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Which presidential candidate do you plan to vote for in the general election?
Clinton 21%  21%  [ 7 ]
Trump 15%  15%  [ 5 ]
Third Party 47%  47%  [ 16 ]
Write-In 3%  3%  [ 1 ]
I'm not sure 3%  3%  [ 1 ]
I don't plan to vote 3%  3%  [ 1 ]
I'm not eligible to vote 9%  9%  [ 3 ]
Total votes : 34
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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2016 8:31 pm 
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RangerDave wrote:
Again, I don't disagree that the anti-racism of the left has jumped the shark in recent years. I do think you massively overestimate the degree to which racism was over in the 90s (again, in 1994, half the country still thought interracial marriage was wrong), but I still agree that the tipping point was reached in that decade and rapid progress has been made since then.


And yet, interracial marriage was quite legal in 1994, and that was not going to be reversed.

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So lets focus on that 1965 to 1985 period, since that's where I think we're the farthest apart. You say, "It isn't just that it became less acceptable to be overtly racist, it's that people actually became a lot less racist, very rapidly - because over that period of 1965 to 1985 an entire generation learned that the sky wouldn't fall in because things changed." That's true. However, it's just a little too coincidental, don't you think, that white voters on the right during that era just happened to move, en masse, to the party that made fighting crime, drugs and welfare key parts of its platform and just happened to enthusiastically embrace talk radio and its resentment-filled rants against Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, political correctness, the race card, etc.?


I don't know why that would be coincidental, since it wasn't until that period that those issues became current, or - in the case of crime - had been ongoing long enough that people truly regarded it as an epidemic - and as for talk radio and their rants, that was really more of a 1990s arrival and given Sharpton and Jackson's behavior, resentment directed at them personally was and is justified regardless. Just because they are black leaders does not make all - pr even very much - resentment targeted at them evidence of racism in general. Keep in mind that they were already part of the nascent stage of the "fabricate a crisis" approach with Tawana Brawley, and their entire career path has been to fan the resentment of black people, heavily using religious techniques to do it - religious techniques that are heavily forwned upon by the left when they appear in public debate for almost any other reason.

Furthermore, a lot of those people are people that were never regarded as racist before - nothern, midwestern, and western whites who had looked askance at the South and Jim Crow for decades, and suddenly found themselves lumped in with those people for the political convenience of the left.


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In your telling, you seem to be portraying white, blue collar voters as having undergone some rapid conversion on the road to Damascus after the Civil Rights era and then only becoming resentful over time because their conversion wasn't properly acknowledged and they were constantly harangued by the arrogant left. You don't find that narrative a bit suspect? Isn't a much more reasonable narrative that folks gradually realized that flat-out racism wasn't ok, but still had a lingering sense of tribalism and prejudice that political elites on the right stoked for electoral gain and ratings/profits by focusing on issues that, while legitimate concerns, nevertheless had clear racial divides built in?


I'm not sure where you're getting this "Road to Damascus" thing from, other than maybe that it's your continued insistence on conflating Southern whites, particularly from the George Wallace states with working-class whites in general, which is neither fair nor accurate.

Furthermore, in that time, the left and black leaders in particular have stoked Black people's fears and resentments to a far greater degree than the right has of whites. If anything, the right has been guilty of being clumsy in its approach to economic matters, and continuously puts forth proposals that are economic in nature but which (allegedly) will have a "disproportionate impact" and then failing to address it when the left claims this is because of racism, rather than being the opposition to greater government interventions, greater government spending, and more lately outright socialism, that it actually is. The right has had 50 years to figure out how to counter this and has so far failed to do so, which only leads me to the conclusion that the top of the right really doesn't care very much if it's called racists and is only now figuring out that their voters do not like it at all.

The really suspect narrative, therefore, is this excessive concern over racial divides, disproportionate impacts, and unverifiable suspect racial attitudes of whites while giving blacks (and, for that matter, other minorities and women) free passes to engage in their own forms of tribalism. Excusing this by pointing to ongoing inequalities, as the left ahs repeatedly done, only confirms the insincerity of the desire to remedy inequality.

What you're running into face-first is that the selling point of the civil rights movement was "the content of their character" versus "the color of their skin." That line basically is what every white person that was really not on board with the South's treatment of blacks - and quite a few Southerners too, once they realized they'd lost - had bought into and said "ok this seems like a fair deal." given the content of America's founding documents. The situation in the South was presented as unfair and untenable and the advocates of change claimed a pretty clear moral high ground based on that "equality" stance.

