Glenn Beck University and Trump University should merge and become the largest center for Dark Arts in the entire world.

If the democrats do lose, it'll be once again thanks to the too cool to vote young left demographic and those taking their vote and going home over Bernie not being nominated.

I also think Trump is going to win, and he's going to end up backpedaling on almost all of his promises because none of them are feasible. He actually thrives on people overreacting to the things he says, but his opponents haven't figured that out yet. His poll numbers go up every time they explicitly or implicitly compare him to Hitler because people are tired of the atmosphere of hyper-political correctness that came with the Obama administration.

I wouldn't worry about it, Nominal. For every person cool enough to stand up for their principles, there are a dozen more so wishy-washy that they'll happily vote for a pro-NSA, Walmart-loving, rape-victim-shaming war monger.

IZ - I hope so! It'll be nice to see a return to journalistic accountability and a slow-down in the number of wars our government can get away with, if nothing else. Hopefully see some more "leftists" getting back into libertarian and anti-globalist causes, too - nothing wakes people up to the dangers of centralized power and rule-by-elites like having a big scary Republican in the White House.

Hillary, as a candidate, is full of problems. She's got the credibility issue, she's not very likable, and she's associated with scandals dating back to her husband's term. But if the Repubs are dumb or crazy enough to nominate Donald Trump, the Dems win it at a walk. I can't take Sanders seriously as a candidate mind you. You'll see a lot of people voting for him just to stop "President Trump" from becoming a reality. I'm not sure that the silent majority of reasonable Republican voters actually exists, but lots of R's would stay home rather than pull that lever, even if Hillary's involved.

"voting for her," sorry.

I'd like to see President Hillary Clinton. I don't like her terribly much, but then I hate the whole "would you have a beer with them?" standard for electing presidents -- that's what got us Dubya. She's a talented high-energy professional who in the Senate showed herself able to get things done. I think she could lock in place the genuine progress Obama did make.

I'd rather Trump lose the nomination. If he wins it, I hope he implodes dramatically and costs the Republicans the House and Senate -- not so much because I love the idea of Democrats running the show, as because it would force the Republicans to take the good hard look at themselves they were supposed to take after 2012.

With that said, yes, the hard left absolutely deserves some of the blame if Trump wins. Hard to be deaf to the university thought police, the Twitter mobs, the astrophysicist breaking down in tears as he contemplates the end of his career for wearing the wrong shirt. People pick up on that stuff. You can say "Oh but the right wing is so much worse!" and I won't disagree, but there's a reason so many Americans find it refreshing to hear a genuinely offensive candidate shoot his mouth off.

As much as I love and support Bernie, I predict a win for Hilary.

Trump can't beat her because he can't get swing votes and whoever wins will need those.

The general idea me and my friend decided is that Trump is currently taking extremest stances due to the fact that he wants to get through the primaries. He can't deliver what he's saying right now and he knows it. He simply wants to get to the actual election and white house, and then say "oh shit we can't build a giant wall sorry guys. Instead, I want better and more reasonable controls on illegal immigration." It is statements like these which will more likely end up being his real platform.

We hope.

That's been the trend. The more moderate Republicans have to play to the extreme right, then swerve center when they win the primary. Hopefully it works just as well for them now as it did in the last two presidential elections.

A wall would take 750 million dollars a year to maintain. That's enough money to solve most of the food problems for the poor.

But why solve actual problems?

"taking extremist stances..." maybe more like "outrageous cartoon character stances" since he may very well understand what it takes to get the most media attention in a nation that thrives on entertainment.

You crazy Americans and your mandatory term limits. Obama's a good administrator and the electorate likes him. In every other profession, an 8-year term would be considered a decent introduction to the field, not a goddamn retirement age.

It's like something out of Star Trek. Sorry Captain, on this planet we execute our professionals after a week's tenure. But what a week we get out of them!

"she's not very likable"

The funny thing is, I dislike her a lot of the time, until I like her. By which I mean, she is terrible when she's trying to play politician, and that's how she tends to start answering the tough questions. But then the interviewer keeps Hillary talking and she eventually exhausts her prepared remarks and just talking about what she knows and believes, and we see the real her ... and I like that Hillary.

The latest flap is that Hillary has been misrepresenting Bernie's single payer proposal, when in fact what she should be hammering on exclusively is, "so Bernie, you promised a detailed plan by Iowa, where is it? You aren't overpromising, are you?"

