Why are you worried about them?
I'm assuming the idea is that centrists crowd into the Dem party and pull it rightward? But I'm not sure if there are enough centrists left in the GOP who would both (a) leave and (b) become active in the Democrats to significantly change the dynamic beyond what we already have.
I'm okay if the Republicans become an incoherent mess, a small number of centrists leave and pull the Democrats slightly to the right, an a further left party fills in the vacuum to become the new second party.
A boy can dream.
I have no idea what the next two years will bring, but it's sure going to be messy.
Oh, and in this dream, the incoherent Republican rump splinters into smaller competing factions, providing an unexpected second base for instant runoff voting.
At this point, I'm not ready to worried about anybody that's voting for Hillary Clinton.
What worries me is that there are too few Barros out there. Even the people who aren't endorsing Trump still want to be part of Trump's political party, and still want Republicans to win.
George W. Bush -- a disaster for this country -- is now rightly regarded as an elder statesman, and the most optimistic outcome for the Republicans is that people like Bush regain control of the party.
We are one ill-timed recession away from a Repubican presidency. Whatever hope we've got, it's because Barro types exist.
I don't mind the conversion tale as a genre, but I don't think I'd enjoy a Caravaggio-style painting of Scoop Jackson, Tip O'Neill, Sam Nunn and Mitt Romney, either.
8 How about a Lucien Freud-style painting of the same?
7 last seems a bit strong but the rest of 7 is right. I mean who knows about the future but it seems like the most likely short- mid-term scenario is that the Republican party goes back to being more savvy about its white nationalist wing and continues to exist as one of two major parties that are increasingly polarized. Bringing "centrists" into a democratic party that's left of where it's ever been isn't a bad thing, because the pull of polarization will remain strong.
The question isn't what the Republican Party is going to do about its white nationalists, but rather, what the white nationalists are going to do about the Republican Party.
11: Basically. Or what the non-white nationalists are going to do about the fact that they're a minority in the Republican Party.
5 strikes me as kind of reachable, actually. The Republicans are a bunch of factions with almost nothing in common, as this election has made very clear. I bet the Cruzes/Carsons/Fiorinas would be happy to split from the Rs if they had a real prospect of some office.
13: I think what we need is a red-but-willing-to-experiment-state to do it for state-level elections first (if that can be done without Constitutional change). IRV in Oakland isn't going to convince anyone on that side of politics.
I'm looking at you, Nebraska.
13 - yeah but they don't. Incredibly different groups within the two major parties are the norm, not the exception. I don't think the election will cause either the white nationalists or the conservatives but not white nationalists to walk out on the R part, the coalition between them worked well for years and most R voters of either faction will still vote for their nominee. Trump will be treated as a one-off and the Republican party will continue to be one of two major parties capable of capturing the federal government. We're nowhere close to the degree of change necessary to change that.
I don't know if I buy the whole of 15, but certainly parties in our type of electoral system are always coalitions of different groups. Locally, you can see the clear divide between public employees/union guys and liberals.
15, see 14. And there's no guarantee the establishment will retake the party. Like that thing Ogged linked said, this shit is not going end after November.
Lately I've been depressing myself by thinking about the Goldwater blowout in 64 and then Watergate 10 years later.
In both cases, the GOP suffered an apparent collapse that should have left the Democrats in power for the better part of a decade, and in both cases the GOP somehow came back and routed the Democrats only a few years later.
All the people who do the day-to-day work of keeping parties going, earning salaries or anticipating some kind of payday, are acutely aware of the structural imperative need under FPTP to keep factions united. Whichever party splintered first would lose big in the short term, so both of them will strain hard to prevent that.
(In Japan, when they had multimember districts plus PR where party-splitting could actually confer an advantage, it happened all the time. Then they moved to single-member constituencies for the majority of lower-house seats; opposition consolidation was rapid.)
I do think the situation in the current Republican Party is close a breaking point of some sort. This election, if it goes reasonably well, will result a fairly large number of more moderate Republicans losing office and very little damage to the extremist/racist/Trump-supporting Republicans who caused the damage. Most of that later group is more afraid of losing a primary than anything else and they can see what the majority of their primary voters want. Assuming they don't have a conscience, there is no upside for them to try to restrain the white nationalists. If this means the Republicans don't do anything to walk away from the white nationalists, the Republicans in states that are even remotely competitive will not have much of an interest in maintaining the coalition.