That, however, never occurred. It was almost immediately abandoned in favor of trying to arrange special privileges for blacks, women, and eventually various other minority groups, and while the first decade or two of this could be passed off as well-intentioned legislative ham-fistedness of necessity it's very hard to excuse the second 25 years of continuing the same thing in view of its ineffective and open-ended nature. White people rightly wonder at what point the left and blacks will actually be satisfied and "content of their character" will become the actual standard and the answer - it is increasingly obvious - is "never, as long as it keeps black people voting for Democrats." It's only confirmed in the case of women, where women are rapidly surpassing men in many beneficial areas and yet there's no sign of a slowdown in demands for new efforts to help women, much less any effort to eliminate special benefits for them, particularly when it comes to education or largesse from public coffers.

This is something you've completely ignored and failed to address so far in your eagerness to re-iterate your suspicions about white racial attitudes and your token attempts to make the other side go away by agreeing that some elements of protest have jumped the shark. You're not holding all sides of the debate to the same standards. If you complain that someone else is engaing in objectionable behavior, you can argue that it's therefore ok to do the same yourself, or argue that they should stop, but you can't do both. The left has tried to do precisely that to whites (while attributing the behavior of one section of them to all) for 50 years now, and tried to shout down any pointing out of this with cries of racism.

And all you're doing here is ignoring this, hoping it will go away if you don't acknowledge it. Like I said, it's time for the left to understand it isn't the arbitrator of acceptability and hasn't held the moral high ground here in a very long time now.

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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2016 8:33 pm 
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Talya wrote:
A friend of mine -- a red-headed, Danish-Canadian man, married a Jamaican woman, and moved down to Florida in the mid 1990s. 4 years later they returned, citing the incredible racism they experienced as a mixed-race couple making it pretty much intolerable for them.

Mind you, they got just as much or more racism from the black community as they did from white people.

I know at least 2 white men here who have married Hispanic women.

It is not the husbands' families that have racial issues with the marriage.

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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2016 8:37 pm 
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My wife's family (Cuban/Puerto Rican) were furious when we stared dating. My ultra conservative, Irish Catholic family was fine with it.

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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2016 9:27 pm 
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That brings up another interesting point.

Here in the Rio Grande Valley, black people are exceedingly rare. Those that are present almost exclusively are military AGR personnel or Customs or Border Patrol employees, or their family members.

The RGV is also far from literally everywhere else in the country. I have to drive 4 hours to San Antonio just to think about going anywhere else.

Therefore, local people tend to be somewhat isolated in their view of the rest of the country, and these local people are almost exclusively Hispanics of Mexican origin.

However, as a white person I experience only occasional, mild prejudice and nothing directed at me that I would call "Racism" (although I haven't tried to date any local women so that might explain it).

Nevertheless I have found local people, especially those I work with to be A) not terribly concerned with taking racial offense at things in the way the left imagines they ought to be (they'll freely poke fun at stereotypes of white people to my face and in such a way that it's obviously inoffensive and entertaining, and will equall poke fun at themselves in the same way) and B) very curious about why black people are so sensitive.

It's not that they're unaware fo the history of black people, but they have almost no contact with black people if they've never lived anywhere else, and the impression they get formt he news is that black people tend to be entitled, racist, easily offended, and hateful.

"Criminal" is notably absent from what they ask about. Guys I know here seem to think that being from up north I know all there is to know about black people and when I get asked something it's always with this distinct undertone of "why do they think everything is racist?"

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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 1:50 am 
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Unlike RD, I don't think Southern racism is particularly associated with the right or the left, actually, it's the fact that the racism in the South tends to transcend political boundaries that leads me to conclude that it's a serious problem.

Before the 1970s, which political party was associated with racism in the South? It was the Democrats, and it had been for over a century. Pretty much every major villain of the civil rights movement was D associated and it was the Republicans that championed civil rights. So why are the Republicans seen as the racists today? Well, it's because the Republicans deliberately catered to disillusioned Southern racists that were angry about the success of the Civil Rights Movement, and managed to swap the South from blue to red on basically this issue alone. Reagan went especially hardcore on the racist **** his first term because the Republicans were desperate to regain support they had lost inthe aftermath of the Nixon fiasco, and Reagan's spectacular success as a President means this has colored R politics ever since.


