Email message today from a sane Sanders supporter, on of the silent majority in that camp… pic.twitter.com/hFaz8CTXP8
— AlGiordano (@AlGiordano) May 7, 2016
The collective bedwetting and hysteria over every mistake and lame move by the Clinton campaign will be like nothing we've ever seen.
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) May 6, 2016
The bed sheets will be so wet you'll get bored of wetting the bed. https://t.co/bbNN9bu4Xf
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) May 6, 2016
brilliant London billboard (via @SaverioBianchi) pic.twitter.com/PRPAsSvXQW
— laura olin (@lauraolin) May 7, 2016
rikyrah
That London billboard is on point.
Maybe the bedwetting will be a good thing, for it will fight against complacency.
Mike J
Jim, Foolish Literalist
i couldn’t believe the overreaction to “Dangerous Donald”. No it’s not brilliant, it’s also not Gerald Ford saying there is no Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. It merited an eye-roll, not much more.
Major Major Major Major
I’m just gonna do a quick Irish Goodbye at this party and I’ll join y’all in late-nite land…
gf120581
@Mike J: Wow. At this rate, is anyone else looking around expecting to see Rod Serling narrating?
It puts the Democratic stuff into perspective. Yes, Bernie can be annoying in his inability to accept defeat and yes, the loud but pitifully small and ineffective Sanders cultists are annoying, but seriously, they are nothing like the all-out civil war breaking out on the other side of the aisle. The GOP is falling apart in front of our eyes.
Original Lee
Then there’s this. Kinda scary.
Mnemosyne
I’m going to amplify something I said in another thread: I think Hillary is going to easily keep the Obama coalition together, not because everyone is going to stop worrying and learn to love Hillary, but because the coalition is made of mostly minority voters who know very well that a Trump presidency would be a fucking disaster for them. They don’t have the luxury of staying home.
Major Major Major Major
@Original Lee: Scott Adams is such a dweeb. He’s classic smart-but-not-really.
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
In my experience, an Irish goodbye takes about 4 hours. Maybe you’re planning to take French leave instead?
bystander
@Original Lee: Dilbert is next to Family Circus and right below Marmaduke in my pantheon of comic strip hilarity. IOW, that guy is wrong about everything, including his,supposed area of expertise, so I’m not bothered.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: they are in fact the same.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mnemosyne: @Major Major Major Major: this is the fifth definition in the urban dictionary, but it was always the way the term was used in my family
the idea of leaving without a word seems to be the more widely accepted usage. i assume it comes from the emigrants who would leave the country without telling their parents? the rumor is a couple of my great uncles did that back in the twenties. OTOH I’ve also heard of emigrants wakes, where they would have a farewell gathering for the one they assumed they’d never see again.
Mnemosyne
@Original Lee:
Interestingly, I think Adams is correct on the basic psychology but completely wrong on what the outcome will be. Here’s the nut graf:
If you look at the presidential election results from 2008 and 2012, he has correctly identified the two identity groups that voted, but he doesn’t seem to realize that the “American, Alpha Males, and Women Who Like Alpha Males” group is the one that lost. Badly. Because they are outnumbered by the second group.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Mnemosyne:
You know what’s funny is that in France it’s called filer à l’anglaise, and means the same thing.
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
I will have you come to the next wedding on my Irish-American in-laws side and you can judge for yourself. At G’s cousin’s wedding in Las Vegas, the hotel staff eventually gave up trying to make us leave the banquet room after the reception was over when even vacuuming it didn’t make people leave.
Jim (Foolish Literalist) may be right that it’s a reference to people abruptly immigrating rather than an actual behavior.
Matt McIrvin
@Original Lee: Scott Adams believes that all physicists are wrong about gravity and things fall down because everything in the universe is expanding. He thinks he’s been successful because he said affirmations to himself many times a day and the affirmations warped the structure of reality to make themselves true. Also, his beliefs about feminists verge on Gamergate-ism.
Anyone taking Scott Adams as having special insight into anything does this at their own peril.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: I get bothered when people talk about “alphas” and “betas” in human psychology. We’re pair-bonding, for Christ’s sake. We don’t *have* those. The wording has the loser stench of PUA’s and MRA’s all over it, and based on some of his other stuff I’ve read I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was into that.
Mnemosyne
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I’m not surprised. Isn’t what we call French kissing likewise attributed to another nationality by the French?
Original Lee
@Mnemosyne: I think you’re broadly correct on the numbers. The scary part to me is that the media KNOWS he’s speaking directly to the id of a fairly large section of the demographic, and they’re HELPING him. The money involved in broadcasting everything he does and says is too good for them to give up. As we know from 20 years of Faux News, this can result in people who ordinarily would spit in his face becoming ardent supporters.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Mnemosyne: Trump has 70% unfavorables among white women. There’s no way he wins with not only just white voters, but while losing that large a portion of even those.
The big error a lot of people are making is saying hey, no one thought he’d get this far, so who knows what can happen now. Except that’s not right, polls pretty accurately predicted him winning the nomination. And they predict him losing the general by a landslide.
Anne Laurie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
That’s certainly the one I grew up with — specifically, sliding out of the bar/party to avoid buying the next round or because you didn’t want your fellows to see you getting all emotional due to inebriation.
Joke I learned from my (lesbian) baby sister:
What’s the difference between a gay bar and an Irish pub?