18: When Nixon won, the Democrats were very divided over Vietnam. The party did come close to falling apart. It probably would have if Nixon's Southern Strategy hadn't taken off some of the internal pressure on the Democrats.
19: That's partially why I think it would have to happen at the state-level first, beginning with safe states. I could imagine a temporary scenario where things become like Canada, where the state and federal parties are much more separate entities than the parties here. State-level Trumpists and Moderate Conservative parties would band together as federal Republicans until IRV becomes a thing.
Sigh. My elaborate fantasies are so boring.
I think what we need is a red-but-willing-to-experiment-state to do it for state-level elections first (if that can be done without Constitutional change).
I think its on the ballot in Maine this year. Not a red state, but a purple state.
A purple state is one where only the governor is an open racist.
8 made me wonder what Jon McNaughton has been up to recently. Turns out, painting Cliven Bundy! Also, for just $20, you can get some scribbles of Trump with hateful inspirational quotes. I particularly like the one where he uses eight different typefaces in one sentence.
I have no idea what, specifically, people are even talking about in re a Republican party collapse. There was a guy who hijacked the primary system who was a horrible general election candidate. The party won't nominate that guy again for President, but instead will keep running "conservatives" of various stripes from libertarians to neo-fascists, as they have for years. People like Josh Barro who were Bill Weld Republicans have been a tiny minority of the party for years and are about as far from the party leadership as you could imagine. So the party will keep going and keep on as a threat in roughly the same way it has from 2008-2016.
I do agree with Mobes that some Northeastern Republican (mostly Senators) who represent more contestable electorates will be worried about the direction of the party. But that's also been true for years. States like Pennsylvania have been able to elect guys like Toomey. And it's offset, more than offset, by Republican dominance elsewhere. I am generally long-term optimistic about the future of the Democrats for demographic reasons but that's a long-term trend and the collapse of the Republicans doesn't seem imminent at all. Basically we got electorally lucky in a horrible Presidential candidate, but unlucky in that the horrible candidate has made open racial animus more acceptable to a party that's not going anywhere as a significant political force.
Put it this way: if by some miracle the Democrats are lucky enough to get the Senate and the House this election the focus should be on getting everything done as quickly as possible, because there's no reasonable short or medium term hope for unified Democratic control of government. The idea that Republicans are going to crack up or go away is a pipe dream.
26.1: This assumes Trump's hijacking of the primary system can be undone as soon as Trump is gone. I don't see why that would be the case. Even if Trump goes away (as I think he will), it's now common knowledge that you can win a Republican primary with open racism and that if you do so, the rest of the party will do fuck-all to stop you. I don't see how you walk back after that.
I think the Republican party could collapse, but on balance I'd say probably not, for the reasons Tigre mentioned. However, what is different this time is how much the current configuration of groups is alienated from each other. The establishment and the base are basically two tribes of monkeys flinging poop at each other right now.
What's Paul Ryan going to do next year, even if they do hang on to the House? He'll be seen as the guy who threw Trump under the bus, and blamed for President Hillary. There is no way he can hang on to the Speakership under those conditions, unless he cuts a deal with Pelosi. So, he either cuts the deal, and in doing so basically draws a line through the middle of the Republican Caucus between the Death Eaters and the mere Fire Eaters. And those would be the battle lines of the Republican Civil War. The other option is that Paul Ryan is out of a job, I can't imagine who is going to crawl out from under a rock to take his place.
Its possible the best option for the Republicans, in terms of restoring party cohesion right now, is to lose the House. This is because not actually having any responsibility to govern will smooth out a lot of the base causes of intra-party conflict.
Their best option is inhaling paint fumes, but whenever I explain it nicely, they get all offended.
8 made me wonder what Jon McNaughton has been up to recently.
I wonder if there is a market for cheeseball polemic art from a left wing perspective? I like to paint. If I practiced more I could be roughly as talented with a brush as McNaughton is.
Alas, liberal taste is probably too sophisticated for that shit.
Don't be the McNaughton of the left; be the this guy of the left.
