedMarshall]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I posted that not because it's from HuffPo, but because she nails it.

No. She nails it from your perspective. You need to understand that.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

You don't realize that you demonstrate everything you criticize in the quote above. You know everything about everything.

This is an absolute complete mischaracterization. And maybe that's why you don't get it. I don't know everything about everything. I have opinions about issues based on how people--who may not necessarily be me--are affected by those issues.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

But you are correct about one thing: I don't believe in much. I'll admit that. I'll own it as "my truth." But you know what? That makes me more qualified to assess that on which I comment. I'm not as emotionally invested. I can see both sides of the coin. I think "believing in things" too much is a lot of what's wrong with this country.

I'm not sure why the fuck anything you just said makes you more qualified to assess anything. Taking positions on something doesn't eliminate the ability to see both sides of the coin. That's about as far away from logic as one can get. If you believe Hitler and genocide are bad you are somehow incapable of understanding why he grew to power? You think that because you neither believe that Nazism and genocide are good or bad that you have some sort of unique perspective? What the fuck are you talking about?

And you miss the point that you are invested. You are so invested in convincing everyone how much you don't care that you take one position in one sentence and counter it with a sweeping statement in the next. You're go-to approach to any of your opinions anyone has identified as garbage is, "Well, everyone knows [whatever your opinion happens to be in that moment.] And if you don't you're a fool." Your defense mechanism when confronted is to talk about how silly whoever is doing the confronting is because they're a member of some tribe that agrees with everyone else in that tribe. You think believing in something equates to belonging to a fucking tribe. That is so beyond stupid I can't even explain how stupid it is.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

We just watched a tribal exercise where believers ignored facts, and a reality TV star nudged out a cipher funded by corporate interests at odds with 90% of her voters.

You think of it as a tribal exercise. I think of it as trying to protect people in this country who do not sit in a position of power from the horrific shit that one of those people has been actively promoting. If he wants the law of the land to be stop and frisk, I'm not voting against him because I'm a Democrat and do whatever Democrats do. I'm voting against him because I don't think people (overwhelmingly minority people--wait, more evidence of tribal thinking!) should be stopped and frisked.

The fact that you can recognize that there are issues with both candidates doesn't come as a result of your non-investment in either party. But the fact that you think that gleefully going back and forth pointing out why everyone who has chosen a side is so stupid and can't see past their tribal beliefs makes you insightful is lunacy.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

That was a good article. You should reread it.

Okay. But I guess that means tomorrow or next week or next year you're not going to wave off The Huffington Post as a liberal trashcan that isn't worth your time when someone posts a link to it, right?

TM

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

The jobs are not coming back to THERE. The jobs have largely already come back. They're just elsewhere. Move.

This is a bit blunt. The jobs that have come back have in large part been lower paying, particularly for the lesser skilled folks in these dying towns.

We're going to have to employ a basic living wage safety net at some point. Funny how all the Hayek freaks forget he was a big proponent of that. Yes, that runs contrary to my libertarian leanings, but as I've said, I'm a moderate form of that creature.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

We're going to have to employ a basic living wage safety net at some point. Funny how all the Hayek freaks forget he was a big proponent of that. Yes, that runs contrary to my libertarian leanings, but as I've said, I'm a moderate form of that creature.

And we could maybe do that if people would vote for Democrats.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I suspected the last few of your posts were brought to us by the good monks at Chimay. Had a certain looseness to them.

There's not much point beating this dead horse any further. We'll never agree why HRC lost. But for all the same reasons we'd have mocked the Trumpkins for complaining the election was rigged had they lost, we could mock the HRC supporters for spraying blame in all directions but inward.

This thing happened. It isn't going away, and the broader movement behind it is much bigger than a mere election. And that's not going away any time soon.

You, me, almost all of us here... We've enjoyed the benefits of a system that has left a shitload of people in the dust. We thought we could ignore them, or dismiss them with statements like, "well, there are winners and losers in trade..." We thought we could write them off with statements like, "technology ultimately creates more jobs than it eliminates," while coyly ignoring the speed with which it does the latter and the glacial timeline over which it does the former. We've bought into silly Kennedy Era notions like "education will fix it all."

Trump grabbed in excess of 25% of the Latino vote. He stole a huge chunk of the union vote. He won 42% of women.

If you want to look for the true fault lines, and not buy into the "it's mostly racism and sexism" bullshit sold to "the marks" (your term), look at people with assets versus people without. That's where I think the significant split lies. Also look at who's in business for themselves, and who's in small business versus working as a cog in a big business.

The people without assets had nothing to lose voting for Trump. Hillary was bringing more of what Obama and Bush had brought them -- a managed decline, rather than hope of a real job. The people with assets, with capital - people like us - had something to lose. We benefit more from globalism and tech, which delivers to investors at cost to domestic labor. The people who are in business for themselves, who feel acutely and directly the impact of an ever more intrusive state, in the form of licensing strictures and regulation, and compliance bullshit, had much to gain with Trump. The people in jobs at large concerns - the kind of people here - have never felt the direct hand of regulation and compliance concerns on their backs. (They may deal with it, but they don't suffer a hit to the bottom line because of it.)