Gays go to the bar to get drunk; drunks go to the pub to get gay.
eclare
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Hmm, my very southern relatives do that too. Before going to any family get together, we decide, when do we want to leave? And then count back at least half or full hour to when we say goodbye.
Matt McIrvin
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
More likely just the formula of “[hated ethnicity] [thing]” to mean a version of the thing that is not the thing at all. Dutch courage, Dutch treat, French leave, etc. One definition of “French leave” seems to be identical to “Irish goodbye” as stated.
RK
This election will come down to who’s disliked less: An insufferable know-nothing narcissist or a humorless, imperious know-it-all.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
Got the Irish goodbye thing here as well. Although I don’t think there is any way it is limited to just that side of my family. The Italian side does it the same.
BTW on the OT side, pulled the trigger on the new wheels today. Pick it up tomorrow.
Original Lee
@Matt McIrvin: Yet he nails quite a lot of the Trump phenomenon. Most of the time, I think he cannot win. And then I remember a number of other people, not just in the U.S., who became leaders despite quite a lot of voters thinking they were idiots.
Jerzy Russian
@Matt McIrvin:
I was about to reply about the first two items. Being wrong would be an improvement for Adams.
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
To be clear, i think he’s right that certain (white male) people classify themselves as Alphas and others as Betas. I also think one of the reasons Obama has been able to outmaneuver the Republicans over and over again is that he doesn’t buy into their system.
I once read a really fascinating series of blog posts by a guy who pointed out that all of the PUA and “alpha male” stuff is pretty much guaranteed to attract women with severe personality disorders, but that most of the guys selling the PUA lifestyle are pretty clearly looking for that due to their own abusive upbringings and desire to “fix” their childhood by forming a relationship with a narcissist or borderline personality who’s just like dear old mom or dad. It was both fascinating and a little depressing.
Major Major Major Major
Jeez, fine, I slipped out of the party, let’s just call it a Frisco Left Hook or something.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne: Most folk think “Alpha Males” == Assholes.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Mnemosyne: Hmm, I never heard one. This seems to confirm that there isn’t really one. Both it and I could be wrong of course.
French kiss might be an exception in that they’re at least aware of it used elsewhere, but it’s sometimes surprising how certain “French” expressions don’t actually exist there, nor have they even heard of them. Like “deja vu”. No one I asked had ever heard of it use that way that we do. When I asked “So what do you call that thing where you suddenly feel like you’ve lived it before?” the response was “Oh! I’ve had that feeling!”
Mnemosyne
@Ruckus:
Yay new (or at least new to you) car! Hopefully one with much better gas mileage, among other benefits.
Matt McIrvin
@Bill E Pilgrim: The polls predict him, currently, losing the general by roughly Obama v. McCain 2008-like margins. That was a satisfying win but not what I’d call a landslide.
I expect that to narrow to at least Obama v. Romney 2012, and maybe further, over the next few months, because Trump will have a couple of months as the unchallenged presumptive nominee, while Clinton still has to deal with Sanders sniping at her and driving her favorable/unfavorables down from the left. I have online friends who are still convinced that Sanders can win the nomination and worrying that Clinton is going to steal it somehow. I’m more convinced than I was that this will be mostly over by convention time, but it will make for a worrying spring.
Remember, Trump has super-high negatives but you can’t project a landslide loss from that alone, because Clinton has fairly high negatives too, just not as high.
Mike J
@Mnemosyne: http://jezebel.com/the-french-finally-invent-a-word-for-french-kiss-510463388
Mnemosyne
@Matt McIrvin:
Also, this. Though I picked up the term “French leave” from historical novels, so it may be period slang and not actually a term currently used.
Bill E Pilgrim
The polling was actually pretty accurate about him winning the nomination. And polling now predicts him losing the general election by a landslide and then some.
He loses white women by 30/70%. There’s no way you win with your support not only limted to white voters, but losing a gigantic segment of them also.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: Yeah, that’s been my experience as well. I used to
assistfact-checkfact-check forwrite books for a guy whose name you’ll see come up in those circles and it’s severe personality disorders all the way down. That people have found a way to make money at this is completely unsurprising. Icouldwill write a think piece about it, some day.Let’s see, what else. Went to ye olde comick book shoppe today, got some swag, that was fun. Bought a Trump piñata. Friend beat it up for his going-away party. We wanted candy that gay people would actually eat, so we filled it with Fiber One bars.
Um. My friend got me a bracelet for my birthday. It’s nice. Then I left a party and got ice cream.
Anne Laurie
@Mnemosyne:
You’re right about that.
And so is Origuy:
For Fox News, in particular, it’s a result of narrow-casting their market. They get the best advertising results pitching to angry, aging, mostly-white viewers; every time they tweak their ‘news’ to better target that group, more optimistic/young/non-white viewers drop away. Remember, Rupert Murdoch & Roger Ailes (‘alpha males’ if ever there were such) are even older than Deadbeat Don — they’re all three hanging on to their empires, their relevance, by an increasingly thin margin.
Six more months of All Trump, All the Time may cripple Fox News almost as thoroughly as it will the Republican party… even assuming none of those three men stroke out before November.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Ruckus: What’d ya get?