I can't get over how offensive this one is.
What's Paul Ryan going to do next year, even if they do hang on to the House? He'll be seen as the guy who threw Trump under the bus, and blamed for President Hillary. There is no way he can hang on to the Speakership under those conditions, unless he cuts a deal with Pelosi. So, he either cuts the deal, and in doing so basically draws a line through the middle of the Republican Caucus between the Death Eaters and the mere Fire Eaters. And those would be the battle lines of the Republican Civil War. The other option is that Paul Ryan is out of a job, I can't imagine who is going to crawl out from under a rock to take his place.
It's certainly true that the party is contentious and that Ryan could lose his job. But I'll bet it doesn't go down like this. Instead, the blame for Trump's loss immediately shifts to Trump and Trump being a one-off freak loser. The more established rift between the Tea Party/non-Tea Party folks will continue, but I don't think Ryan will be hurt significantly for not being a full-throated Trump supporter when Trump goes down.
I think I want a print of "George Washington: Zombie Killer."
33: That's possible, but it requires millions of people who voted for Trump in the primaries to either stay home or decide that Ted Cruz was right.
Or, if they're still American enough to care who killed JFK, Marco Rubio.
Instead, the blame for Trump's loss immediately shifts to Trump and Trump being a one-off freak loser.
Except the ones who care the most about blaming other people for their problems are the most hardcore Trump supporters. Sure, people with any sense will blame Trump. But there is also going to be some serious stabbed-in-the-back mythology coming out of the other camp. And Trump's new, post-FOX media empire will be pushing that narrative, bigly.
Their best option is inhaling paint fumes
No, that's how the Republicans got into this mess. More huffing is not the answer.
Trump's new, post-FOX media empire
This is another thing that I'd bet, somewhat heavily, doesn't happen. Neither the economics nor the audience is there. He might run a website and I guess Breitbart the website will likely continue but that's it.
Stupid tags. Second sentence was me.
But there is also going to be some serious stabbed-in-the-back mythology coming out of the other camp.
This, but this time it'll be the cucked-in-the-back myth.
Could you all please amp up the bullshit quotient a bit? Twitter's down and I need my fix.
That guy Barro is one of the most smug elitists around. I agree with you Heevie.
This is another thing that I'd bet, somewhat heavily, doesn't happen. Neither the economics nor the audience is there.
The economics is totally there. There are dumb-shits to be fleeced! Trump will be all over that.
On a slightly different topic, I've been wondering if Trump is going to take a tax write-off for the damage he's done to his brand.
I keep misreading the headline and wondering, why does heebie have a problem with centaurs?
IRV is moving forward very slowly in California. There was a bill to allow general-law cities, not just charter cities, to use it, and it passed with decent majorities, but Jerry Brown vetoed it simply because he doesn't like IRV.
And it's not really winning converts here where it exists municipally either - anecdotally people blame it for everything because they don't understand it, even when it comes down to the quality of the candidates on offer.
I haven't even bothered to look up what "IRV" stands for yet.
Sometimes I feel like I should do more (anything) to help in this election, but then I remember not making things worse counts as helping.
45: It's on my mind partially because of you mentioning the (IIRC) 2010 Oakland mayoral election elsewhere.
Instant Runoff Voting, the attempt to market ranked-choice voting to Americans under what I guess they thought was a sexier-sounding name.
I like it because it allows for Greens and the like to support Democrats as second choices, coming closer to what PR would achieve while continuing to elect individuals rather than parties as Americans would seem to prefer. And it reduces the need for fundraising, with just one election date. In practice, in Oakland, it's made elections more congenial because savvy candidates talk about which other candidates they resemble and recommend second-choice votes for. But people still blame it for Jean fucking Quan...
Assuming they don't have a conscience, there is no upside for them to try to restrain the white nationalists.
Indeed, the Trump campaign has made really clear that 90+% of GOP elected officials are willing to be openly complicit in a white nationalism that cuts their WH chances in half* as long as they, themselves, get to stay in office.
IOW, the constraint on kowtowing to white nationalism is ostensibly the Presidency, but we've now learned that the revealed preference of actual party leaders is kowtowing over presidential power.
