Donald Trump and US politics

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

There is no single reform to US politics as important as IRV. Get involved in trying to promote it. The predictable result of first-past-the-post is steadily increasing hyper-partisan extremism, and if we don't remove the cause then we deserve the effect.

I would also like to add: ban line voting and do not show party affiliation, and all candidates should face the same barriers to appear on the ballot.

You should have to vote for each individual, by name and platform, not party. You should not be allowed to vote for a temporary monopoly of one party without knowing its individual candidates agendas. If you do not recognize any of the names for a given position, you should not be voting for it.

My father ran for state senate as a libertarian, and never made it onto the ballot. Dems and Reps needed only 500 signatures from their constituents; as a third party candidate my father required 2400. The Republican Party then contested my fathers signatures in court until after the election. This very same story can be told ad nauseam about prospective third party candidates. Edit: those numbers may be off, but the disparity is something similar. It took (literally) hundreds more man-hours to collect the requisite signatures than the primary party candidates combined.

The entire voting process is a sham. Tis why I scoff when one party blames the other for voter suppression—there was no democracy to suppress in the first place, just a dog and pony show.

Whataboutism is an argumentative technique that Trump has made popular. It implies that all actions, regardless of context, share a moral equivalency. And since nobody is perfect, all criticism is hypocritical and everybody should do what they want.

This is Trump's big bid: you can never criticize me because other people are bad too. Republicans investigated Benghazi for years and found nothing. To talk about now is just an effort to distract. Yet if I were to bring up Trump likes grabbing women's pussies, "fake news" or "guy talk" is the reply. Or even, "but what about Bill?"

There are no good excuses for Whataboutism. Is is a way to side step personal responsibility.

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The folks in that story are fully breitwashed and DEEPLY racist.

And the evidence that they are racist is...

Did the folks named in the story mention Breitbart? No? Did the article mention Breitbart? No? Did you just imagine Breitbart, like the bogeyperson in the closet?

They didn't make any racist comments, either. What does this all add up to? Unfounded assumptions that they must be x-cist and they must be Breitbart readers because they support something you don't.

The beauty of it all, is that this venomous unfounded vocalized hatred for Trump and anyone who supports him just increases the resolve of the people who do. Every time someone makes an unfounded accusation (Like Ben and Jerry's half-baked claims) they are unwittingly helping support Trump.

Keep up the good work!

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DalaiLama wrote:

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The folks in that story are fully breitwashed and DEEPLY racist.

And the evidence that they are racist is...

Did the folks named in the story mention Breitbart? No? Did the article mention Breitbart? No? Did you just imagine Breitbart, like the bogeyperson in the closet?

They didn't make any racist comments, either. What does this all add up to? Unfounded assumptions that they must be x-cist and they must be Breitbart readers because they support something you don't.

The beauty of it all, is that this venomous unfounded vocalized hatred for Trump and anyone who supports him just increases the resolve of the people who do. Every time someone makes an unfounded accusation (Like Ben and Jerry's half-baked claims) they are unwittingly helping support Trump.

Keep up the good work!

They made multiple racist comments in the articles. Just read it until the end.

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faerwin wrote:

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DalaiLama wrote:

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The folks in that story are fully breitwashed and DEEPLY racist.

And the evidence that they are racist is...

Did the folks named in the story mention Breitbart? No? Did the article mention Breitbart? No? Did you just imagine Breitbart, like the bogeyperson in the closet?

They didn't make any racist comments, either. What does this all add up to? Unfounded assumptions that they must be x-cist and they must be Breitbart readers because they support something you don't.

The beauty of it all, is that this venomous unfounded vocalized hatred for Trump and anyone who supports him just increases the resolve of the people who do. Every time someone makes an unfounded accusation (Like Ben and Jerry's half-baked claims) they are unwittingly helping support Trump.

Keep up the good work!

They made multiple racist comments in the articles. Just read it until the end.

The racism was implied, nearly explicit. Nonetheless, I don’t think the entire town is inherently racist, and my experience about these type of folk is that they are just misguided—their criticisms are directed at a culture which they erroneously mistake for race.

so, you think that them saying "NFL" means "N for life" because there's a lot of black players is in it and they said "anyway, the NFL was mostly them, not a big loss", it's not explicit??

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

John Oliver describes Whataboutism

Whataboutism is a very interesting concept.

It's called discrediting the witness, and is used prolifically in court cases and jury trials. When the witness has a vested interest in outcomes, the jury is almost guaranteed to be skeptical of what the witness says.

It isn't a logical fallacy because we aren't talking about hard logic being discussed, they are positions advocated either for or against, usually with little or no supporting data or logical proof. As political positions go, they are almost universally predicated on emotional appeal, and as such the mindset of the person presenting them makes a difference.

Where it does not make a difference is in cases where an indisputable fact (or formal logic) is part of the argument, but this difference pertains only to the fact or the logic. Applying it to the whole of the argument is a logical fallacy in itself.