Bill E Pilgrim
@Matt McIrvin: The leaving quickly or without saying goodbye thing exists in many languages, but most of the European ones at least make it “English”, with a few making it French. Or Polish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_leave
Matt McIrvin
By the way, a little while ago I and a bunch of people linked to an article by Sam Wang arguing from national polls alone that Trump has a 9% chance of winning the election. Wang now says he made a math error and the result of the calculation should have been more like 30%. That’s not to say that Trump’s probability of winning is necessarily 30%, just that that’s all you can say by looking at national polls alone at the beginning of May.
Mnemosyne
@Matt McIrvin:
Again to clarify something I’ve been saying a lot: I think that the natural course of events will be that the Obama coalition will stick together and Clinton will beat Trump by a similar margin.
However, I think that if we put our backs into it and really work hard to get massive turnout, we can squish Trump like a bug, which would be a whole lot more satisfying.
Anne Laurie
@Ruckus: Congrats!
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
New to me and also brand spanking. Over 200% better mileage, not quite as much space in the back. But now I can drive by a school without that look by the neighbors.
Different brand than you but basically same size/type. Also decent financing.
John Revolta
Love the billboard. Gonna steal that.
Looks like Times Square to me though.
Yutsano
@RK: Your tears are bitter. Good thing I happen to like negronis.
@Ruckus: MAZEL TOV!!!
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: Hard work won’t drive up those margins into the House-taking range, though. Ground game will get you, what, two points, tops?
Anne Laurie
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Including self-styled and would-be ‘Alpha Males’!
Major Major Major Major
Tonight’s jam (how I’m feeling all cooped up in my cozy little room): Surrounded, by The Mountain Goats.
Mnemosyne
@Mike J:
French is so weird. If I’m reading that article right, it sounds like there was a long-standing slang term for it that was only recently recognized by the Academie Francaise.
Anne Laurie
@Major Major Major Major: Happy birthday, and many happy returns to you!
Ruckus
@BillinGlendaleCA:
@Anne Laurie:
Ford Focus.
Went in to test drive and they made me such a good offer I said what the hell. Last new car was in 03 so this is over due. And I can actually afford it!
Major Major Major Major
@Anne Laurie: Whoa there, that’s not until Monday. I’m young yet. The mail delivered today though :)
Mnemosyne
@Ruckus:
Nice! I was surprised that I got such good financing with my crappy credit.
@Major Major Major Major:
People here have said that if Republicans get depressed enough, we might be able to turn it into a wave election. I’m willing to take that chance and do the work to try and get one.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Ruckus: Last new car for me was in 85; I still drive it. The last two times in the shop are making me think that the end may be near($500 to replace a fuel filter and $1000 to replace(everything had to be replaced) the brakes).
Ruckus
@Major Major Major Major:
With a good GOTV program I think it’s possible to take the house. There are a lot of republicans that are going to sit this one out, if what I hear about the water cooler is right. They don’t like their choice any better than they like ours, maybe even less. Getting them to pull the D lever may be impossible but at least getting them to not pull one at all may be easier than we think. This is all conjecture and small sample size of course but trends can be made that way.
Matt McIrvin
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Maybe we have different definitions of a landslide. To me, a landslide is Reagan vs. Mondale 1984. Or at least Bush vs. Dukakis 1988. The kind of win where almost the whole map turns one color.
If I take the Wikipedia state-polling page and color in every state where Clinton is currently leading, using 2012 results to fill the holes where there are no numbers for 2016, I get Clinton with 362 electoral votes, Trump 164, 12 tied. That’s pretty much an Obama 2008-scale win. Nice, but not what I’d call a landslide.
RedDirtGirl
@Original Lee: That is pretty scary!
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: I’m not saying we shouldn’t work for it! Just that waves are usually based on underlying ‘wave-like’ fundamentals, which we aren’t particularly having at the moment, hence the likelihood of an obama-coalition-style outcome.
But Trump is one hell of a black swan scenario, so who knows.
Tom Q
@Bill E Pilgrim: To the “they said he wouldn’t get the nomination, so why shouldn’t he prove them wrong twice?” argument: I remember a Feiffer cartoon in 1972 (can’t find it anywhere online) that featured two pundits in discussion, going something like this: “McGovern can’t get nominated because… 1) Muskie’s the front-runner. (No; that was before New Hampshire.) 2) He’s too liberal to win primaries. (No; that was before Wisconsin). etc. The final panel was “McGovern can’t win the election because… 1) Nixon can’t be beaten.”
I imagine Feiffer grimaces a bit if he ever remembers that cartoon (it gives me a pang, because it makes me relive the grisly loss). But it’s almost exactly the argument being made about Trump today — pundits can be very wrong about a nomination; it doesn’t make them wrong about the general election.
Mike J
@Yutsano: I saw the wazzu football coach endorsing the trumpster fire today.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Matt McIrvin: Huh, yeah polls are closer than I thought. But still show him losing by six or seven points, and that’s more than enough. The point being that polls did predict that he’d win the nomination, and now predict that he’ll lose the general. Just to counter the “well no one could have predicted he’d get nominated, either” line. Not true.
Major Major Major Major
@Bill E Pilgrim: 538 had a good thing on that today.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Tom Q: Oh well don’t misunderstand, pundits being wrong is a whole different thing, I’m talking about polling being fairly accurate, all things considered. Just as a response to the “Polls never showed him winning the nom either” argument. Because in fact they did. A “they said” argument is another animal entirely. Anyone claiming that pundits have no idea what they’re talking about will get no argument from me.