Bernie is overpromising the fuck out of what single payer can do, because all it can offer is 15%-20% savings over private insurance (and that's assuming perfect efficiency). The big problem remains on the medical costs side, with doctors overcharging a little, hospitals overcharging even more, overpriced pharmaceuticals, malpractice insurance costs, etc. That's a big complicated pile of mess to deal with, and Bernie is too much the demagogue to be straight with his supporters and say, "guys, we need to give single payer a rest while we work on the bigger problems, and by the way it's going to be a long slog with only incremental gains".

Sorry, Hazlenut, but I don't really buy your argument that the Democrats are somehow responsible for twitter mobs and political correctness gone wild or whatever. First, I think it's a fine thing that you can't tell nigger jokes at work and just laugh it off. I think it's fine that you can't go around assuming that you know everything about everyone else's experience. The people who generally have problems with this are people who believe that they should be loved for every idiot thing that comes out of their big, stupid yaps and think they know everything about everyone all the time, and fuck those people. If Donald Trump or Joe the Plumber or Andrew Dice Clay "speaks for you," you have bigger problems than deciding who to vote for.

The thing is, the stories that become most famous because of all this are almost necessarily the most extreme cases: that's why they become anecdotes. But I'm not sure that represents most people's experiences with Americans have, as a whole, become more careful about talking about race and gender, partially because lots of them have become more empathetic and have realized the limits of their perspective, and good for them. In those excessive cases that do make the news, I usually find it hard to sympathize with the "victimized" party, because anyone with any amount of intelligence or basic human understanding should know enough not to say that sort of thing. Donald Sterling doesn't get to own an NBA team anymore, and boo fucking hoo.

And the Dems aren't at fault just because they -- shockingly enough! -- won't race-bait for votes. The issue is the technology itself. It's too easy to talk shit to people under an assumed name and forget about the fact that an actual person will be reading what you wrote. It's easy to forget that sites like Facebook feel like closed-off, intimate spaces, but aren't. Maybe people will get used to this new way of communicating, and maybe they won't. But I find it hard to sympathize with anyone who loses a job because they sent a photoshop of Obama dressed up like an African tribesman from a work email account.

Miss H, I do see where you're coming from. Hard to argue the case one way or the other since we mainly disagree about _extent_: are the extreme cases something that just happens 'anaecdotally' or are they symptomatic of a widespread problem?

I would at least urge you to read this article from the Atlantic, hardly a right-wing rag: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-o f-the-american-mind/399356/

Good God, Miss Henson's, you sound like a Gawker article.

... turns out Bernie released his vaguely-sketched-out single payer proposal a few hours ago. Three big problems I have with it:

1) The plan calls upon a hell of a lot of new taxes, mostly on the rich. When do we figure to have a Congress willing to pass that? I don't see it happening any time in the next eight years at the very least.

2) Sanders simply assumes that he's going to be able to control costs to doctors, to pharmaceutical companies, to hospitals, and that's what will make the whole thing affordable. Until you've actually negotiated with doctors and pharma and hospitals, you don't actually know where the prices will end up, and I don't think it can be predicted. So if Sanders overpromised, it means an insolvent plan; but if the government sticks to its guns and refuses to pay enough to satisfy doctors / pharma / hospitals, the result is people not getting the treatment they need.

3) That said, cost containment is a very good idea ... but that can be done independent of single payer, which would not obligate the government to the problems of #2. If the government implements gradual cost control measures, those automatically carry over to the privately insured (Obamacare ties insurance company premiums to medical claims paid, so cheaper claims mean lower premiums), so why not do it that way? It's more politically achievable and less potentially catastrophic.

People get in trouble for a lot less than that, Miss Henson. Take the infamous PoETV "fuck her, fuck him" stance on the professor sending the Halloween costume email.

Why is automatic firings the first and only response? Do we really expect any positive changes out of that and NOT an increasingly polarized, hostile landscape? Shouldn't mutual understanding and respect be the goal? Why not make the first step sitting down the conflicting parties? Make an attempt to communicate that sending those images is as insulting to some as hanging "god loves dead soldiers" banners would be to them.

>> She's got the credibility issue, she's not very likable, and she's associated with scandals dating back to her husband's term.