*supposedly the fundamentals say this was a GOP year for the presidency; certainly it was a better shot than they had the previous 2 elections. Trump is the white nationalists' dream candidate, and he's going to get crushed. A slightly more disciplined version of Trump would still lose. And a much more disciplined version is simply Cruz or whoever--not really a candidate of white nationalism. IOW, conditions will have to favor Republicans significantly for them to win with a white nationalist candidate. The more the party ties itself to white nationalists, the harder it will be for a non-WN to win the nomination.
Oh, Twitter is down. I wondered if my workplace had caught on and blocked it.
I think the real question is "will white women ever vote for a Republican again." The question isn't so much about what Paul Ryan or the party bosses do. It's about whether voters will come back after Trump fucks off and dies, like everyone is asking him to.
Twitter is down, so I can't be unproductive.
Github is down, so I can't be productive.
This DDoS is a hell of a quandary for me.
49: Oh, you saw my similar plaint before.
Democrats aren't going to win the House.
Yeah, 53 is a good question. Especially because, per previous trends, HRC's favorability should rise (somewhat) once she's in office. I don't expect it to be as high as when she was SoS or a Senator from post-9/11 NY, but there will be a bounce back, and a lot of the people who are incoherently moaning that they're "afraid" of her will wake up one day to see that A. she's basically fine and not at all frightening, and B. the GOP is still the party of Trump and Breitbart and Duke.
If Clinton wins married white women, that changes the political landscape seismically. Especially since we know that electing women to high office leads to more women in office: imagine a world in 2024 where Dem candidates up and down the ballot look like the Obama coalition, but with a lot more women, everyone under the age of 40 has basically never voted for a Republican, and white women have been 60/40 for Dems for 8 years as well.
That's the best case, of course. Worst case is, they finally find the gun Hillary used to kill Vince Foster in October 2020.
57: Vox (I think) says that a 6 point Clinton win puts 50 seats into play; Dems win 2/3 of those, and they get the House.
Even if they don't, Ryan's lead could be in the single digits, at which point that mess of a caucus really becomes unmanageable.
Democrats could win the House. I'm hoping the Republican GOTV effort is enough of a shitshow to push it over the edge.
59.2 seems like a safe bet. It's part of what I was talking about in 20.
OTish but I commissioned a very dainty rose-gold nameplate necklace reading Nasty Woman, should arrive next week, you all can borrow it.
"will white women ever vote for a Republican again"
Yes. Next question?
Should I try to get an MRI of my ankle?
Because I'm not a fan of learning about myself in any way.
I wonder if we get, not enough of a split that the GOP disintegrates, but enough that the non-Trump caucus starts voting with Democrats in the House on a lot of issues, like the Southern Democrats in the generation post-FDR. There's actually precedent of Paul Ryan doing bipartisan deals - not great stuff, but not destructive either.
I have no idea what, specifically, people are even talking about in re a Republican party collapse. There was a guy who hijacked the primary system who was a horrible general election candidate.
For the record, Trump didn't hijack the party. Absent Trump, the primary looked exactly like the primary in 2012 - a whole parade of candidates that were more loathed than liked. Remember how long it took everyone to quasi-coalesce around Romney? The Republican party had no viable candidate that could both win the base and then challenge Clinton.
I'm not saying that Rubio or Jeb couldn't be viable in the future. I'm just saying that in both 2012 and 2016, we currently have a Republican party in tatters, and Trump was able to sort of gallup in because of the existing mess.
Cambridge, MA has or used to have* IRV (they call it Preferential Voting there) for local races such as city council. My main memory of it is that it always took them days to figure out who won**.
* Looked it up, they have both Preferential Voting AND Proportional Representation. They say "any group of voters representing more than 10% of the population will be guaranteed a seat." Not sure how that works.
** Now it's computerized. Where's the fun in that?
Stupid, unpredictable radioactive decay.
A friend of mine made the mash up of nasty Hillary on Janet Jackson's Control album cover that's going around. He's gotten a zillion requests for t-shirts and tried to set up a store on Zazzle but they won't let him sell them, which seems unsurprising. Is this a cut-and-dried IPR violation or is there something arguable and they're just being cautious?
This is an academic question on my part. My friend's not at all trying to get into a fight about it -- he was just doing it because so many people asked him to.