Matt McIrvin
@Original Lee: He nails the Trump phenomenon for people who already like Trump. His mistake is believing these people are a majority because he’s one of them.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
Was thinking the same thing but having bought/leased a bunch of Fords in the last 25 yrs and not had any credit in the last ten made a difference. They couldn’t find a score because of the not using any credit but all the accounts that came up showed closed with zero balance. So everything looked better than I expected.
@BillinGlendaleCA:
My current POS
iswas going to require some work and I’m thinking expensive. I could have done it myself with anyplace to work on it but that’s long gone so when they offered me only $500 less for trade in than I was thinking I could get for it on the open market, I went for it. I used to lease a car for 2 or 3 yrs and then start the whole cycle over again. Always making a (smaller) payment but also also always driving a new car. But this one I expect to last 20 yrs or so and that’s probably as long as I’ll be driving so I thought new would be the way to go.Mike J
@Major Major Major Major: They also had thing today predicting a 22% chance of the Cubs winning the world series.
Matt McIrvin
@Bill E Pilgrim: I would like to see more polling in Texas and the deep South, because I suspect that, while Clinton is probably not going to flip those states, the margins are probably narrower than we’ve seen in a while.
Meanwhile, I expect Democrats to fret a lot about Ohio, because it’s probably going to be close all season, and spin ideas about Trump flipping all the blue states of the upper Midwest. But I don’t think he actually will. Clinton can easily win without Ohio; she wins if she keeps just the deep-blue Kerry/Gore states plus Florida.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Mnemosyne: The Acadamie is what’s weird. No one really pays much attention.
They try to come up with words for “web” and blog and so on and everyone just uses the English words.
Meanwhile the language itself is alive and pulsing, with younger people always coming up with things like this.
Matt McIrvin
@Bill E Pilgrim: Looking up data for that comment, I was surprised to find that GHW Bush’s popular-vote margin in 1988 was just a hair under eight points–and Obama ’08 was a hair under seven. Not a huge difference. But 1988 looks way more impressive on the map than an eight-point Democratic margin would be, because of all those low-population red states forming a solid block.
Reagan in ’84 had an 18-point margin, which is the kind of thing that gets you 49 states. ’80 was less clear-cut in the popular vote because it was a three-way race.
Villago Delenda Est
@Original Lee: Scott Adams has been flirting with wingnuttery and insanity for some time now. Seems like he’s ready to go balls deep.
Villago Delenda Est
@Matt McIrvin: A true landslide would be 1964 or 1984 lopsidedness.
Fair Economist
@Major Major Major Major: In the modern era of turnout-based elections, if significant factions in a party’s coalition oppose the nominee, you have landslide conditions.
Bobby Thomson
@Original Lee: Adams is an idiot who can’t count. Also a liar, because he claims in that piece not to have political opinions but he’s a right winger.
bystander
@Bill E Pilgrim: I was just reading about verlan yesterday in a NYTimes book review. A book about the clochard culture in France has just been translated into English, and their inventiveness with the language was noted. Nobody bothered to point out the rhyming slang of cockney English.
The Times today has a Haberman column about Trump’s accusations that Hillary mistreated the women Bill supposedly harassed and some people said she tried to discredit them blah blah blah. I’m already sick of the Times. Everytime Trump makes some accusation, they will be publishing it without comment.
bystander
Paris Vagabond chronicles the world of Parisian clochards following WWII. The review is by Edmund White so somewhere along the way the review’s topic becomes Edmund White. But the linguistic discussion is pretty interesting.
Prescott Cactus
@Mnemosyne:
Ah the long goodbye. We also had the saying, the difference between an Irish Wedding and an Irish Funeral, was one less drunk. . .
J R in WV
@Bill E Pilgrim:
The only reason Trump won a single primary is that there were at least a dozen other terrible candidates running. They all got from 10 to 12 % and on down, and Trump’s 27% was enough to win those contests. Toward the end Rafael Cruz and John Kasich were each getting 15 or 20%, which left Trump’s 40% the winner.
If Trump had fought against one good candidate all the way, it may have been a toss-up who won, or it may have been a close shave for the other guy.
In a race against Hillary Clinton, a single candidate who he cannot rattle, and who may be able to rely on her fellow democratic speakers to get under his skin, as President Obama appears to be able to do almost without trying, I really don’t think Trump can pull it off, especially with many real Republicans realizing that they hate him almost as much as the Democratic people do.
If he actually wins, I may seriously look at moving abroad somewhere, because I think he may kill the country off. Imagine NPR and PBS either gone or transformed into Trump TV, for one example. France seems good, Belize, maybe even Canada’s west coast?
J R in WV
So glad there’s usually some late night activity here for nights when I wake up and have to be up a while to go back to sleep.
G’night all. Sleep well when you do it.
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne:
That and the fact that he’s Stealth Jedi Alpha.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
Moving is a nice idea. But it isn’t that easy to relocate to many places. I’ve been looking into it to stretch my SS budget. But unless you have more than a reasonable amount to in invest in a business or a large enough guaranteed income like SS or an annuity of a reasonable amount you aren’t going permanently. In many countries the amounts required are not all that reasonable. Understandable yes, but reasonable, not necessarily.
Applejinx
@Original Lee:
Run the numbers. In this economy, do you REALLY want to stake everything on ‘people who aren’t disenfranchised’?
