Quote:
Originally Posted by Wooders0n
I can't speak for an entire group of people, and I think it's dumb to assume they all have the same motivations, but I will try to honestly answer this question for myself.
I don't support Donald Trump because I think he'd be an incredibly incompetent President on Day 1 for a variety of reasons, and I don't think he possesses the raw intelligence to be able to learn enough to become competent at any point of his would be presidency. If I were somehow forced to vote between Hillary and Trump and my vote would somehow be THE deciding vote, I would vote for Hillary. My life is relativity great and I have no reason to want to introduce a massive variable into it.
I don't really know why I get joy out of his popularity though. I just truly deeply hate everything that "politics" is. I hate the parties. I hate the politicians. I hate the labels. I hate the team aspect of it. I hate the way you discuss things. I pretty much hate you for a bunch of reason and I don't even really know you but I hate your guts. I hate the way the media covers things. I hate the pundits. I hate the people who treat it as a game and the political "scientists" who are so interested in analyzing it. They're a joke. It's a joke field. I hate it from the top down to the local levels which are much more insanely corrupt. It just nauseates me every time I think about it deeply.
And to me Hillary Clinton is the epitome of it and so I take ALL of that hatred out on her because I don't have anywhere else to channel it. Seeing people supporting her, because as part of some twisted joke there is no better option in this joke of a system, it angers me some more. I guess that is my best guess at why I get joy out of seeing you squirm over Trump's popularity. I am so spiteful towards the side that allowed her to be in this position to win that part of me wants all the bad things to happen because people deserve to be punished for letting this happen. They deserve to be punished for letting it be her when so many other people would have been such a slam dunk better choice than Trump.
I don't know how much that'll change as it goes from "lol at him ever actually being president" to "well now he might actually win" but that's pretty much how I feel right now and I'm fully aware of the flaws of that line of thinking and how insensitive it is to the people whose lives may be affected much more negatively than myself.
This is a great post. Pretty much sums up how I feel. Except if I had my hand on the button I'd pick trump assuming Gary Johnson was not an option.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shark Sandwich
Fly has done a great job making this thread toxic by getting intensely personal with anyone whom he disagrees with. This is his M.O. I guess. But since we're here:
My life is objectively great. I have a loving, supportive family, I've lived in Manhattan for the past nine years, and I have a good job that I enjoy that's part of a successful, growing business. Just this past weekend I went to a stand-up comedy show with a friend of mine who's an Eastern European immigrant on Friday night, went hiking in the Hudson Valley with a beautiful Jewish girl yesterday morning, and my Jewish college roommate invited me to play on his softball team down in Princeton later this week. I just got invited to a wedding - for a black guy! marrying a white woman! - that I'll be flying down south for soon. I'm including these seemingly irrelevant details not to show how not-racist and not-bigoted I am - I'd never make such a bold claim - but to show that I'd make a piss-poor white nationalist, and I'm certainly not mad about losing my dominant position on some made-up totem pole.
But I am a nationalist, meaning I think we should put America and Americans first. Donald Trump is an openly nationalist candidate. Despite my life being good, I think anomie in this country is at an all-time high, with the Labor Participation Rate cratering, inequality skyrocketing, and people dying from opioid addictions, suicides, and atomization.
I don't think Donald Trump can fix this - I don't think anyone can, really - since these things are due to forces of mass society and scale, which no one man can reverse. But I think we as a people can do some things to reverse some of the more harmful effects of mass society on our psychology, starting with not thinking of America as a borderless strip mall with a worldwide police force that should solve other countries' problems. When people talk about nostalgia for the 1950s, they're not wishing we could go back to a time when black people didn't have rights, they're talking about going back to a time when people felt a sense of community and bonhomie. A healthier society would have smaller corporations, smaller government, smaller communities, and more local and civic involvement, and the beginning of de-scaling is siding with nationalism over globalism, which Donald Trump is the avatar of.
And Fly, since you've been bleating about SAT scores, I took that test once and I would bet money that my scores are higher than yours. Not because I think you're an idiot - you seem like a reasonably intelligent midwit - but because mine were very high. But I don't hang my hat on a test I took half a lifetime ago, and I think IQ fetishism is harmful and silly - traits like work ethic, loyalty, and kindness are much more important. Which means I don't froth in rage that my less intelligent countrymen have the power to vote.
tl;dr: Fly, stop picking these insanely personal fights on the internet and start lifting.
I don't get why you and everyone else don't have him on ignore.
And I don't understand why there's been ~0 discussion of Gary Johnson itt. That video he put out was awesome and I think I agreed with every single sentence of it. Seems like the only reason he can't win is because people think he can't. If you asked me a month ago I would have confidently said that there is ~0 chance I'll ever vote in my lifetime but I am going to register and vote for the first time ever just for him.