God dammit.Strat wrote:I can't read it any other way now. LolGreen Habit wrote:I'm sure I first read this much differently than was your intent.Strat wrote:but im really curious to watch trump moving forward in how he speaks about affairs.
Day 1 in trumps america
https://twitter.com/i/moments/796417517157830656
Even tho Hillary did not win, Trump's election to the presidency is still historic. He's the first person elected that has neither been in public office nor served in the military. Every President before him has done at least one of these things.Strat wrote:and strangely unique to Trump, he has had NO first hand experience or knowledge about any of it all.
CBS news wrote:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary- ... tion-2016/
Commentary: The unbearable smugness of the press
Last Updated Nov 10, 2016 12:01 PM EST
The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.
This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.
So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.
And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.
It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?
We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.
You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works. To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.
This is all a “whitelash,” you see. Trump voters are racist and sexist, so there must be more racists and sexists than we realized. Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress. Let the new tantrums commence!
That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.
Journalists increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such ascribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way. We see this in the ongoing veneration of “facts,” the ones peddled by explainer websites and data journalists who believe themselves to be curiously post-ideological.
That the explainers and data journalists so frequently get things hilariously wrong never invites the soul-searching you’d think it would. Instead, it all just somehow leads us to more smugness, more meanness, more certainty from the reporters and pundits. Faced with defeat, we retreat further into our bubble, assumptions left unchecked. No, it’s the voters who are wrong.
As a direct result, we get it wrong with greater frequency. Out on the road, we forget to ask the right questions. We can’t even imagine the right question. We go into assignments too certain that what we find will serve to justify our biases. The public’s estimation of the press declines even further -- fewer than one-in-three Americans trust the press, per Gallup -- which starts the cycle anew.
There’s a place for opinionated journalism; in fact, it’s vital. But our causal, profession-wide smugness and protestations of superiority are making us unable to do it well.
Our theme now should be humility. We must become more impartial, not less so. We have to abandon our easy culture of tantrums and recrimination. We have to stop writing these know-it-all, 140-character sermons on social media and admit that, as a class, journalists have a shamefully limited understanding of the country we cover.
What’s worse, we don’t make much of an effort to really understand, and with too few exceptions, treat the economic grievances of Middle America like they’re some sort of punchline. Sometimes quite literally so, such as when reporters tweet out a photo of racist-looking Trump supporters and jokingly suggest that they must be upset about free trade or low wages.
We have to fix this, and the broken reasoning behind it. There’s a fleeting fun to gang-ups and groupthink. But it’s not worth what we are losing in the process.
58 million+ ?dimejinky99 wrote:Silent majority is bullshit.
We faced that last year here in the marriage equality referendum. It wasn't a majority. It was a few backward hicks holding the whole show up. This is probably the same writ large.
EJ wrote:58 million+ ?dimejinky99 wrote:Silent majority is bullshit.
We faced that last year here in the marriage equality referendum. It wasn't a majority. It was a few backward hicks holding the whole show up. This is probably the same writ large.
I agree, and on the flipside you cannot ignore the racial aspect. These are divisions that also need serious attention and healing. Some of this behavior is not okay. It needs to be condemned when the KKK marches for your victory.tragabigzanda wrote:Great read Bi_3, thanks for posting.
Strat, re: Day 1 in Trump's America -- many of the victims there (or perhaps their parents) have already been through this, after 9/11. I bet the same people who made bigoted comments then are the same ones doing it now. Those people are always going to exist, and it's absolutely imperative that we continue to reject their beliefs. But I think it's just as vital that we make a real effort to embrace the non-racist Trump supporters, to understand their frustrations, and to understand how we may have been implicit in their suffering. Otherwise we run the risk of their aligning themselves with the racist faction again in 2020.
100%. The Supreme Court said they could march, but as President (or Prez-elect) you have a moral obligation to tell them to go fuck themselves.Strat wrote:I agree, and on the flipside you cannot ignore the racial aspect. These are divisions that also need serious attention and healing. Some of this behavior is not okay. It needs to be condemned when the KKK marches for your victory.tragabigzanda wrote:Great read Bi_3, thanks for posting.
Strat, re: Day 1 in Trump's America -- many of the victims there (or perhaps their parents) have already been through this, after 9/11. I bet the same people who made bigoted comments then are the same ones doing it now. Those people are always going to exist, and it's absolutely imperative that we continue to reject their beliefs. But I think it's just as vital that we make a real effort to embrace the non-racist Trump supporters, to understand their frustrations, and to understand how we may have been implicit in their suffering. Otherwise we run the risk of their aligning themselves with the racist faction again in 2020.
I'll deny it.Strat wrote:Nobody denies hillary was a flawed candidate,
Go on.....durdencommatyler wrote:I'll deny it.Strat wrote:Nobody denies hillary was a flawed candidate,
FTR: I totally supported her and wanted her as president.Strat wrote:Go on.....durdencommatyler wrote:I'll deny it.Strat wrote:Nobody denies hillary was a flawed candidate,
There is probably some truth to it. I also absolutely believe, to the core of my soul, that there are 30 million Americans minimum who are deeply, unwaveringly racist. Conservatives like to say that liberals live in a bubble where they think they are smarter than their counterparts, but conservatives live in the bubble that tells them that each of their constituents are voting on real grievances or insights. Part of what Trump did that they had not was to openly own the rhetoric of racism. Just because he won, everyone wants to sit back and say "gee whiz, maybe there's something there." But people vote on rhetoric. Most people don't know what HITECH is, or how the Clean Air Act does or does not utilize stack heights to determine adherence standards. In fact, the American populace votes based on almost literally no knowledge of the issues they are voting on. So they look to the rhetoric of the candidate to guide them.Strat wrote:And the theory i just started working on (like 3 seconds before the start o this post) is that the silent majority that snuck up on everyone, are probably not racist but detest the system and hillary clinton. The vocal minority are racist, bigots, and dumb.
Work in progress here though
no don'tStrat wrote:Go on.....durdencommatyler wrote:I'll deny it.Strat wrote:Nobody denies hillary was a flawed candidate,
You are on the right track. Growing up in North Carolina and hearing Rush Limbaugh on the radio everyday in my dad's car, I can atest to the hate people have for HRC. The campaign against her started 30 years ago and it got deep into people's heads. My first inkling that things might not go well was Tuesday morning when I texted two NC friends who are not politically minded and don't vote. They both responded similarly, "I voted for Trump. He sucks a million dicks, but that is one less than Hillary."Strat wrote:And the theory i just started working on (like 3 seconds before the start o this post) is that the silent majority that snuck up on everyone, are probably not racist but detest the system and hillary clinton. The vocal minority are racist, bigots, and dumb.
Work in progress here though