There are many reasons people responds to claims of hypocrisy. The first is that the hypocritical person may be lacking in judgement as evidenced by them not noticing the opposition between what they say and do on one hand and what they say and do on another. It can also be that the audience believes the speaker is well aware of the hypocrisy, but chooses to ignore it. In this case, the audience question whether the speaker has two sets of standards - one for themselves (or people they trust) and one for others. As humans, we are all too aware how common this is in our daily lives, and why it makes sense - sometimes.

Example: New Player first day playing makes a claim about GGG's source code underlying PoE. A GGG developer states that claim is not true. How many of us would want to see the logic and proof before we sided with the new player or with GGG?

Ad hominem and pro hominem are two sides of the same coin. That third side, the edge of the coin, requires a lot of balancing to stand on its own. That is what science and logic try to do, balance the coin on edge and let facts and formal proofs determine which, if any way the coin changes position.

Politics is flip-a-coinism. If it lands on heads, the tailies are going to call foul and blame it on the coin flipper, and vice versa for landing on heads.

The left has currently chosen emotional appeal as the primary method of 'logical' argument. When their messengers are viewed as hypocrites, the emotional appeal backfires. Had they chosen logical, fact supported arguments as their mainstay, the so called what about ism wouldn't apply. The left chose to build a wall of hate between them and anyone in the Trump camp, and now they are complaining about the wall stopping their arguments, and defectors leaving their side of the wall.

This isn't to say that some of the same behavior doesn't exist on the right. The left, however, turned it into an art form and made it the be all and end all of their political positions.

Spitting on people and calling them names because they disagree with you, is never going to work for the left.

Here's a real world example of why 'what about ism' isn't necessarily false:
Mitch McConnell is calling for Roy Moore to step down based on accusations. McConnell's call is being mocked by saying he is a hypocrite since he is/has testified as a character witness on behalf of Menendez, who is not just accused, but being tried. Did McConnell make any calls for Menendez to step down when the accusations were made long ago? Why is his judgement different for one than the other? Is his public stance based more on dislike of Moore than the supposed facts in the case?

There aren't a lot of facts and logic put forth in McConnell's position. Proclaiming a logical fallacy, when logic hasn't been promulgated in the first place is foolish and untrue.

What's amusing is the pundit's claims that it is some sort of Russian thing, when PKB goes back much further in history at least 1605 in Don Quixote: "Dijo la sartén a la caldera, Quítate allá ojinegra"

So if we apply John Olverism - "According to Oliver, Trump also uses “whataboutism” or the practice of changing the subject to someone else’s perceived wrongdoing, which Oliver describes as an “old Soviet propaganda tool” of creating false moral equivalency."


Then we have this Russian puppet pushing propaganda in the Sermon on the Mount over 2,000 years ago:



""Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"


John Oliver is a broken rusty tool, whose only function now is that of a bludgeon.

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Schmodderhengst wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

The way we vote makes Whataboutism valid

Nope. It means changing the subject and distract without reacting to any criticism. Result: only accusations, nothing else. Hey, let´s just point at someone else....

The amount of this has risen with Trump, so his followers might want to call this behaviour normal. It is not. He is not.

Technically "with Trump" would be accurate, though it was Trump's detractors who greatly increased the tactic. Consider that the left unabashedly decided that violating Godwin's law was where they would start their criticism of him. They made no pretense of civility and elevated character assassination to a level that made Monty Python look like a documentary by comparison.

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Schmodderhengst wrote:

It is not legitimate. Our media is much harder with people who try this and demand an answer. If politicians don´t answer questions, why listen to them anyway ?

Your media was all too nice and naive (and greedy) with Trump.

According to Wikileaks, the DNC wanted Trump to win the nomination, so I would be pleasantly surprised to learn that the MSM wasn't informed of this decision, at the very least.

Ratings. Just as in the Russia story, Trump coverage brought them lots of advertising revenue. TDS is profitable for the media.

@Dalai: I actually like John Oliver (or, more accurately, his writers). Yes, they have a super-thick progressive anti-Trump bias, but they tend to use arguments that are much more fair, much less bigoted, and much funnier than the typical MSM ranting. I usually disagree with the show's positions, but it's the respectful type of disagreement, and every once in a while they raise a truly good point.

For instance, the video I linked to isn't really that different in substance from a typical Scott Adams analysis of Trump's persuasion skills, except with the partisan bias swung to the other side of the pendulum. "Look at these rhetorical techniques Trump uses to be more persuasive than previous Republicans." Naturally, the Last Week Tonight position is that Trump being persuasive is terrifying and dangerous — yawn — but they're still respecting how effective his persuasion is. That's a presentation grounded in reality, even if its head is in the clouds.

I simply wouldn't characterize LWT as fake news. I feel they've gone to reasonable lengths to avoid that in an industry where such behavior is rampant. It is left news, very decidedly left. But that's okay.