Ok, "uneasy" seems reasonable. "Royally ****ed up", not so much. I mean, Bernie obviously thought that Hillary had an easy road ahead because the GOP nominated the dems dream opponent, so pushing his platform seemed correct at the time, especially considering he's too old to ever run again and do it himself.

Re: bolded, I'm not remembering this happening. But I'm biased. Do you have a link?

Yea he seems very down to earth and plain spoken.

Wanna know how I know you're lying?

"I don't care if you are a man or women"? That in reality she crushed the debates?

More like some fancy retconning to arrive at the absurd statement, "putrid debate performances."

edit: u ninja'd me

Then again I have my own biases.

I believe the 3rd debate lost it for HRC. Millions of idiots saw that and thought, how dare the mean lady embarrass one of our own so badly.

Everybody's talking about coded language, so what do we think "tells it like it is" really means? It's the logical endpoint of criticizing Obama's egghead liberalness and celebrating idiocy.

Since we're in the mood for fingerpointing, I'd point out that the polarizing nature of the BLM movement played a role in Trump's success and I called it out as it was happening last summer:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=789

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=794

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=795

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=797

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=809

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=827

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=831

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=867

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=896

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=964

It's strange to me that the left can't make up their mind. On the one hand, America is deeply and systematically racist against blacks. But on the other hand, they act as though racists can be converted overnight to support explicitly pro-black messaging and explicitly pro-black policy. You can't have it both ways. If you believe, as Bernie, his supporters and most liberals do, that Americans want a more progressive economic policy than the current political center between the Democrats and the Republicans, that means, if you exclude economic policy, what the Republicans have to offer is much more compelling to the voters than what the Democrats offer. It's not hard to figure out what that is.

Some more thoughts. We're a gambling forum so I'm kind of surprised no one mentioned this but one growing group that probably broke for Trump is vice voters. There are lots of voters who are much closer culturally to typical Republicans but feel uncomfortable with the Christian rhetoric coming from the right. They may resent rhetoric against sex, against drugs, against abortion, against gambling, against not going to church, against receiving government assistance, etc. They may feel demonized enough by the right's traditional rhetoric to vote for the Democrats or despite cultural disconnect. Sex workers, professional gamblers, single moms, deadbeat dads, drug addicts, people on welfare, gambling addicts, alcoholics, atheists, people estranged from their families, etc. Many of them may adopt moralizing posture against others which may confuse bystanders into misidentifying them but that is a purely defensive weapon deployed against outsiders.

For white otherwise right-leaning vice voters, Trump is the perfect candidate - one byproduct of Trump having led a life relatively free of moral constraints and the Republican rhetoric pivoting from doing the right things to being born the right way is that this election cycle has been relatively free of moralizing rhetoric from the right. Also, Trump's use of race/ethnicity/religion-based insults in lieu of dog whistles has been effective at avoiding collateral damage on whites. Dog whistles are less effective in a world where cultural problems that Republicans blame black communities for are increasingly the same cultural problems that many white communities face.

At the same time, this election cycle, the left has officially become the morality police. Even without the whole "deplorable" gaffe, the left has been obsessed with the incorrectness of Trump's and Trump's supporters' behavior, forgetting that lots of people act that way and lots more people know other people who act that way. Many were predicting at first that the religious right will abandon Trump and after being wrong about this, were giddy that the religious right will no longer have the moral high ground. The problem is that the moral high ground is less than worthless in a world where voters increasingly feel they are on the wrong side of morality. And liberalism is increasingly associated with doing the right thing in every area of life - from eating habits to college education to correctly using social media to being aware of what's going on in the world to pronouncing names correctly to buying the right stuff/car/house. That's before we get to social justice stuff, which comes with a lot of rules and theories and lots of opportunities to be wrong. What's even worse, the left has started to pick up some of the right's rhetoric against poor people and started to deploy against white America. Like how if you're white, being poor is your own damn fault because white privilege. How white people's problems are not real problems compared to the problems of some <insert underprivileged group here>. This has the appearance of political correctness but it's the exact opposite.

It's important to realize that people vote for whoever makes them feel better and in a campaign, political correctness always triumphs over the cold, hard truth. You're not going to change people with some campaign rhetoric. The kinds of people who have genuine conviction, not fleeting fantasies about what makes them feel better, are not swing voters. The most significant quality of Trump's central rhetoric is that it's highly politically correct - he won by telling people that their problem is not their fault and those who had been telling them that they need to change in order to do better are all wrong. He told them, they've been doing the right thing all along or maybe they don't even need to do the right thing because they were born the right way in the right country. It's just that the system's rigged against them and that's why they are struggling. He didn't moralize about what they could do to improve their situation - he told a story about how dark forces are conspiring to hold them down. This is a good template for what you need to say to win an election, whether it's true or not. Liberals worrying about whether any given instance of pandering is rooted in truth is unbelievably poor political instinct.

tl;dr - Trump won by out-PC'ing the libtards. Also read this thread:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/41...point-1245897/

I wrote that exactly for people like you. You are too lost in OMG I spotted a racist/bigot and can't see what is obvious right in front of you. But you really chessmated me this time. Anyways carry on. I'm glad to see the moron class of this forum are back in full force. The week without you guys was probably some of the best discussion this forum has ever had without anyone getting shouted down or the stupid spy hunter routine towards supposed closet Trump supporters.

Do you need a safe space?

How come people tiptoeing around their latent misogynistic tendencies like WichitaDM lash out after letting it slip? lol

That was a tell.

