Election 2016

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Oct 10, 2016 8:29 am

-Username17

erik · Post by **erik** » Mon Oct 10, 2016 11:07 am

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Tue Oct 11, 2016 1:10 am

FrankTrollman wrote:The thing that's crazy about the whole thing is that Donald Trump said two other things that in any sane world would immediately disqualify you from the presidency that day. He said that black men who had been exonerated by DNA evidence should still be rotting in jail for a crime they factually did not commit because they were coerced into signing a confession by police. Also he advanced a conspiracy theory that Mexican immigrants were going to steal the election somehow with the help of Obama's control of the border agents.

Those two were awful and racist and insane. And if our society weren't hideously tolerant of evil racist insanity, those would have ended Trump's campaign then and there. But as is, you might not have even heard of them. Because Republicans are simply allowed to say awful racist things.

I'm actually not sure how Trump talking about how being a big TV star lets him get away with sexual assault is any worse or different than the things he already said and did. Was it really the profanity that put that over the top? If so, that's fucking pathetic. Still, as long as the Trumpocalypse is avoided, I'll take what I can get.

-Username17

It may just be the sheer volume of it. It seems like every day Trump says something that's racist, sexist, some other form of offensive or just plain stupid. People may have just become desensitized to it.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Oct 11, 2016 6:23 am

http://pressthink.org/2016/09/asymmetry ... eam-press/

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Oct 11, 2016 12:12 pm

So, on Trump threatening to jail Clinton and all that... let's pretend she committed a crime for a moment. Exactly what powers does the President have in that regard, as to prosecuting people? I was under the impression that this didn't fall under the power of the President, that other people took care of those matters. I don't wish to imply that he actually knows this.

And on him basically being held afloat by Putin's money, and it becoming increasingly apparent that Wikileaks is basically a Russian-backed thing now - one that has released fake and doctored information in an effort to influence the election and get Trump in power, and him being really quick to get hold of this poor quality information... how is Putin likely to react when his investment doesn't pay off? Are we looking at him being even more of a raging asshole who seeks to do "whatever pisses America off, be it good or bad on this particular day" in local and international affairs? More cases of throwing Russia's weight around into neighbours in order to (something something consolidate power something)?

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Tue Oct 11, 2016 12:44 pm

I quite like that article.

The press is stuck catching him in lies and racist comments and so on, but that's exactly what he wants them to do. To the press, a lie and a racist comment is a huge thing that exposes the real candidate separate from what they have tried so hard to present.

But Trump just wants to be on the news. His name, in the headlines, right now, the end.

You can't expose the real thoughts of a man whose real thoughts are only to be constantly exposed. Sure he's a compulsive liar, a racist, and so on, he's not making that up to get attention, but he's not trying to hide it either. He loves that it gets him attention for being himself. In the headlines.

A normal candidate would be destroyed by a casual racist remark because he'd have spent twenty years beforehand crafting an image as a modern inclusive and well meaning gentleman. Trump just wants you to say his name again. I may have to put him on ignore.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Oct 11, 2016 12:56 pm

Putin already got his money's worth. He isn't dealing with a close election between Hillary Clinton and either Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Jeb Bush has gone on bizarre rants about how Chiang Kai Shek was a "mystical warrior" for conservative ideology that he talked to as his Jedi force ghost mentor. Marco Rubio wants to vastly increase the size of the fleet and conquer Cuba. These are guys for whom the Cold War was the good old days and they want to fight and win those same battles. And yes, that very much means acting belligerent towards Russia.

So if it was Hillary v Jeb! or Hillary v Rubiobot, we'd be seeing debate questions like "How hard do you want to punish Russia for [fill in pretext]?" Or "How many weapons should we be shipping to the Ukrainian junta government to fight a proxy war with Russia with?" With the Republican taking the role of the hawk and the Democrat taking the role of the dove. Instead... we don't see that. We see the Republican taking the side that we need to give Russia a completely free hand in Syria and the Democrat taking the side that we need to apply increasing pressure to reach an end to the humanitarian crisis.