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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 9:48 am 
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Xequecal wrote:
Unlike RD, I don't think Southern racism is particularly associated with the right or the left, actually, it's the fact that the racism in the South tends to transcend political boundaries that leads me to conclude that it's a serious problem.


Just to be clear, I don't think Southern racism, or racism in general, is inherently associated with the right, and as you note, it's not historically associated with the right in the US either. The association with the right is a product of the deliberate political strategy employed by the right in this country since the 60s.

Also, I just want to note that I don't think racism in the South was or is necessarily worse than racism in other parts of the country. I think it had more of a white supremacist character related to the more organic/hierarchical view of society in the South, which is why racial boundaries were so much more formally and systematically enforced, but the rest of the country had its share of vitriolic bigotry and racial violence as well.


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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 10:51 am 
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Xequecal wrote:
Unlike RD, I don't think Southern racism is particularly associated with the right or the left, actually, it's the fact that the racism in the South tends to transcend political boundaries that leads me to conclude that it's a serious problem.

Before the 1970s, which political party was associated with racism in the South? It was the Democrats, and it had been for over a century. Pretty much every major villain of the civil rights movement was D associated and it was the Republicans that championed civil rights. So why are the Republicans seen as the racists today? Well, it's because the Republicans deliberately catered to disillusioned Southern racists that were angry about the success of the Civil Rights Movement, and managed to swap the South from blue to red on basically this issue alone. Reagan went especially hardcore on the racist **** his first term because the Republicans were desperate to regain support they had lost inthe aftermath of the Nixon fiasco, and Reagan's spectacular success as a President means this has colored R politics ever since.


The problem with that logic being that Reagan never went "hardcore" on any "racist ****" at all. Lee Atwater and successive Republicans through Bush I simply exploited animosity for the Democrats and mostly pointed out legitimate issues - they knew full well that Southern racists would interpret them in a racist way, but most of the "coded", "dog whistle" stuff is actually perfectly legitimate in terms of its topical nature. Calling it "coded racism" is a cute way of saying "we're going to tar this issue with the nature of some of your supporters so that you don't bring it up, because there's uncomfortable realities for us, too."

By the time the 1992 election rolled round, however, that was an obsolete strategy - and the Democrats were, to a degree, doing the same thing anyhow with Bill Clinton taking time out from his campaign to oversee an execution and look tough on crime. That's an election where David Duke garnered a laughable 119,000 votes in the Republican primary; he should have done significantly better than that if the Democratic/leftist view of Republican voter motivation were accurate.

These days, the "serious problem" of Southern racism you see is Southerners rebelling against being endlessly tarred with the brush of racism, and being tired and frustrated with the constant goalpost-shifting of the left. If declare a behavior unacceptable and people shift away from it, you can only declare the new standard of behavior unacceptable so many times before people figure out you'll never be happy and just give up on it.

Finally, it isn't up to you - or the left in general - to determine if there's a "serious problem with racism" because the left and minorities do not get to simply decide what's racism. This is part of the same message - it is not up to Southerners to convince you that they aren't racist; it's up to you to get them to buy into the definition you're trying to use, and that constant goalpost-shifting has made such a thing impossible. Your argument contains the hidden assumption that your ideas of what constitute racism are actually meaningful, but people have finally started figuring out that the meaning of "Racism" has meant whatever the left needs it to mean for decades now, and are deciding not to tolerate it any more.

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Last edited by Diamondeye on Mon May 16, 2016 11:14 am, edited 1 time in total.

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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 11:04 am 
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RangerDave wrote:
Just to be clear, I don't think Southern racism, or racism in general, is inherently associated with the right, and as you note, it's not historically associated with the right in the US either. The association with the right is a product of the deliberate political strategy employed by the right in this country since the 60s.


This strategy has really not been current in almost 30 years now, and even when it was, it overlooks the obvious - the people it was appealing to were going to vote for someone, and it wasn't going to be a Democrat. Once the futility of backing George Wallace became apparent, the Republican strategy essentially neutralized these people, and most of them are dead now. The idea that Republicans should have just sacrificed any hope of election in order to keep a very large portion of the electorate disenfranchised is really pretty ridiculous.