PB, I'm going to suggest that your analysis is incomplete. Or, rather, that nothing you said is anything different from what certain members of the old guard on civil rights within the NAACP and such are saying to BLM. You acknowledge this in some links. But BLM isn't quite an organized movement with specific political objectives just yet. It's more along the lines of the NAACP during it's formation, except for the part that we know how it will play out - or that it will succeed at all. You're right that it flanks them from the left.

However, it's like saying that Trump's core constituents should've channelled their grievances in negotiations with Mitch McConnell, and the old guard of the GOP, in the National Review, because that was the alliance. Those were the proper channels. The right got flanked from the right. The GOPe didn't rally to Trump's banner, even after he consolidated the nomination.

Like, the core of what we now call Trump supporters cultivated the conditions within the GOP by which he could win. With absolutely no groundwork, Trump can't happen. And they weren't laying the groundwork for Trump specifically. He just seized the moment. And he happened to win. The part where he laid waste to his opponent (HRC) during the election never happened. Facts simply don't bear out this conclusion. I mean, other than the fact that he is President elect. If that's what you mean... okay? It's a true statement.

I'm not quite sure anybody ever disagreed with that statement. We saw the rabidity.

Understand I haven't yet read the responses to your links.



Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're denying the BLM folk their agency, or assigning Dem folk too much. The "left" can't put BLM on punishment, on timeout, ground them with no TV until they learn to protest better.

Otherwise your analysis is spot on, but you're describing how tornadoes and lightning storms work, a worthy feat, but still separate from discussing if humans have the power to control the weather.

(insert climate change joke)

My criticism of BLM has been they aren't radical enough, in message, not that they're too polarizing. (black lives matter? duh. not exactly cutting to the bone with that slogan {but in hindsight also what makes it brilliant, based on the "polarizing" reactions}) Everybody in the family is gonna have nitpicks and criticisms about the day-to-day of their brothers and sisters, but you can't tell them to stfu and sit down as that's kinda antithetical to the whole point.

Actually I need to correct myself on BLM mirroring the formation of the NAACP, because that had clear leadership and objectives from the outset. Who is leading BLM is a question without a good answer. It's not that kind of movement yet. And it isn't even clear that it will be.

If they had the White House and kept the grassroots movement going, they could. This seemed to be Bernie's plan. You need the people who voted for you to keep calling their representative and Senators. It takes a special type of politician to do that, and Sanders seemed to have a very activist group of supporters that may have.

That's not true. Take Trump's winning map and flip Florida (-1.3%) and Arizona (-4.1%) and you win it. You could also sub North Carolina (-3.8%) for Arizona. The strategy in these states would be to win at the local level to fight voter suppression legislation and to fight them in the courts as well, while at the same time running registering drives for as many minority voters as possible. Obviously it's key to recognize that Florida Hispanics are very different from Arizona Hispanics in how they vote, but never the less, these states are within reach.

Given that they have four years to work on it, they should pursue those AND the rust belt (aka better economic policies) with full vigor.

There has been a populist trend globally and there was a populist trend here, but your solution was for the Dems to not run a populist at all in their primary and to just clear the way for one of the most establishment candidates of all time?

They tried... I mean, I don't think Bernie was running to try to win from the outset - he was running to keep her honest on behalf of the left wing of the party. He then had a movement and had a real shot and went for it.

You say this like it's not 98% a recursive loop of swamp fever propaganda pushed and consumed by gamergaters and breitbartians.

Your post is the hyperintelligent version of, "How dare somebody call me a racist! I'll show them, I'll vote for the candidate the KKK and neo-nazi-esque people just looOooOOve!"

Real People roll their eyes if something is a little too heavy-handed from the so-called SJWs, they don't call the whole thing off and vote for white nationalism.

(the circles of Real People and SJWs overlap)

The BLM people I've talked to don't want it to be and consider a movement as dying when it starts being top down instead of bottom up.

Maybe if we want to win we just need to push Education


Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump

Oh mercy me, please proceed.

This post was on 11.11:



Your next post was was on 11.19:



Yeah, that "week without you guys" right?

Give us a break here. I don't GAF what your personal baggage is, whether you couldn't stand to see a woman in power or all your friends and family are trumping deplorables, or what, just don't spew all over with dishonest bull****.

I wondered then, right after the election, like I wonder now, how you could possibly say she had horrible debate performances. Feel free to hate everything else, but what kind of bias would cause you to say "putrid" debates?

You ducked then, and duck now, and still feign to talk about "best discussion". ****ing spare me.

For the record. I would of preferred Bernie over Hillary. But the last month or so when it was clear Hill was going to win I wanted Bernie to drop out.

I don't have a link, but I was regularly checking r/politics just to see what the mood was there. That period before Bernie dropped out every single link had email somewhere in the tagline. A month after Bernie dropped out r/politics was still DNC cheated Bernie. I know lol r/politics but it still represents a mood of a select group of people. r/politics finally realized well **** Trump is worse. But I just worry there was some damage done.

I figured as much. I deleted an additional sentence where I said "kind of like an insurgency." That's not a very precise term, and its loaded, but I'm too lazy to find a better one.

So its Sanders fault Hillary couldn't beat an orange clown? Pathetic. We were not moving in a progressive direction we were moving down the same corporate elite path we have for decades and the voters knew it and rejected it.

Yes lets maintain those awesome conservative values that have resulted in the county being broke, poor, and in perceptual war! Which progressives were rejected? Obama and Hillary were not progressives.

Can you pin point and conservative policies over the last 30 years, that have addresses all these issues you listed?

What we are sadly seeing in reality, is the disillusioned public are resorting to the main culprits for their predicament to try and help them, simple because the left has failed to properly address the issues. Both sides are to blame but the right is far worse on every issues, hence the rejection of the establishment, but sadly they have chosen the wrong 'revolution'.

lol