In terms of tactics, I think one puzzle piece is to not alienate roughly half of the US population( of voters.)

There are, I'm sure, many people who voted for Trump who are queasy on certain policies. That's the populace you need to sway. If you write off the entirety of active voters who votes for trump, you automatically hand him the win. — csalisbury

There are about 250M Americans who are of voting age. Of that, only ~138M voted in the 2016 election, (or 55% of the total voting population). Of those who voted, ~63M voted for Trump, (or 46% of those who voted). So those who voted for Trump only account for ~25% of the general voting population, which isn't "roughly half". And what percentage of this 25% would never ever vote for a Democrat? Despite this, it's curious that it's demanded of democrats/liberals/leftists to seek the favor of Trump/conservative voters by moderating their otherwise left-leaning policies, rather than the Trump/conservative voters being asked to moderate their extreme positions so that they are more palatable to moderate/left of center voters. Seems like this demand is simply subterfuge in an attempt to temper the growing popularity of leftist policy by advocating for fallacious "electability" arguments.

It's actually very easy to climb a 30 ft. wall, I've done it several times without any training. Child's play.

And Trump's move out of Syria is easily one of the worst foreign decisions since the Iraq War.

Being a Trump supporter clearly causes some form of brain damage

Next you’re going to tell us video games cause violence — NOS4A2

Are you so brain-dead that you can't admit this type of stochastic terrorism by the president and his supporters is bad?

jUsT a HaRmLeSs PaRoDy

Yeah not even Orwell could have imagined this

Me: the camps at the border are concentration camps
You: wow how dare you make a comparison between what is occurring at the border with Nazi concentration camps
Also You: censoring a video depicting the president murdering political opponents is basically Nazi Germany

Did you complain about the original movie? The Christians being shot in their place of worship? Or did you realize it wasn’t real? — NOS4A2

We are talking about a video, created for a Trump conference and shown at one of his resorts, which glorifies the President of the United States murdering political opponents. You seriously don't think that's vile? Is that where your brain is at?

It was just a meme, a joke, a gag, a parody. — NOS4A2

Yeah shooting 'Black Lives Matter', or media organizations, which have been threatened and attacked, isn't some innocuous parady or gag. There is no doubting that a vocal segment of MAGA supporters fantasize about massacring perceived enemies.

That Kingsman movie video of Trump murdering networks, individuals, and social movements was something else

Assmann — Hanover

same

In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West by Wendy Brown

@180 Proof I'm over halfway through Black Rights/White Wrongs and I highly recommend it. A powerful corrective course for liberalism as typically articulated and defended by white men illiterate to the complexities and inequalities of race and racism produced in society. Charles Mills believes we can keep liberalism (which he defines, by way of John Gray, as Individualist, Egalitarian and Universalist) and strengthen it by acknowledging race experience and the history of racism, and integrating the moral and political philosophies found within it into liberalism (in conjunction with Feminism and Marxism/classism). Pairs very well with the New York Times' 1619 Project, particularly Nikole Hannah-Jones gushingly fantastic essay here.

Well, places where Trump was very popular were places in the rust-belt and not the most well off prosperous places. (And white, of course) From this chart you can see that typically the more well off households did vote for Clinton than Trump. Now, we can argue about the statistics and have a discussion about them, but what I'm just saying is that dismissing totally the video with such ferocity and hurling so many accusations on it comes off to me as quite arrogant. — ssu

As the Washington Post article from which you ostensibly pulled this from notes, Trump won in poorer counties, but did better with wealthier voters over Hillary Clinton (and of course not everyone within a given county voted at all!). Even the percentage difference between the median HHI of counties that voted Trump vs. voted Hillary is quite low: just 8.5%. But regardless of the precise statistics or the framing between counties vs. individual voters, the thesis of the video was that there was a potent dyad between how the working class voted and how the wealthy elite voted, and with economic anxiety being the prime motivator for Trump voters. This is at best vastly overstated, and at worst simply incorrect.

This is an aspect of racism that now permeates throughout American culture and is spreading, to the point that it has become institutional, manifesting in policies such as “diversity training” for example. It is being taught in school. — NOS4A2

human bodies no less end up becoming the brick and mortar to their failed schemes, long before the dogma is abandoned — NOS4A2

oh wow

What exactly is the definition of racial constructionism, how are we confirming that there is such a thing, and how are we confirming its effect on people? — Terrapin Station

Feel free to check out Ibram X. Kendi's excellent book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, if you doubt the historicity of racism

Again you show your arrogance quite well. — ssu

Feel free to refute the counterpoints I provided! The irony is the circle jerk that devolved in this thread over the arguments made in the video, despite no substantive research to support them (including a women presented as an expert who was caught lying and fabricating interviews)

Historically people have been treated as members of racial groups, convicted of some form or other of essentialism, and treated accordingly. It seems to me prudent to refuse engaging in racism if we want to banish it. — NOS4A2

Accepting the history (and continuance!) of racism, as you acknowledge in this first sentence here, does not mean "engaging in racism". The best way to refuse to engage in racism is to understand how it affects people.

Your opening post simply santizes the history and continued practice of racial subjugation, prejudice, exclusion, etc. History is nowhere awknowledged in your opening. The only way in which colorblindness is a viable anti-racist practice is if there was never a history of racial constructionism in the first place.

we are always already engaged in it

'Color-blindness' ignores the history of racial constructionism, which was and continues to be a sociological reality that affects people in ways both material and ideological. The path towards a more equal society is to acknowledge how this racial construction materialized in history, how it manifests itself today, and how it has affected society and its subjects. Ignoring it only serves to perpetuate it and leaves us unable to combat it.