Yes, Hillary is most likely to become president either way. Her team is much more sophisticated and her natural coalition much larger than that of team Republican. And doing this shit really does piss Hillary right the fuck off. She is personally way more pissed off at Putin than I would have thought possible coming in to this cluster fuck of an election. But the Overton Window of acceptable policy is way more dovish towards Putin than you could possibly have imagined 30 years ago. You have the fucking hard right openly demanding for us to abandon our NATO commitments and give Russia a free hand to annex Latvia. What the actual fuck?

All in all, I think that Russia probably comes out ahead even without the tail risk that Rubiobot might have won with some jank ass 1960s foreign policy pledge to "get tough" with Russia and deploy nukes in Eastern Europe or some crazy thing. Hillary Clinton is enough of a professional and not-crazy person that pissing her off personally but leaving the traditional hawkish party divided over whether Putin is an ubermensch we should emulate means that the US going to war (or proxy war) with Russia is substantially less likely.

Remember: John McCain offered to back Georgia up on their insane and ill fated attempt to use military force to de-Russofy South Osetia. And it's historical fact that Obama was elected instead and those promises of aid were never made good. But he was supposed to be one of the sane Republicans. From the standpoint of minimizing the risk that Moscow turns into a glowing crater, having the Republican Party simply fall apart in acrimony is definitely not the worst possible outcome that Putin could imagine.

But honestly I think Donald Trump deserves Hero of the Russian Federation even if he loses badly.

-Username17

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Oct 11, 2016 2:44 pm

Koumei wrote:So, on Trump threatening to jail Clinton and all that... let's pretend she committed a crime for a moment. Exactly what powers does the President have in that regard, as to prosecuting people? I was under the impression that this didn't fall under the power of the President, that other people took care of those matters. I don't wish to imply that he actually knows this.

The President has the power to pick anyone they want as AG, and fire the AG at any time. Now, as you can imagine, that gives them pretty much carte blanche to suggest to the AG anything and be pretty sure it will happen.

However, conventionally the President doesn't involve themselves in such matters. Under Clinton they passed a separate law to get a special prosecutor, and did, and the judges picked didn't listen to Clinton on who to pick, and the judges picked instead of the AG because they couldn't be fired by Clinton, and the special prosecutor didn't listen to Clinton.

Under Nixon, when Nixon tried to interfere in his own investigation (and did, he got the special prosecutor investigating him fired), the AG resigned rather than fire the special prosecutor. Then the Deputy AG did. The then acting AG thought about it, but instead fired the Special Prosecutor. (Later another special prosecutor was appointed by a different AG.)

Under Obama, people were upset by Obama endorsing Clinton because the investigation was not finished, and this could be seen as a signal to the AG. But then even that didn't matter, because then the AG removed herself from her normal role to be extra sensitive to Republican babies.

But technically that's all convention, it's not actual law (well, the special prosecutor maybe can't be fired by the President, that might be law) so when Trump says "I will instruct the AG to appoint a special prosecutor" and "you will be in jail" it's not an idle threat.

If he could get elected President, he could appoint Chris "Speech That Was Literally A Sham Trial of Hillary Clinton" Christie as his AG, and then follow that up with instructing him to appoint Larry Klayman as special prosecutor. To give you a brief idea who that is, he's a crazy who sued Hillary Clinton for Benghazi, but alleged that it was part of her deliberate plot to murder the people at the embassy. He's so crazy that Fox News made fun of him on air for being too crazy on Benghazi.

And if the AG refuses to appoint him as special prosecutor, or if the special prosecutor refuses to find Clinton guilty enough to go to trial, then goddam it Trump can keep firing people until he gets there.

Now truthfully, eventually it would get to a judge and a jury, but if you string it out, and try Clinton separately for each made up scandal of the last 30 years, you could absolutely keep her in trial for the rest of her life.

SlyJohnny · Post by **SlyJohnny** » Tue Oct 11, 2016 7:06 pm

Koumei wrote:And on him basically being held afloat by Putin's money, and it becoming increasingly apparent that Wikileaks is basically a Russian-backed thing now - one that has released fake and doctored information in an effort to influence the election and get Trump in power

Explain this remark? I'm not a fan of Assange, and they contextualise stuff poorly and with a huge narrative bias, but what fake information have they released?

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Tue Oct 11, 2016 7:16 pm

SlyJohnny wrote:and they contextualise stuff poorly

This is the understatement of a lifetime.