You mean Whitewater? So you think the Republicans are going to start up the whitewater hearings again? Maybe five or six more Benghazi hearings? Don't think of them as scandals, think of them as inoculations. I've been voting Democrat since Jimmy Carter, and I am genuinely excited about Hillary, because the number one quality I want in a presidential candidate is the ability to withstand vicious Republican attacks, and in that arena, Hillary Clinton is the world champ. They've been digging into her past for 20 years. They're not going to dig up anything anything new on her.

People don't like Hillary because she's a politican, as if being President of the United States has nothing to do with politics. It's the same reason some very stupid people think Donald Trump is such a great candidate. Hillary has quite possibly more experience working in the White House than any presidential candidate since FDR ran for a fourth term, and she probably laid the groundwork for Obama's greatest success, healthcare. We know her, so we can't idealize her the way we did with Obama eight years ago, but she's qualified.

Yeah I'm surprised the whole Vince Foster thing hasn't come up yet. Sure it will; I'm voting demo but here's the scary part:

so I watched the whole debate just a few hours ago: it's actually the first one I've been able to watch all the way through. It was so amicable compared to the Rep debates. It was sort of like watching American Idol where the knives come out only at the very end, vs. the Rep's WWF-style debates where they used to be best friends but now he's got him in a headlock AHHH waaaay before Wrestlemania. All the little youtube Vidz From Teenz kinda annoyed me too. That's like MTV: Rock the Vote over there. And what concerns me, as a society, is that we're naturally drawn to entertainment more than politics, just like any other civilization, and that's what the Rep debates have been. :(

Anybody who will listen to the Republicans about Vince Foster has already made their minds up about Hillary Clinton, and I doubt bringing up a 20-year-old conspiracy theory is going to endear them to younger voters.

That's not to say that someone on the right wouldn't resort to bringing it up, but they've got Benghazi for that sort of thing now.

"I don't really buy your argument that the Democrats are somehow responsible for twitter mobs and political correctness gone wild or whatever."


Personally, I'm a pretty strong supporter of the "mobs are an inherent and inevitable result of the basic structure of Twitter" argument, most famously espoused here:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/tw itter_is_broken_gamergate_proves_it.html



On a more general level, I think anyone interested in Internet mob mentality would get a lot out of reading Aldous Huxley's essay on "herd intoxication" in the appendix of The Devils of Loudon. On the face of it, he's talking abut a very different context (totalitarian societies as opposed to Twitter and most other social media's ostensible democratic meritocracy via votes/likes/retweets/etc) but it doesn't take too much examination to realize that ANY social media site, no matter how user-driven it is on the face, resembles totalitarianism once you remember that the nominally democratic aspects of social media operate within a limited sphere (TOS, interface design, whatever algorithms a given site is using behind the scenes to determine visibility) and the final authority - the company or organization or individual that develops an operates a site - are absolutely totalitarian societies. Obviously the stakes are lower right now (having your Youtube account closed for spurious DMCA claims is a much gentler way of being made into an unperson than what what Stalin got up to) but there are very fundamental structural similarities. Social media outlets are Internet nation states governed by corporations, and as the line between internet and real life blurs more and more over the next decade or two, the similarities are going to get less academic.

http://www.panarchy.org/huxley/devils.html


I would go so far as to say that social media outlets - particularly Facebook, but really any of them that have user voting/rating systems - are very directly analogous to fascist economies, with social visibility standing in as a proxy for capital.


I also think it would be hard to overstate the correlation between the rise of social media and the huge resurgence of Social Darwinism (though rarely identified as such) in the Western world.

I'm Canadian so I kind of don't care that much, but... there's 3 supreme court justice's in their 80's and one in their late 70's, so whoever gets elected could end up replacing all four of them, which could have some long lasting, shitty repercussions.

Incidentally, don't take the above post to be any kind o endorsement of panarchy.org (which seems to be dedicated to some variety of "anarcho-capitalist" hokum), they just happen to be the ones hosting a copy of the Huxley essay.

At the bottom of a sea of the most intelligent discussion I've read anywhere lately, I'll also say that I Voted For Her back in 08 over Obama. For a little context I was 18 when the 2000 elections came around, and at least in Madison Wisconsin it was Nader v. Gore. Bush didn't exist. Granted I was young and this was before the internet but I lost a lot a lot of friends because I didn't vote Nader, because I remembered wanting Perot to win when I was too young to vote, whose presence probably got a Clinton in as prez in the first place.