If there's a criticism to be made it was that Atwater's strategy was probably unnecessary - these people would have gravitated Republican anyhow due to animosity towards the Democrats. It bought the votes of the South for decades, at the cost of allowing the left to frame the Republicans are racists (which really one should expect in politics if you deliberately trick racists into voting for you.)

However, we're also past that now - as in we're past the expiration date of this issue for the left, as well. Continuing to complain about it is yet another sign that the left very much wants the situation circa 1970 to never die, not unlike the hilarious objections to ending the use of 1970 as a criteria for the Voting Rights Act. If you need proof that the Left is trying to claim it's "progressive" while fighting tooth and nail to avoid admitting actual process, the attempts to insist on using demographic data from 40 years ago to justify racial gerrymandering is right at the top of the list.

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Also, I just want to note that I don't think racism in the South was or is necessarily worse than racism in other parts of the country. I think it had more of a white supremacist character related to the more organic/hierarchical view of society in the South, which is why racial boundaries were so much more formally and systematically enforced, but the rest of the country had its share of vitriolic bigotry and racial violence as well.


If by "it's share" you mean "racism was not nonexistent elsewhere" that might be true, but the idea that racism was not worse in the South between 1865 and about 1985 is somewhere between embarrassing and hilarious. Not engaging in legalized segregation as public policy is by definition far less racist than actually doing so. This is just a way to justify the politically convenient assignment of racist attitudes to any rural or working white person that doesn't toe the leftist line.

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PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 11:45 am 
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The lengths to which liberals will go to shift the blame for their own bigotry onto others is astounding.

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PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 12:54 pm 
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Corolinth wrote:
The lengths to which liberals will go to shift the blame for their own bigotry onto others is astounding.


Well, when you've been allowed uncontested control over what counts as "bigotry" for 5 decades, that's unsurprising. At a certain point you're so used to defining "bigotry" as "anything I disagree with or find uncomfortable to confront" you don't even notice you're doing it any more.

To be fair though, the right bears a great deal of blame for not confronting this years ago. Had a stop been put to it in the 1990s when it started going really off the rails, the national political discourse of both sides would have been considerably strengthened. When your opponent constantly forfeits it's not surprising when your own level of plat deteriorates.

What we should do is start regarding words like "racism" and "misogyny" as if they were slurs just like racial or gender-oriented slurs actually are, since they're used in basically the same way. These terms are not used to condemn language that's universally agreed to be unacceptable, they're used by the left as a way to dismiss the speaker rather than address the speech.

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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 7:42 am 
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Unions figuring out that other parts of the Democratic coalition are incompatible with their interests.

I'm sure this is really because unions are now a bunch of angry white people though.

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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 11:57 am 
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Both groups oppose societal progress. They have a lot in common.

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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 3:11 pm 
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Corolinth wrote:
Both groups oppose societal progress. They have a lot in common.


For the side of the political spectrum that includes "Progressive" as a moniker, it's remarkable how many constituencies are opposed to making any progress - or admitting any has been made.

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PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 3:52 pm 
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after this weekends fiasco at the NV Dem Caucus...

I want to vote for whomever will make the world burn faster.

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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 4:49 pm 
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Well, a substantial number of people seem to think it's all of 5 minutes from a Trump inauguration to the first Minuteman III launch...

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PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 5:02 pm 
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eh, I do not think it will be that quick, but never know. but the Repugnican Party lost me when they changed the rules to screw Ron Paul several years ago, and the Democraps just did it this weekend. So IMNSHO **** them both.

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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 5:54 pm 
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Given the ululations of many of them, voting for Trump can only be described as **** the Republicans, in their own view.

That said, **** Ron Paul and the horse he rode in on. He was the Republican Dennis Kucinich.

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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Wed May 18, 2016 12:43 am 
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I'm far more worried about Trump starting a trade war with China, because we'll almost certainly lose. That or try to push through Smoot-Hawley 2.0 and cause another depression.


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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Wed May 18, 2016 8:56 am 
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Xequecal wrote:
I'm far more worried about Trump starting a trade war with China, because we'll almost certainly lose. That or try to push through Smoot-Hawley 2.0 and cause another depression.


More like a case of Mutually Assured Destruction. China is facing serious structural problems within its own economy.

That said, it is not a tenable long-term position of just continuing current practices with China because if we annoy them there'll be a trade war. Especially given that their current behavior is likely to cause a real war at some point.