Bernie’s running exactly the same ’emotional, calculated, persuader’ type campaign (for sincere reasons: he’s a Socialist) literally against people like Trump, the wealthy and entitled. He’s persistently risking the Clinton campaign just by tying her to Trump-like powers that be, but every argument used to scare people away from supporting 2016 Hillary (let’s concede that 1990s Hilllary wouldn’t be good now: she’s not running) is also a valid reason for not trusting Trump. Every picture of Hillary hobnobbing at Trump’s wedding with Trump is, well, a picture of Trump…
Scott Adams is being dumb here. He’s also looking silly in other ways unrelated to the Presidential race: at least in recent years he’s looked like a MRA bozo. You can’t always trust comedians to be your guide to reality because sometimes their twisted vision is because they’re just twisted themselves.
Applejinx
As for the chances of people feeling less disenfranchised, Douglas Rushkoff Deconstructing the Digital Economy (90 minutes but well worth it) is pretty much all you need to know about that.
People complain about Bernie Sanders not having answers for the problems he raises, and oversimplifying things. I’ve always leaned on Mark Blyth for a reference to how the modern leveraged capital economy works (i.e. what are they thinking, this is madness!) but it turns out Douglas Rushkoff is the one who really gets into the deep background and explains WHY it does what it does. And the answer is, the problems we’re having with it aren’t fixable problems, but signs that its fundamental nature is being exposed as never before. In industrial capitalism implemented through corporate monopoly over currencies and trade, everything worked as long as there were new places to expand to: it’s totally dependent on being able to expand, so you had the British Empire, and now you’ve got American capitalism expanding everywhere but as it goes digital there’s literally nowhere else to go, and digital economies accelerate this process by an order of magnitude.
So basically Scott Adams is making an argument based on what it would be like if we were conquering other stars and planets and making them drink Coca-Cola sold in Wal-Marts. As Rushkoff observes, Wal-Mart is closing stores because after thirty years or so they’ve successfully bankrupted communities to the point that even with workers on welfare the towns can’t afford to keep a Wal-Mart in business: they’ve taken all the money out and there is no more, they’re done. That’s how that system works.
In the digital age, this happens faster.
Rushkoff correctly blames the way capital gains taxes are far lower than employment/income taxes but also observes that we can’t make things better by finding one big company, one big idea, by extending the ‘network effects’ in hopes of efficiency. Small localized community interactions are actually more efficient: why? Because they don’t have to pay stockholders or global transportation costs! It’s an interesting perspective fiercely grounded in a belief that throughout history, corporate control of human-designed markets has been explicitly the tool of power elites to destroy decentralized ‘bazaar’ style commerce: you give only one company (like the British East India Company) the legal right to do business, and then control that. Corporations were apparently MADE for that purpose, ‘markets’ are nothing but an invention to justify it.
He explains it better than I do. Point being, Scott Adams is an idiot because he’s acting like the system produces a majority voting bloc of ‘alpha males’. Instead, it tends towards a Gini number of one (Google trying to be Amazon, Amazon trying to be Google, Facebook wanting to be both, all of them trying frantically to end up as the one digital titan left standing) and on the whole everybody loses. That’s what Adams considers sustainable.
And the whole point is, this is an operating system. The rules and conditions were set and have BEEN set all along by human beings for comprehensible, historic reasons. Change the rules to make smaller-scale commerce a working strategy. You’ll still be able to buy iPhones because only a huge corporation can produce that type of good, but not every form of production or commerce needs to operate under those conditions, and even iPhones don’t have to bring an exponentially accelerating investor profit to exist :/
Aimai
I had thomas friedmans cab driver last night on my way in to boston. The guy was an enormous, white, chatty, trump supporter who explained to me on a repeating loop that ” people are angry, kids will have no jobs, washington is corrupt, they will reinstitute the draft for all the wars they want in countries we shouldnt interfere with, he hates elizzbeth warren because she is stupid snd evasive, he listens non stop to hoewie carr on the radio (local rush limbaugh). He repeated this word for word for twenty minutes despite our pointing out he should be voting bernie. The Intensity of his friendly affect and his rage filled monomaniac style speech was terrifying. Once you go trump, if you are zn angry shite guy, you are never coming back. And you are dure you are in ghe majority. At lesst until you lose and your sobs of self pity and sense of victimhood obertake your fslse sense of power.
sm*t cl*de
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Czechs also have the expression “Ožralý jako Dán” or “drunk as a Dane”, which I have to say is slightly ironic.
sm*t cl*de
@Bobby Thomson:
Oh, they never do have mere opinions, they are merely stating the melancholy facts of human biology. “Opinions” are for liberals.
The Thin Black Duke
@Applejinx: Huh. @Applejinx: Huh. Interesting and insightful. Thank you.
msdc
@Matt McIrvin:
Bush-Dukakis was 53-45, barely more than Obama-McCain. Clinton could potentially beat Trump by a considerably wider margin. Large portions of the electoral map will stay red, but only because of regional polarization.
ETA: See you replied to this later, never mind.
Keith P.
I never really noticed until now, but during the entire primary season, I do not recall seeing a single – a single – anti-Trump ad run on television for anything put a news story. The party that was a master at negative campaigning turned out to be not-so-good at campaigning against itself. Maybe it was too many elites clinging to Reagan’s 11th commandment (gone for years, but many didn’t know it), or maybe they were all on Fox News so I missed it.