Assange has taken to attaching blatantly false taglines to email articles in the hopes that you will read the tagline and then get bored of the email itself before you realize he's bullshitted you. It's disgusting, and this point it's impossible to call WikiLeaks anything more than a propaganda mill in the vein of Fox News.

Right now, WikiLeaks is doing this batch release of thousands of emails at a time thing, and some of Clinton's campaign staff have suggested that some of the documents may have been modified before being released, and it's basically impossible to prove either way. But it is important to remember that Assange's "sources" for this are without doubt tied the Russian government, that their goal is to elect Trump, and that Assange does not - and realistically cannot - vet the material he receives. It would be fairly trivial to use WikiLeaks to release forged or partially forged documents in an attempt to influence an election.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Tue Oct 11, 2016 8:05 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfW2TiPAKsw

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Oct 11, 2016 8:14 pm

Notice that DeNiro is basically just Trump, but not currently being racist at this moment.

He's a bullying shit talking old man who thinks that name calling is a substitute for substance.

He just happens to be making fun of someone you hate.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Oct 11, 2016 8:25 pm

Another link addressing the same topic as my last one:

http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2016/10/there- ... inton.html

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Tue Oct 11, 2016 8:26 pm

Kaelik wrote:Notice that DeNiro is basically just Trump, but not currently being racist at this moment.

He's a bullying shit talking old man who thinks that name calling is a substitute for substance.

He just happens to be making fun of someone you hate.

I really don't know. Righteous indignation is supposed to be a thing. I've seen my country suffer a coup in the last months and kept wondering at which point are we supposed to stop to calmly explaining why they aren't allowed to do that and start to get angry?

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Tue Oct 11, 2016 8:33 pm

I dunno, a lot (though certainly not all, and probably not even most) of those are just colorful descriptions of criticisms which refer to some very real underlying substance. Just listening through and grabbing some as quick as I can:

pig
con
bullshit artist
doesn't know what he's talking, doesn't do his homework, doesn't care
doesn't pay his taxes

Those are all legitimate complaints you can make about the substance of Donald Trump, and they are also ones that are completely 100% true. Pig is a fairly obvious reference to Donald Trump's sexist behavior; meaningful, true. Con and bullshit artist are the exact same thing, and are perfect descriptions of Trump's I'll-tell-you-exactly-what-I-think-you-want-to-hear-today approach to policy; meaningful, true. Trump being poorly educated and poorly researched on policy matters is well-documented - his blunders may not stick to him very well because we're grading him on such a huge curve, but they're certainly abundant; meaningful, true. The extent of his tax-dodging is well-documented, though you can certainly quibble about how meaningful that is; nonetheless, it is at least a factual claim, and a true one to boot.

There's a whole lot of fuck that guy in DeNiro's rant, but he's also referencing a decent number of reasons he's saying fuck that guy. I don't know what more you'd expect from someone ranting angrily about a despicable politician. Except for them not to do that, I guess, but fuck you, I like ranting angrily, and Donald Trump is certainly the kind of asshole who's worth it.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Oct 11, 2016 8:42 pm

nockermensch wrote:
Kaelik wrote:Notice that DeNiro is basically just Trump, but not currently being racist at this moment.

He's a bullying shit talking old man who thinks that name calling is a substitute for substance.

He just happens to be making fun of someone you hate.
I really don't know. Righteous indignation is supposed to be a thing. I've seen my country suffer a coup in the last months and kept wondering at which point are we supposed to stop to calmly explaining why they aren't allowed to do that and start to get angry?

There is a difference between being angry, and being a dumb bully. Dumb bullies get mad at both nerds and other dumb bullies and beat them up, sometimes that's a good thing and sometimes it isn't, but when it is, it's purely incidentally a good thing.

I'm mad as fuck at Trump, and the Republicans, and the media, and really, just everyone all the fucking time, but there's a difference between channeling your anger into pointing out that Trump is bad business man who might have committed tax fraud* and definitely has no idea how the tax policies actually work, and has no idea what would be good for the economy, and therefore people shouldn't elect him, versus saying "I don't like Trump, he's a mean poopy head and I want to punch him in the mouth!"