Isn't that how they do it in Germany? They elect people individually but then add from party lists as necessary to make the representation proportional?
On the main thread, I think there's a lot of pearl-clutching going around about the fact that a party nominated someone too extreme to be electable. That has happened multiple times in living memory; people think and adjust.
71: Feel free to elaborate on the complications.
T-shirt of Hillary over Jackson's likeness, or what? If I was defending the t-shirt I could probably come up with a bunch of reasons why it was fine but all involve semi-creative arguments you'd have to make to a court. If I was a lawsuit-averse person I would say no way. This is uncomfortably close to actual legal advice, so usual disclaimers about not being your lawyer or anyone's lawyer.
Right-wing parties are in power just about everywhere in Europe except Portugal, Sweden and (until next election) France. If North America is immune to this indefinitely because our politics don't revolve around hatred of immigrants, that would be good. But I think the Republicans will soon come up with somebody who isn't a belligerent 70-year-old white man with a 30-year history of repellent misogyny, racial prejudice and unethical business dealings.
T-shirt of Hillary over Jackson's likeness, or what?
Dude, are you living under a rock? It's everywhere! The Today Show showed it! Angela Bassett and RuPaul retweeted it! (Not that I would have known it existed if I hadn't seen it in his FB feed.)
http://www.imgrum.net/media/1364980416049895727_1702006212
I think that's actually my wife's current Facebook image, so yeah. I think it's probably not a violation but again for reasons that you'd actually have to explain to a court.
64: Seriously, Moby, there are so many better ways to be like me. Want me to see if they'll let me have extra copies of my images to send to you?
I'd just like to not need naproxen every morning.
Ooh, that reminds me I can take another Advil now! Very gentle high five!
They say "any group of voters representing more than 10% of the population will be guaranteed a seat."
10% across any dimension? Like, the 10% of people who think Aquaman is better than Superman? Because I don't think they should get their own seat. Those people are idiots.
He who controls the fish controls ... fish.
Because I'm not TV dictator, I learned there's now young, black Aquaman.
I can't get MRIs and don't want to do a CT in a non-emergency so we are left guessing about what is my back even and I've had to do way more stupid treatment assays than I would have if diagnosis were more precise, so I would enjoy the luxury. And it's your ankle so it's not like there's much risk of false positives for real bad stuff.
In other superhero news: its shit like this that gives feminists a bad name.
Aquanet is a woman whose bangs are firm enough to fight crime.
77
I immediately thought "Andrew Jackson," with the idea being Hillary replacing him for Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners.
86
I've been trying to figure out what "any group of voters" means too. The Cambridge website doesn't exactly front the definition. I could easily imagine 10% of Cambridge voters are (e.g.) vegan software coders, or Portuguese immigrants, or GMOs for that matter, but the question is "how do they know?"
86: It's the Legislature of Babel. All citizens must have their own representative who represents them in all respects.
Cambridge: There are 9 city council seats. If you can get 1/10th of the voters, plus one, to vote for a candidate in the #1 slot, you can get them in. This theoretically allows for your vegan software developers to have a vegan software rep on the CC if they care enough.
In practice it's still all about name recognition. I've voted in at least one Cambridge city council election where all nine incumbents won, despite being in a field of 20 candidates. I would have thought that the bottom two or three would rotate out more reliably, but no. Of the 20k votes cast, usually only one or two candidates break the 10% barrier, so the #2, #3, etc. vote positions turn out to matter.
In 2003 a MIT person I knew ran for City Council, and got 1200 #1 votes, not enough, but enough to frighten the establishment a bit. Instead he went off and founded ActBlue.
I've voted in at least one Cambridge city council election where all nine incumbents won, despite being in a field of 20 candidates. I would have thought that the bottom two or three would rotate out more reliably, but no.
That... seems like about what I would expect, actually. Incumbents are hard to defeat in any system that lets them run.
54 The DDOS seems to be continuing. I'm having trouble connecting with a lot of sites.
92: Wait, what? The choice of Wonder Woman seems completely insane, for all of the reasons set out in the article. I'm totally unsurprised by the fury it's causing, including within the UN. It actually makes me quite angry when I think about it.