But my point is, Trump is going to get SLAUGHTERED in ads very, very soon.
Cleos
@Mnemosyne: And then there’s that assumption that women who don’t like alpha males are “angry.”
As often as not, we just snicker at them. They’re such fragile creatures, totally ruled by their emotions and their hormones.
Matt McIrvin
@Keith P.: They didn’t run negative anti-Trump ads for the same reason that Hillary Clinton didn’t run negative anti-Sanders ads. They were all assuming that insulting Trump too much would just alienate his voter base, and that Trump would eventually fade and they’d need those people. So they all went hard after everyone who was not Trump, to be the last man standing when Trump took himself down. The only flaw in the plan was that Trump didn’t fade.
The general election is different in that nobody on the Democratic side actually needs to win over the Trump primary voters. They just need to make all other decent human beings horrified and disgusted at the man, and the Democratic nominee will win.
Uncle Cosmo
@Mike J: P. J. O’Rourke??!??!!11 What, did the Völkischer Beobachter offer him early retirement?
Matt McIrvin
@Aimai: Massachusetts Trump supporters are so into the man, and so out and proud about it, that it’s actually hard for me to believe the race isn’t close here. The psychological effect of those colossal signs and posters, the way Trump people will decorate everything they own with monuments to Trump, is palpable. I look at current state polling for the general election and it runs about 60-30 against Trump, but it feels like Trump is close to winning the state.
D58826
@Mnemosyne: In an election cycle in a ‘normal reality’ the only surprise would be Hillary not sweeping all 50 states against Trump. This year just seems weird in very large letters and a relatively inconsequential bump or shock late in October could just make Adam’s prediction come true. There has been a lot of ink spilled about how the experts should have seen the rise of Trump given the state of the GOP electorate but I’m not sure that isn’t Monday morning quarterbacking. I agree that the experts missed the anger and sense of betrayal in the GOP but so to pick Trump as the obvious face of that anger is a bit of a stretch. Tail gunner Ted might have been a more obvious choice.
D58826
@sm*t cl*de: The Greeks call a hole in the ground a Turkish toilet. And I understand the Turks return the favor.
The Sheriff Endorses Baud 2016
@Matt McIrvin: Sanders has his die-hards, but everyone else knows the main act is Trump vs Clinton and rightly so. The Democratic race is over, its a matter of letting Sanders end his campaign on his terms.
I’m curious to see if Trump can break the 43% barrier in national polling in the coming days, what with the party ‘unifying’ and all. That’s the highest Huffpo’s Pollster had him against Clinton up to this point, I know it can’t be his ceiling but still…
Rolling Along
The Beta Male Party is the perfect name for the Democrats. It’s the losers in life that flock to a party that blames everyone else for their own failures at life.
Jay C
@Aimai:
Maybe someone who has been following the political news so far (and I think I have been, to a fairly large extent) can explain something to me. And that’s the extreme persistence of the “Hillary the Hawk” meme. It seems to be a given, on both margins of the body politic, that if elected President, the first thing Mrs. Clinton will do (probably before even changing into her gown for the Inaugural Ball) is to order some bombing or invasion somewhere – and that a Clinton 45 Presidency will inevitably feature bloodstained military adventurism on a (depending on the intensity of one’s views) OIF- or even Vietnam scale.
OK: I realize that Hillary Clinton is no committed dove or knee-jerk antimilitarist – it’s just that so much online commentary about her as a candidate (and speculation about her as President) seems to accept the a priori assumption of a belligerent bloodthirstiness that would make Tamerlane look like a peacenik. Assumptions with, AFAICT, are not backed up by any actual positions expressed by Hillary Clinton. Am I not looking in the right places? Or is this just another artifact of decades of obsessive Clinton-bashing (by both Left and Right)?
Yutsano
@Mike J: Ugh. I saw that too. Do not get me started there. Leach may have forgotten that if the kids actually voted in Whitman county it would be a patch of blue on the east side. I never did because of jury duty (we’d always get kicked off anyway) but it would make the students more of a political powerhouse there as well.
Soylent Green
Since Indiana I’ve been wading through the conservative fever swamps, enjoying all the cognitive dissonance. What’s interesting is that they can describe with great clarity and reasoning exactly why Trump will be a disaster for America, while affirming with no evidence whatsoever that HRC will be worse.
In November, 95 percent of the Nevertrumpers and other malcontents will vote for Trump while piously proclaiming “I am not voting for Trump; I am voting against Clinton.” They are already test marketing this phrase.
Amir Khalid
@Jay C:
I tend to think that in Hillary’s time as Secretary of State, she was sometimes the “bad cop” in certain of the Obama administration’s ME policy deliberations, advocating from a pro-military intervention point of view. Perhaps she came to that from the close association with the military that the New York Times says she cultivated as Senator and SoS.
In any event, I doubt very much she will spend her presidency looking for wars to fight just to prove she can do it. She must know better than that. I expect her to keep human rights, particularly women’s rights, in the forefront of her foreign policy as much as possible.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@bystander: Scott Adams on President John McCain (in 2008).
Like you, I’m not worried. Hillary is going to beat Donnie like a grandma defending her grandchild from a tarantula.
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Jay C: I think it’s a few different things:
1. Her vote for the Iraq AUMF as seen through the lens of the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, which revolved around making the election a referendum on rejecting George W. Bush and all his works. This is a genuine stain on her record.