Who here but Hank actually has to make a payroll every week? I'm not sure any of us are really qualified to explain this phenomenon. But to start flinging blame around without serious looking inward, at your own side's failings - and I mean your side's often limited and tribalist thinking, not the failings of HRC as a candidate - is useless sour grapes. The thing is done. Blame is useless. Try to make the best of it.

Just for the record, I wasn't drinking and I couldn't see your face, but you got at least part of my meaning. You were pissing me off, most immediately because when I respond to something you say you change your tune. Either Hillary Clinton is particularly corrupt or all politicians are corrupt -- you say things without seeming to care what you mean. Which, I suppose, is symptomatic, because the underlying issue is that I care about what happened this week, maybe too much, and you are at least pretending not to.

If you are going to mock me for spraying blame in all directions but inwards, then you haven't been reading what I've been posting. Which was the point in the preceding paragraph. Actually, it's pretty plain that you haven't been reading, because the only person I called a "mark" was you, and wasn't for the way you voting, but for your mindless repetition of alt-right talking points that you can't be bothered to defend.

Elections are big, complex affairs, and there is plenty of blame to go around. I blame, in no particular order

- Anyone who voted for Trump
- My cousins who call Obama "Kenya"
- Anyone who pretends to be a libertarian and who voted for Johnson instead of against Trump, especially in a state where it might have made a difference
- Anyone who voted for Jill Stein
- Anyone who didn't vote
- Anyone who wouldn't vote for Hillary because Bill cheated on her
- Republicans, for many things which paved the way for Trump
- Obama, for not finding a way to make Republicans pay for their obstruction, and for failing to build institutions around his desire for change
- the Democratic Party, for all sorts of failures
- Hillary, though I suspect she did her best
- the media, for its promotion and normalization of Trump, and for the many fake scandals that dominated its coverage of Hillary
- Justice Roberts and the other conservatives on the Supreme Court, for getting rid of key parts of the Voting Rights Act, paving the way for Republican legislatures to make it harder for people, especially Democrats, to vote
- James Comey, for selfishly injecting himself into the presidential race
- the Electoral College, for handing the Presidency to an incompetent Republican who did not win the popular vote the second time in sixteen years
- myself, for not having done more
- many more, I'm sure

"Blame is useless"? Only if you don't give a shit. I do. And you actually do too, which is why your schtick is so irritating this week.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

And we could maybe do that if people would vote for Democrats.

But then many Democrats who work in the bureaucracies that administer the current safety nets would be out of work and in those nets. It gets a bit thorny.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

"Blame is useless"? Only if you don't give a shit. I do. And you actually do too, which is why your schtick is so irritating this week.

What do I give a shit about here?

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

What do I give a shit about here?

Posing.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

No. She nails it from your perspective. You need to understand that.

This is an absolute complete mischaracterization. And maybe that's why you don't get it. I don't know everything about everything. I have opinions about issues based on how people--who may not necessarily be me--are affected by those issues.

I'm not sure why the fuck anything you just said makes you more qualified to assess anything. Taking positions on something doesn't eliminate the ability to see both sides of the coin. That's about as far away from logic as one can get. If you believe Hitler and genocide are bad you are somehow incapable of understanding why he grew to power? You think that because you neither believe that Nazism and genocide are good or bad that you have some sort of unique perspective? What the fuck are you talking about?

And you miss the point that you are invested. You are so invested in convincing everyone how much you don't care that you take one position in one sentence and counter it with a sweeping statement in the next. You're go-to approach to any of your opinions anyone has identified as garbage is, "Well, everyone knows [whatever your opinion happens to be in that moment.] And if you don't you're a fool." Your defense mechanism when confronted is to talk about how silly whoever is doing the confronting is because they're a member of some tribe that agrees with everyone else in that tribe. You think believing in something equates to belonging to a fucking tribe. That is so beyond stupid I can't even explain how stupid it is.

You think of it as a tribal exercise. I think of it as trying to protect people in this country who do not sit in a position of power from the horrific shit that one of those people has been actively promoting. If he wants the law of the land to be stop and frisk, I'm not voting against him because I'm a Democrat and do whatever Democrats do. I'm voting against him because I don't think people (overwhelmingly minority people--wait, more evidence of tribal thinking!) should be stopped and frisked.

The fact that you can recognize that there are issues with both candidates doesn't come as a result of your non-investment in either party. But the fact that you think that gleefully going back and forth pointing out why everyone who has chosen a side is so stupid and can't see past their tribal beliefs makes you insightful is lunacy.

Okay. But I guess that means tomorrow or next week or next year you're not going to wave off The Huffington Post as a liberal trashcan that isn't worth your time when someone posts a link to it, right?

TM

I hate to personalize it, but honestly - I am somewhat rootless.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Digest this and get back to me.

Some of the Ds get it. You aren't one of them.

Let's just recap this exchange, because it's illustrative of how you are being a jackass.

I posted something about how the Republicans have kept people, especially blacks, from voting.

You glibly suggested it didn't matter.

TM told you, fairly enough, to go fuck yourself.

You linked to something worth reading, but not relating in any way to voter suppression.

Hey, the HuffPo article you linked to is interesting in its own right, and worth a discussion, but you're not going to get it by being such a dick.