100 Have we finally reached peak Superhero?
69 etc. Additional Member System, used in German Federal elections and, I believe, Scotland.
97
Thanks, that actually makes sense.
Wonder Woman is the Sandra Day O'Conner of the Justice League, and has been busting the super hero glass ceiling for 70 years. Whats insane is that the angry birds got a shot at this before she did.
Unsurprising. Finns are much more UN-friendly.
I'm not completely clear on the appeal of 3d parties in a system like ours. So great, you don't have to be part of a broad coalition that includes people you don't like for election purposes. (For a great many of the misanthropes I see on this, the problem would continue). But you still have to be part of. a broad coalition of people you don't like for purposes of governing. Is the LibDem party in the UK really something other than. a vanity project?
Obviously, in places where a lesser outfit can become the Second Party, it's a real thing. . But in most of the US it's vanity at least partly funded by the Other Side.
I think the gain would be not so much the 3rd party as the 4th-nth parties where nutjobs could segregate themselves in splendid purity and do little damage.
The LibDems weren't always a third party; for hundreds of years, they were in the top two. The structure of the Westminster system makes having an absolute majority more important, and allows for the possibility of coalition forming where the smaller partner might get a few bones thrown their way. If they were subsumed into one of the major parties, their views might not be respected at all. There are places that might vote for the LibDems but wouldn't vote for a slightly more moderate Labour (or take your pick with other permutations).
Also consider the regional nationalist parties like the SNP and Plaid Cymru: although they have broad sets of policies, they each have one overriding issue that is only of local interest; that makes separate parties make more sense, although they might have natural coalition partners. That holds even more so for the various Northern Irish parties from both communities.
In the US, no, it doesn't make much sense. Separating the executive from the legislature allows for more clashing between the two; our parties are also less disciplined than the British (although more so than they used to be) so a majority (or supermajority in the Senate) isn't sufficient to enact any policies you'd like. We're just very different from the British. And just about everywhere else.
I don't generally disagree with 108 (or 107) but I think the point that being a separate party gives more leverage than being part of a party coalition is just completely wrong. The Freedom Caucus now, and the Blue Dogs of yore, have/had much greater leverage within their coalitions that either would as separate parties.
Ryan would love to be free to substitute Blue Dog for freedom Caucus votes on some sort of grand bargain, if he could do it without 'treason' to his party which would make the next primary challenge bite a bit harder.
Where a separate party makes a difference is in patronage: the Genscher foreign ministry was surely friendlier to young Liberals than a CDU ministry would have been. No significant difference in policy, though.
IMO, people who bring money and votes to the coalition aren't being ignored, except to the extent that what they want is politically impossible. R.g., it doesn't matter how hard religious conservatives work to elect Republicans, they're still not going to get a constitutional amendment overturning Roe. They will get lots of restrictions around the edges of Roe, and they only call this being ignored because they refuse to acknowledge the unpopularity of their base position.
109.1 is my thinking. My speculation is that the nastiest and stupidest politicians would rather be top dogs in their own (ineffectual) parties than (more effectual) members of coalitions. Which would leave the saner people in the old coalition parties with workable governing majorities. I say all this in blithe ignorance of the actual workings of non-FPTP systems.
I'm probably extrapolating from bad data: the FPTP Westminster nations I know the best are the ones that have the longest history of powerful third parties, the UK and Canada. Arguably India too, although they sort of have built-in coalitions between parties.
I can see 110, that this is sometimes due to jerks wanting to be big fish in small ponds, but that can't explain the continual existence of the LibDems or the NDP in Canada. I think part of it has to do with a tradition of expecting strong party discipline, and splitting or remaining separate when that isn't realistically possible.
What about cases where the nation is almost split between the two major parties? Maybe that's not generally the case, but it seems to be common right now in a number of nations. If they could get elected in the first place, that might be a meaningful edge case where extremist defectors could extract real power out of a coalition.
I think my Fox-news watching parents have actually turned against Trump. We didn't discuss politics but in discussing my situation at work on Skype earlier my dad said snidely "and whatever you do don't whine, no one likes a guy who whines" at which point my mom started laughing as did I as I added "I don't want to go there but I know what you mean" and we all cracked up some more. And we all knew what the not very subtext was.