*PS it appears that what happened is that Trump took advantage of a loophole in the tax laws that has since been removed, where in 1995, if you and a bunch of other people went into an investment together, you could right off all their losses as your losses for tax reasons, so long as you were obligated to repay them that money. So he claimed all the losses for all of his investors in his Casinos in one year, because people were already talking about reforming the tax law to avoid that loophole, and then he filed for bankruptcy (on behalf of his assorted casinos and companies that owned them both during and since 1995) and never paid those people all those losses that he was supposed to pay them in order to justify his huge tax loss.

Also while he was at it, he deliberately had the companies pay off his own private debts to go more in debt, so that then the companies could file for bankruptcy and he could then reduce his ownership share in exchange for more money than it was worth, and then also pay himself as the broker of all the deals.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Oct 12, 2016 3:52 am

SlyJohnny wrote:Explain this remark? I'm not a fan of Assange, and they contextualise stuff poorly and with a huge narrative bias, but what fake information have they released?

On top of what DSMAtticus said, there's this article which raises some questions at the least.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Oct 12, 2016 7:57 am

http://www.newsweek.com/vladimir-putin- ... nik-508635

Apparently we live in a world where the Republican Nominee actually gets briefing material from Russia.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Oct 12, 2016 8:05 am

Kaelik wrote:http://www.newsweek.com/vladimir-putin- ... nik-508635

Apparently we live in a world where the Republican Nominee actually gets briefing material from Russia.

Not necessarily. In the scant hours between when Sputnik ran with the Blumenthal piece and when someone noticed that actually he was forwarding a Newsweek article from 2015 and even the out-of-context quotes they pulled didn't mean anything and spiked the story - the story got circulated around the White Nationalist dark web as a viral thingy. So when Trump started rambling about the story, it had already been pulled from Russian propaganda outlets but was still being copypastaed on white supremacist boards.

So it's possible that Trump gets his news from Stormfront. Or it's possible that he gets briefed by Russian propaganda teams. I think those are the only two options though.

-Username17

Mechalich · Post by **Mechalich** » Wed Oct 12, 2016 9:23 am

FrankTrollman wrote: So it's possible that Trump gets his news from Stormfront. Or it's possible that he gets briefed by Russian propaganda teams. I think those are the only two options though.

I'm fairly certain it was previously established (in some other, lesser, Trump controversy, the one with the Star of David and Hillary and the big pile of cash in a picture if I recall) that Trump follows various white supremacist figures on Twitter and occasionally re-tweets their stuff (his son also does this, and since Trump presumably follows his offspring, this is another possible source. so I'd learn towards the Stormfront explanation.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Wed Oct 12, 2016 10:27 pm

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/10/11/t ... -the-fall/

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Wed Oct 12, 2016 11:40 pm

Also, a reminder that Trumpkins are terrible: http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/ ... story.html

Yes, they created a hashtag about repealing the amendment that allows women to vote.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Wed Oct 12, 2016 11:55 pm

I get reminders like this every day about how low the bar is. It keeps me nice and angry with the some of the "definitely-not-alt-right" people that make posts on the election.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Thu Oct 13, 2016 10:48 am

Ancient History wrote:
that guy wrote:I feel sorry for many of my individual friends who are Republicans and/or conservatives

Fuck that guy.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu Oct 13, 2016 11:15 am

In ongoing Trump news, while lots of women are coming forward with stories about how he sexually assaulted them (or hey, people who already said that a year ago and were ignored are now being listened to)\

I'm going to give a brief run down on Trump pedophilia news:

1) On Howard Stern, they talked about how young Trump would go, and Stern suggested 24, and Trump gave a Trumpian overlong repetitive answer that featured the phrases "Half that" and "12 year old" and "12 is my limit." All in a joking tone of course... because we have no reason to expect that he would actually do anything to girls that age.

2) Oh wait, I lied. Trump did his classic boasted about "I walk back into the Miss America Dressing rooms while they are changing and ogle the girls" thing in Miss Teen America, which features girls from 14-19.

3) One of the women who came forward is alleging that when she was 13 Donald Trump raped her and her 12 year old friend. Or maybe he just sexually assaulted the friend and raped her. I can't recall, and honestly, I don't want to look into the details because this is already overloading my tolerance levels.