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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Thu May 19, 2016 11:44 pm 
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Diamondeye wrote:
Xequecal wrote:
I'm far more worried about Trump starting a trade war with China, because we'll almost certainly lose. That or try to push through Smoot-Hawley 2.0 and cause another depression.


More like a case of Mutually Assured Destruction. China is facing serious structural problems within its own economy.

That said, it is not a tenable long-term position of just continuing current practices with China because if we annoy them there'll be a trade war. Especially given that their current behavior is likely to cause a real war at some point.


Sure it is. We've been appeasing Saudi Arabia for decades despite far worse conduct from them, and the consequences for not keeping them happy being much less than the consequences of not keeping China on board.

The fact of the matter is you can't expect to win what will essentially boil down to a misery competition with a country where the Great Leap Forward is not only still in living memory, but the people responsible are still in power. You think they're going to cry uncle first when things get bad on both sides?


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 Post subject: Re: Presidential Poll
PostPosted: Fri May 20, 2016 8:35 am 
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RangerDave wrote:
Sure it is. We've been appeasing Saudi Arabia for decades despite far worse conduct from them, and the consequences for not keeping them happy being much less than the consequences of not keeping China on board.


The far less severe consequences are precisely why it's tenable to do that in Saudi Arabia's case. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia is located in a part of the world where it's just one actor amid a large number of others, and there is real reason for concern that creating instability there results in yet another regime being replaced with something far worse. There is also their purpose as a counterweight to Iran.

China, on the other hand, is a large country that does not counter anyone else - in fact, all the various other countries around it would be hard-pressed to counter China even if they all co-operated perfectly, unless they have our direct support. Even if we include India in that and Britain (based on the Five Powers Defence Agreement) it's a very happy situation indeed where the relative pygmies surrounding China can both co-operate well enough to act as a meaningful counter and have the physical capacity to do so. I really don't see that happening.

Therefore, the fairly obvious differences between China and Saudi Arabia render this comparison fairly irrelevant. Need I remind you that if a "trade war" really threatens total economic collapse, either side can render that irrelevant on about 1 hour's notice?

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The fact of the matter is you can't expect to win what will essentially boil down to a misery competition with a country where the Great Leap Forward is not only still in living memory, but the people responsible are still in power. You think they're going to cry uncle first when things get bad on both sides?


Did you miss the part where I said it'd be Mutually Assured Destruction? I was not disagreeing with this; I was disagreeing with the notion that we will just outright lose a trade war - and the unstated notion that any attempt to shift the present status quo will necessarily result in a trade war. China is a classic example of a country that is very easy to get along with when it believes it is facing strength, and which will take a mile if given an inch. The economic situation with them is quite similar to the South China Sea situation - they engage in incremental, minor pushing, loudly decry any counteraction as unfair, illegal, whatever, and rely on the minor nature of each individual action to avoid significant provocation at any one time.

The difference between the 2 is that in trade wars, confusion and uncertainty about what's on a radar screen in the middle of the night won't cause something to get blown up and people to get killed. Putting fake islands in the ocean to provoke everyone else while pretending they're part of your land, then putting long-range SAMs on them has a real possibility of doing just that - and again, the potential consequences after that make the trade war look quite preferable.

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PostPosted: Wed May 25, 2016 6:17 pm 
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At the moment, if Bernie doesn't take the nom at the convention, I'll abstain, or vote Trump.

Clinton is evil. I'd rather have the bloviating idiot in charge than the pathological liar who's so deep into the pockets of the moneyed special interests that she's queefing lint balls.

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Müs wrote:
At the moment, if Bernie doesn't take the nom at the convention, I'll abstain, or vote Trump.

Clinton is evil. I'd rather have the bloviating idiot in charge than the pathological liar who's so deep into the pockets of the moneyed special interests that she's queefing lint balls.


A huge hidden benefit of Trump is that he's likely a one-termer anyhow. Hillary is too, but Trump is even more so.

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PostPosted: Wed May 25, 2016 6:59 pm 
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They're both New York liberals. I don't see the difference.

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PostPosted: Wed May 25, 2016 8:07 pm 
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Corolinth wrote:
They're both New York liberals. I don't see the difference.


One offers at least the possibility of appointing half decent judges, the other will appoint every photocopy of Sonia Sotomayor she can find, and never saw a gun control measure she didn't like.

That ought to be enough difference right there to choose between "bad" and "worse".

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