The elephant in the room as it were.
Their toes are notoriously short.
I'm in line for the Clinton/Kaine rally in my neighborhood. Figure I have a good chance of getting in given its raining and cold.
The second movement of Ben Johnston's Suite for Microtonal Piano, "Blues", is really wonderful.
Stretches from shady and Pittock to forward, then east on forward. I can't see but it might go to the corner with tilbury.
Thanks. I'm not going but somebody else is supposed to be on her way.
I think Hillary has her own people to tell her how long the lines are, Moby.
Trump's top priority should he win: suing his accusers.
There's a certain school of masculinity that values self-confidence over all else. It really lends itself to digging yourself as deeply as possible into the ground.
Yep. Trump is like the physical embodiment of that school of masculinity.
113: While it's obvious to my students that I will be voting straight-ticket D in this election, I still try to resist making partisan comments in the classroom. That said, I've been throwing in "jokes" about having the best words, tremendous words, and they've been going over well.
Most of my students this semester are freshman engineering majors, and will be voting in their first election. Since mine could well be the only college course they take with any kind of government/civics/social studies orientation, and because their high schools apparently neglected to explain the ins and outs of how to actually vote, I've spent some time over the last couple of months reminding them to register, and explaining the significance of voting based on their college or home addresses,* how to request an absentee ballot, the importance of voting in local races,** how to compile a personalized sample ballot, and various hacks for deciding how to vote without devoting hours to research. This has very little to do with the actual course topic, but my inner Girl Scout compels me to shepherd them into US civic life.
*If McGinty wins in PA by 6 or 7 votes, you're welcome.
**"No, really, county commissioners matter, you guys! And sheriffs! And don't get me started on school board members or we'll never get to today's reading..."
Apparently more people in my neighborhood want to see Clinton than can fit in the room.
Uniting this thread with the previous, the only way we can gmake Carrigan quit it when he is being obnoxious is to explain to him how he is acting like Donald Trump, with examples. (Radegund is still little enough to be manipulated by parental disapproval alone.)
She's really charismatic in person. Kaine, too.
I have a bit of a cold so in the interest of not adversely effecting the election I stayed away from the rope line.
Apparently, if you didn't get in line in time, you didn't get to even see Clinton.
125.2 is indeed excellent. Way to go, JRobot!
My nicest interaction while out canvassing today was with a couple of excited 18-year-olds. They were adorably thrilled to have a visit from a canvasser making sure they knew where to vote. I did all I could to provide positive reinforcement for their very first election as voters.
131.2: My mom has been registering voters, and she says her specialties have been 18-year-olds and ex-cons (who I think are eligible to have their voting rights restored after a certain number of years but don't always know that).
In NM, that is. The rules for disenfranchisement/reinstatement are different in every state.
All power to Robot! All power to teo's mom!
135: Indeed. Thanks, Witt! As someone who's shamefully too lazy and asinine to volunteer, I appreciate that you and people like you do such good work to further the democratic process.
And me. Who didn't go to the bar so my wife could phone bank.
You can't just demand people give you all power, Moby. That's what Trump does.
I mean, I would consider giving Moby all power. He has statistical reasoning skills and a well-developed sense of the absurd.
Oh yes, absolutely. Ask nicely, and maybe buy me some chicken wings.
I, for one, welcome our new moby overlord. but I think he and tigre might need to fight?
I'm too sleepy. Stupid Eastern Time. Goodnight.
133: We used to let prisoners vote. I think Maine still does. Sigh. We can blame Romney for that change.
There are a few states that let prisoners vote, I think mostly in
New England. There was a good article about this going around a little while ago.
And me. Who didn't go to the bar so my wife could phone bank.
They also serve who sit and make puns.
Moby of all people knows the virtues of subtlety.
I love the openness of the small, interdisciplinary seminar for honors freshmen that I teach. On Thursday I spent five minutes explaining how they could find out about candidates' endorsements; six or seven minutes predicting that we will continue to see an upsurge in feminist, LGBTQ, indigenous, Black and other POC, and environmental activism; and then a few more about how the fights *within* activists groups are the absolute worst because the stakes seem so high, but no one really knows what they're doing, or if their efforts will make a difference. [I successfully resisted showing the obvious Life of Brian clip, but only because it would have been a poor segue to discussing MLK Jr.]