2. Insider reports about Clinton’s role in the run-up to intervention in Libya, and her positions re Syria, which suggested that she was somewhere to the hawkish side of Obama.
3. Part of it is really criticism of Obama himself; the antiwar left in 2012 angsted a lot about whether it was possible to support Obama’s reelection given the drone campaigns in Pakistan and elsewhere, and Hillary Clinton came to symbolize everything that was warlike about Obama and the Democratic establishment. Some of the dead-endest fringe Bernie-or-Busters are actually people who were pushing for Ron Paul in 2012 solely as an antiwar vote.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@John Revolta: Did the “W 47th St” street sign give it away? ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Spike
@John Revolta: That would explain why I can’t seem to find “W 47 St” on my map of London.
Matt McIrvin
@Matt McIrvin:
I should add, the guy like this who I know the best is currently actively insisting on Facebook that our only hope is to elect Trump so that his fascism brings the revolution. He spent 2012 mocking liberals for thinking Obama was good just because he was black, and his hatred for Hillary Clinton is incredibly intense.
Matt McIrvin
@The Sheriff Endorses Baud 2016:
What concerns me at this point is not that the Sanders supporters won’t vote for Clinton in the fall, but that they’ll spend a couple more months reinforcing the “crooked Hillary” theme that Trump is starting to emphasize, and helping to drive wavering people in the middle toward Trump.
Miss Bianca
@Uncle Cosmo: Have I mentioned that I always *love* your comments? I almost sprayed coffee this morning when I saw a reference to the VB. Took me straight back to grad school days.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Amir Khalid: Agreed.
Being a Senator from NY is very different from being Secretary of State is very different from being President. The President makes the ultimate decision. Having that responsibility focuses the mind very sharply.
She strikes me as someone who learns from mistakes, and the rapid change of international affairs and our clear inability to impose our preferred solutions on the world any more (for good and bad reasons) would seem to me to make her more cautious about striking out on her own to have a “pretty little war” somewhere.
She may have some hawkish rhetoric (but so did Obama at times). But she knows how to “play well with others” and won’t trash her historic presidency by doing something stupid.
More than her “hawkishness”, she’s very very protective of her image and her place in history. That’s why her “Wall Street speeches” don’t say much of anything. That’s a reason why her 11 hour Benghazi testimony didn’t give Gowdy anything. That’s another reason why she’s not going to do something stupid, and that part of what’s going to save her and the US and the world.
Always remember, though, that HRC is a monster. If you remember that, then you’ll be able to see the slanted reporting against her.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Rick Taylor
@Jay C:
This article from Time addressed your question.
http://swampland.time.com/2014/01/14/hillary-clintons-unapologetically-hawkish-record-faces-2016-test/
A
sdhays
@Matt McIrvin: Syria bothers me. She has suggested that everything would be fine (well, at least “better”) if Obama had listened to her and gave all the “good guys” American weapons at the beginning of the conflict, despite repeated demonstrations that the CIA isn’t very competent at identifying the “good guys” in Syria and ignoring the fact that at the beginning of the conflict Syria had large chemical weapons stockpiles.
It suggests that she has learned nothing from the failures in Iraq or in Libya, and it demonstrates that when it comes to foreign policy, her instincts are poor. She’s far too credulous regarding what the military can do and far too willing to accept military assurances that there won’t be other, unknown, consequences for military intervention. Sometimes it feels like Obama’s the only one in Washington holding these instincts back, since large portions of the establishment think this way. With Clinton in charge, my fear is that they will be given free reign.
Sanders never developed an effective critique of Clinton’s foreign policy, and that’s why I knew before any voting started that he would never win the nomination. Foreign policy is considered Clinton’s strength, but it’s also her Achilles heel, and Sanders (although I voted for him) never built the kind of forceful critique necessary to exploit that weakness. Obama did in 2007/2008, and that was the opening he rode through to beat Hillary.
Sanders says some good things, but it’s clear that he hasn’t thought about these things in that much depth, so he’s unable to really articulate a broad alternate vision of foreign policy beyond “I have better judgement”. It’s a lost opportunity because it leaves Clinton without much of a foreign policy critique from the left and leaves her to occupy the “left-wing” foreign policy space, when she’s not particularly representative.
Villago Delenda Est
@Rolling Along: You’re projecting. AGAIN.
Ruckus
@Jay C:
Or is this just another artifact of decades of obsessive Clinton-bashing (by both Left and Right)?
Bingo!
JimL
What I want to see is a strong Democrat in the White House and TWO strong liberal/progressive Senators (Sanders and Warren) to serve as emotional and intellectual counterpoints to push that President in domestic and foreign policy directions counter to the Wasserman-Schultz / Schumer wing of the Democratic party. The political weight that Sanders and Warren can wield against the slavish devotion of W-S/S to Wall Street and the Likuddite version of American foreign policy toward Israel will serve both the Democratic party and this country well.
different-church-lady
@Jay C:
Well, there you have it. If you’re not one, you’re the other. That’s how math works in Purityland.
Bobby Thomson
@Rolling Along: says the serially banned supporter of a candidate who couldn’t even defend his own wife.
different-church-lady
@Bobby Thomson: Come now, I don’t think he ever supported Dukakis.