Yep. Right now the majority support impeachment and removal. — frank

This is why I advocated for an impeachment process in the Donald Trump thread. I sincerely doubt the GOP controlled senate will remove him, which will impact their own re-election if impeachment still enjoys majority approval.

Also important to distinguish between someone who voted for Trump in 2016 (and who may or may not support him now), and those that continue to praise and support him and his policies now.

The rhetoric comparing Trump’s supporters to Nazis justifies their persecution. — NOS4A2

Both Trump supporters and protesters have engaged in violent acts.

But, fourth link, I don't accept the analogy between these camps and holocaust concentration camps. (this leaves me open - link me to the concentration camp specialists.) — csalisbury

You can read an article from the NY Review of Books by historian Andrea Pitzer, who recently wrote a book about the history of concentration camps.

the close-reading of the cartoon — csalisbury

oh here's the problem

I do recognize that. I tried to show in my post that I understand the point of the cartoon, and I also understand Hanover's argument, and I tried to show the disconnect between the cartoon and what it's cartooning. I think I did a good job of that and whether you agree or disagree with my points, I wish you had engaged with it.

You didn't, and I suspect that that's because it was a speedbump in the way of composing the hyperlinked second post. — csalisbury

I didn't, because you are over-analyzing a cartoon in a digression that I'm not following whatsoever.

The cartoon is making the exact same bad political/rhetorical move he was decrying. — csalisbury

As I said, the cartoon is a response to a specific form of argumentation that Hanover had made.

Most of your points are less points, than jabs, expulsions of anger, sharp needles looking for soft bellies. The points nestled among the jabs are lost because the people responding, correctly, read these points as merely the means to an end of Expressed Contempt. — csalisbury

Yeah I do often have contempt for some people here if they say stupid shit. Hanover decides to define Nazism as genocide despite the Final Solution being put in place in 1941. When I point out that Nazism existed and was in power prior to this he ignores it. When I point out that immigrants are being called infestation and vermin, and point out the state of children in concentration camps, he ignores this and just states that we're not putting people in gas chambers, which started in 1939. When I criticize his reliance on defining Nazism by its concluding years, ignoring the conditions which lead to genocide, he ignores it and goes back to talking about genocide. I find this frustrating and contemptible.

The point of the cartoon is to lampoon the argument that calling a person, or group of people Nazis, or Racists, or Fascists will eventually make them embrace those very positions. Or in Hanover's terms, calling them Nazis will "strengthen their resolve" and lead them to embrace their political leaders who...call immigrants vermin and throw them into concentration camps in inhumane conditions, which is totally not Nazi-like.

Not sure what conversation you'd like me to have with Hanover and others, when the points I'm making are constantly ignored.

Between Hanover justifying separating families and wanting to vote for Trump, despite not liking him, just to see democrats have a second meltdown, I think 'deplorable' is a pretty apt appellation

1. Many of the immigrants separated are seeking and announcing asylum, which is legal.
2. Many of the immigrants are from countries that were destabilized by the US Government through coups and supplying militia with weapons and training.
3. Even granting that USA has sovereignty over it's borders, this doesn't justify family separation as an acceptable policy. This is sheer victim blaming 'look at what you made me do' thinking.

I've made and flushed out these points to you several times, but you simply ignore them.

At least people generally avoided engaging with Maw for a while (progress there I guess — I like sushi

Yeah thank Christ on that one

And some of us seem to enjoy being arrogant and condescending. — ssu

Anyone who has been keeping up with post-2016 political discourse and election analysis should have found it fairly easy to point out the bullshit discussed in that documentary, as I did. I've spend the last few years making the effort to keep myself informed, and I'm not going to take kindly to people who continually think they can get away with not doing their homework, yet act as if their thoughts and speculation on the matter are more valid than mine.

Sorry...Ayn Rand? Who is that?

This song is so fucking good

Oh and by the way, I just realized that one of the woman "experts" in the video is Saleno Zito, who infamously lied in her book, The Great Revolt, about interviewing swing voters, when in fact they were Republican officials or long-time GOP voters, or simply made up quotes that supported GOP talking points from uncertain voters. What a complete joke.

Nazi Germany and Hitler are the worst to draw parralels to, because it's overused as a method to do the most damage to your "political opponents". — Judaka

Yes, when I see families separated and placed in camps that historians, including historians of concentration camps call them concentration camps, in sinister and inhumane conditions that I've outlined here and elsewhere, approved by a president who calls immigrants "vermin", who "infest our countries", which, uh yeah, very much has Nazi precedence, or spreading conspiracy theories that lead the the worst massacre of Jews in America (and continues to do so), then yes, I will continue to draw parallels between Nazism and Trumpism, and give fuck-all to how my political opponents feel about this when they shrug it off, enable it, or outright support it. Conservatives are the biggest fucking crybabies I swear.

Literally the only thing that would convince some of you that drawing an analogy between Nazi Germany is when the US Government starts shoving people into gas chambers, and the point is to ensure that it doesn't get to that point.

Caring about immigration ≠ racism either — Judaka

Except I didn't say that concern with immigration is tantamount to being racist. What I actually wrote was that the documentary's main focus was that the primary concern and motivation of Trump voters was the economy. It offered no stats to bulwark that. Just some talking heads and some Trump voters they interviewed. The stats pulled from the exit poll show otherwise. The thesis of the video is incorrect.


Once again, some of you don't read, and it really shows.

Are you quoting David Bowie's Starman?

the left heaps upon the right by calling them Nazi-like does nothing but strengthen their resolve and increase their loyalty to their political leaders. — Hanover

Just evergreen commentary from you

Most of you clearly don't read any relevant political material, and it shows in your comments.