I also voted for her in 08, imply because as much as I appreciated the cultural significance of a black president, every major speech I heard by him sounded like a bunch of hollow trigger phrases just like W. Different ideology but same tactics. I didn't think Obama would be bad but I didn't expect him to deliver on much of his rhetoric.

IZ, do you remember the expression on Bush's face when he looked back as he left the stage after his inaugural address?

I remember thinking it was the expression I would expect on the face of a professional killer leaving the court after being acquitted. It was literally chilling.

I can't find it now, unfortunately. Maybe it wasn't that speech. It was after he won the recount and it was outdoors, so I think it is probably that one, but I distinctly remember him walking with Cheney and I think Rumsfeld and getting in to a helicopter, and I don't see a helicopter in the CSPAN footage of the inaugural speech.

>>Personally, I'm a pretty strong supporter of the "mobs are an inherent and inevitable result of the basic structure of Twitter" argument, most famously espoused here:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/tw itter_is_broken_gamergate_proves_it.html

There's plenty of reason to hope that internet culture will evolve to accommodate the shitty possibilities of twitter. People are becoming more willing to block obnoxious users, and more conscious of harassment, and eventually they may look beyond how successful hashtag campaigns are at getting attention, and start to notice how ineffective they are at achieving results. Stephen Colbert wasn't canceled, he was given a much more lucrative, high-profile gig. Gamergaters like to point to their success in costing kotaru a few thousand bitcoins, but Zoe Quinn just got a book and movie deal, Anita Sarkeesian is an international celebrity, and the image of the male gamer as entitled misogynist manbaby is now a permanent part of mainstream interent culture.

Twitter is fine for sharing links with people who share your interests, one liners, selfpromotion and talking to celebrities, but hashtag campaigns are a shit substitute for real activism, and one can only hope eventually everybody is going to be sick of desperate bloggers who use tweets as a news source. Reprinting 1-3 tweets doesn't prove there's a major backlash against Jennifer Lawrence, and one bitchy tweet doesn't prove that Jennifer Lawrence is a horrible person.

He's got no style..

Donald Trump, for a brief moment, actually sounded like a decent person in the last debate because of Ted Cruz.

He has no grace

Ghost stars *****. Its funny, cause this dude talks about how macho men should be, yet is very metro-sexual.

Take 'em.

From the post-Fox videos I've seen, his dress code really varies! Some days it's hipster-chic or metro-sexual, or just totally casual; other days it's the suit-and-tie again! This day he chose.. well this. That's one thing I agree with Beck on apparently, that there should be no such thing as a dress code at work! I'd love a presidential candidate to just show up in jeans and a t-shirt, make more convincing points and see what happens. Because like I said above, it's American Idol with the Dems and WWF with the Reps. Gone are the days when you could just whip our your saxamaphone and start jammin for the win, or lose because you looked too short in a tank.

Plus tying a tie is a pain the fuckin ass.

I'm not sure who scares me more between Trump and Cruz. That's two kinds of terrifying crazy.

Cruz scares me way more, but I don't have time for that particular essay right now.

And from all reports, the word on Cruz is that everybody really does hate him, including other Republicans. It may be the most factual thing Trump had said.

You know why I like Donald Trump? Because he scares Glenn Beck.

You do realize he's not even the real Trump, right? They swapped his brain with Bill the Cat back in '89 or '90.

Not saying trump is good or better than cruz, just saying Beck was a GOP shill all along.

Trump might not be a GOP insider like cruz, but he's a crazy/stupid outsider.

>>Sounds like you've already given up on Bernie, how very stupid of you.

says the person who thinks there's zero difference between Hillary and Trump.

I think Bernie's great. If he wasn't 150 years old he'd make a fine supreme court justice, but Hillary has experience working in two White Houses, and that's two more than any other candidate. Just about every President in recent memory had pissed away the honeymoon on rookie mistakes, and is playing defense forevermore.

Presidents get real practical things done by being politicians, not by being philosophers, or tv personalities, or business tycoons. The urge to elect a president who hasn't been corrupted by politics is comparable to wanting a surgeon who hasn't been corrupted by medical school. Compromising, horse trading, and sometimes pandering is how it's done.

Think we’ll still be allowed to make this joke in 2024 or 2028?

Can’t insult Dear Leader after all.

wait... what's coming? because I think most Americans would tell you that their life wasn't substantially different during the Trump years