Then, since I had basically called an audible with my lesson plans anyhow, I decided that I wanted the students to really engage with King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail". We passed it around, each reading a paragraph or two, and made it to the end just as class ended. I'm sure at least one or two of them were rolling their eyes at the exercise, but I think (?) they got something out of the exercise as well.
78: The right wing in Europe isn't (or doesn't seem to be) entangled with a bunch of other kinds of mediocrity and nuttiness the way right winger-dom in North America is. It's just about hating Muslims. The right wing in North America has a way more complicated task ahead of it -- not least in that it's the Democrats who now have the "silent majority" and supremacist America has zero things to say that appeal to that coalition -- and it also has a deep, deep bench of people just as ignorant and ill-disciplined as Trump.
It's possible that someone will come along who can effectively turn the violent supremacists into an organized militia, though.
(The right wing in America, I should have said. Elsewhere in North America, the righties in Canada -- for instance -- could still totally use "hate the Muslims" as a solid single-point election strategy.)
The right-wing in Canada does a degree (ha) of global warming denying, no? Not to take away from the point that USA is #1 at rabid right wing extremism.
I'd imagine that in Canada "global warming denial" is pretty much cover for "would like warmer weather please".
155: Oh, Canada has its deniers, but if someone -- let's call him "Kevin O'Leary" -- wanted to do a Trump here, he wouldn't have to spend much time audibly pandering to them. Just go right in with the "Syrians bad, they get too much free stuff" and ride it all the way home.
I'm not sure if Ezra qualifies as a centrist, but he might. I found this fascinating: http://washingtonbabylon.com/release-the-transcripts-journalistclinton-surrogate-ezra-klein-nets-30750-for-a-single-speech/
Speaking of centrists, NMM to Tom Hayden, you hippies.
The right wing in Europe isn't (or doesn't seem to be) entangled with a bunch of other kinds of mediocrity and nuttiness the way right winger-dom in North America is.
UKIP, as I understand it , accepts that climate change is happening but denies any human involvement. They want to repeal the Climate Change Act which commits the government to its Kyoto targets.
Yeah, UKIP has plenty of barmy non-Muslim-hating views, especially when you look at individual MPs/MEPs/candidates, rather than the manifesto. All sorts of stuff around misogyny, capital punishment, guns and so on. I'm much less familiar with them, but I'd be very surprised if you couldn't find the same in the FN, the AFD, the PVV and the FPO.
I remember a stat from someone that the single best predictor of a Leave vote was support for capital punishment. Which makes a kind of sense. If we can't kill people, let's disembowel the economy.
(I'd say "Of we can't kill black people let's at least throw them out" but to my knowledge the death penalty when it applied in this country was not racially skewed the way it is in the USA to that dynamic doesn't apply)
And the serious answer is almost certainly that the death penalty is the most illiberal and communitarian position available: it asserts that the state has a greater right to your life than you do. So it would make sense as a predictor of hostility to rootless cosmopolitan free trade-ism
Speaking of the death penalty, Nebraska's death penalty vote is coming up and I can't find any good polling. I suspect the death penalty will be restored but then I was completely taken by surprise that it was ever repealed.
We're unlikely to repeal the death penalty even in CA this year, going by polling.
162.2. The BME population of Britain in 1965 was trivially small compared to today, and even smaller compared to that of the United States, so I don't think you can make comparisons like that.
I liked this, but then again I would. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/?utm_source=atltw
166 is good. I'd love to read something more in depth on the cultural and political rift that grew with unions and economic populists on one side, and the rising neoliberals on the other, and how that let free market ideologues and their aspiring plutocratic sponsers to dominate the party. Ideally from an unbiased, academic perspective, because I'm already unable to talk about this stuff without sounding like someone's drunk uncle at Thanksgiving.
166 is good. I'd love to read something more in depth on the cultural and political rift that grew with unions and economic populists on one side, and the rising neoliberals on the other, and how that let free market ideologues and their aspiring plutocratic sponsers to dominate the party. Ideally from an unbiased, academic perspective, because I'm already unable to talk about this stuff without sounding like someone's drunk uncle at Thanksgiving.