Frankensteinbeck
@Jay C:
It is Clinton Rules revisionism, stripping what she did of context, throwing in the fact free gossip that has plagued Obama’s administration, omitting or ‘that must have been someone else’ get her dove actions, and multiplying the result by one hundred. It relies on things like pretending Libya was America’s fight and not NATO’s (the historical myopia of these critiques is freakish), her support for the same surge as Obama in Afghanistan for the same reasons, and equivocating her wanting slightly higher training troop levels in Iraq than Obama or more arming of the rebels than he did as OH BOY I WANT TO INVADE!
It became a narrative, like ‘Obama Always Caves’. Remember that one? And just as justified.
Bobby Thomson
@D58826: the “experts” ignored a metric fuck ton of polls. No Monday morning quarterbacking about it at all. Their insistence Trump couldn’t win was about as defensible as the McCain campaign’s insistence Obama couldn’t win Virginia.
Bobby Thomson
@msdc: Dukakis would have won with today’s demographics.
Barry
@Jay C: “Maybe someone who has been following the political news so far (and I think I have been, to a fairly large extent) can explain something to me. And that’s the extreme persistence of the “Hillary the Hawk” meme. ”
Freudian projection by the right, who are now billing themselves as the party of peace.
Villago Delenda Est
@Barry: Yes, the party that launched the first war of aggression by a major power since 1939.
Mnemosyne
@D58826:
I know I’m being kind of a broken record about this, but which minority voter group do you see staying home or switching to Trump due to an inconsequential bump?
The demographics of the US have changed to the extent that a candidate can no longer win solely by winning a majority of the white vote. He or she needs to also win at least a substantial chunk of at least one group of minority voters, as W did with the Hispanic vote in 2004. So who do you see switching to Trump in large numbers: African-American voters? Hispanic voters? Asian-American voters?
Elie
@Mnemosyne:
I wouldn’t just make that disenfranchised minorities. I would say that PLUS very self aware minorities who are totally awake to what is happening. This includes many black people like myself, all brown folk and Asians as well. It is not just poor, unaware black folks… we aint takin the beat down and we absolutely know the score…
Elie
@Bobby Thomson:
Just remember — Trump benefitted greatly from winner take all primary methodology in the Republican Party. He cracked 50% of Republicans only in a couple of states during the primaries and only recently hit 50% in Republican polls. That leaves a whole lot of Republicans who did not vote for him and its unclear you can just assume that they will come November. That is without mentioning any of the Democratic groups discussed previously — blacks, browns, women, etc.
john fremont
@Applejinx: Thank you for the interesting post. I will bookmark the Rushkoff video. Phillip Longman has written some very informative articles, at the Atlantic and the Washington Monthly over the last few years, about how the decrease in enforcement of antitrust laws over the last 30 years has lead to consolidation of corporate bureaucracies over many sectors of the economy. These corporate bureaucracies actually end up being even more inefficient yet are able to continue to paper it over year after year. The Rushkoff video looks like it touches on the same points.
Matt McIrvin
@sdhays: A version of Bernie Sanders with a clear alternative vision of foreign policy might have actually gotten my vote, much like Obama did back when. I don’t get the sense that Sanders is really all that interested in foreign policy (neither is Elizabeth Warren, for that matter, which was one of the things that bothered me about the Draft Warren movement: some of the people in it seemed to assume she’d have a left-noninterventionist foreign policy, when she’d never said a single thing to imply that).
msdc
@Matt McIrvin:
IOW, people who were never going to vote for a Democrat in November anyway.
msdc
@Matt McIrvin: Case in point.
Matt McIrvin
@Mnemosyne:
I worry about some staying home due to massive vote suppression, efforts ranging from confusing ID laws to violence. (I heard recently that a lot of the votes suppressed by new ID laws are of people who actually have proper ID, but think they don’t.) But this is something that can actually be addressed by targeted activism.
Matt McIrvin
@Mnemosyne:
Also, it’s not strictly impossible to win a presidential election just with white votes; you just need a sufficient supermajority (the Sean Trende strategy). The necessary supermajority just keeps going up and up, but I think it’d be possible with something like 67%. Trump’s relative lack of appeal to women means he needs to dominate among white men by much more than that, though. I think it’s not inconceivable, though it’s an uphill fight.
Villago Delenda Est
@msdc: Prezactly. While Ron Paul (and his loathsome spawn) does have a better take on the war/peace issue than most, he’s pretty much the classic example of a stopped clock. Everything else he wants to do is batshit insane.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Matt McIrvin: Yup. Too many people on the left think that Warren agrees with them on everything.
Greenwald wasn’t happy with Warren’s statements about the Gaza war, but Glenn’s not too happy with too many things that Democrats do, so …
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who recognizes that Greenwald often isn’t on the “left” anyway…)
Matt McIrvin
@Villago Delenda Est: I’m not even sure his take is better. He always seemed aligned with the Buchananite paleocons. You know how Israel hawks and neocons always claimed their opponents were just antisemites? That’s actually true about those specific guys.
Frankensteinbeck
@Villago Delenda Est:
Like everything with the Pauls, if it sounds good you’re hearing the sound bite version. They’re not doves, they’re isolationists who believe a one world government under control of Jewish bankers is trying to take over America.
Similarly, they’re for marijuana legalization because they want all regulations on all drugs removed, including medicines and getting rid of the FDA. Utter fruit cakes.
john fremont
@Villago Delenda Est: This!!!