It's here! God it's like Christmas morning only without the presents, joy, holiday cheer, tree, decorations, and your crabby Uncle that nobody likes. Okay maybe not so much. Perhaps more like Lady Macbeth and the damn spot, at least with respect to the campaign.
My prediction - Hillary wins with 300+ electoral votes and Trump gives a mostly gracious - although at times caustic - concession speech. So I guess there could be some joy and holiday cheer. Senate is either 50/50 or 51-49 in favor of GOP. In the case of the latter we get 4 years of Mitch McConnell's jowls all over my Teevee. Yuck.
I can't wait for 2020!
Anyway - go vote and open thread!
(and if any of the other front pages want to add to this or take it down and put up your own thread - go right ahead!)
If I've done this correctly, Ugh's post (long may it wave!) should be above this one. Just thought that you might like to read some non-US political stuff and this is fascinating, at least to me. It also makes complaints about money for speeches or putting people on boards seem like pretty small change.
Currently, the South Korean President, Park Geun-hye, is not having the best of times. The shitstorm that is happening in Korea makes our current political scene the model of thoughtfulness. This take, from ASK A KOREAN! blog, gives the basic details. From the post
In an ordinary case of political corruption, the politician is in it for himself. At most, the politician is doing it for his family, or other rich people who may end up helping him later. Obviously, corruption is bad. But this type of self-interested corruption at least gives some measure of predictability. We all know what self-interest looks like. Even though we would prefer that our politicians are not corrupt, at least we know how corrupt politicians behave.
But not with Park Geun-hye. Her corruption was not self-interested at all. If anything, her corruption was self-sacrificing in favor of Choi Soon-sil. Among the numerous revelations, I personally found this the most pathetic: Park Geun-hye gave Choi a sizable budget to purchase the presidential wardrobe, and Choi embezzled most of it. Instead of purchasing the clothes that befitted a head of state, Choi outfitted Park Geun-hye with crappy clothes that she had her cronies made with subpar material. There is a video of Choi's staff smoking and drinking while eating fried chicken, right next to the suit meant for Park Geun-hye. At one point, one of the staff members handled the suit without even wiping chicken grease from his hands, while breathing smoke onto the clothes. Park Geun-hye would wear this suit on her presidential visit with Xi Jinping. For accessories, Choi gave Park the cheap leather purses and clutches that her gigolo designed. This could not have possibly escaped Park's notice. Even assuming the unlikely possibility Park Geun-hye might not have had the discernment to know firsthand (unlikely because she grew up in the lap of luxury,) the obvious cheapness of Park's clothes and bags even made the news. Yet nothing came of it. Choi Soon-sil dressed Park Geun-hye liked an unwanted doll, and Park, the president of the country, did not care.
Even in her apology, Park Geun-hye showed that she still might be under Choi Soon-sil's hold. What would a self-interested politician would do, if the corruption of one of his cronies was revealed? The politician would sell the crony down the river, denying up and down that he ever knew or interacted with the crony. Such denial would be cowardly and dishonest, but at least it is predictable. But not with Park Geun-hye. She stood in front of the whole country and admitted that Choi Soon-sil fixed her speeches. Instead of cutting ties with her, Park reaffirmed that Choi was an old friend who helped her during difficult times.
This is utterly irrational. Rational people can expect that a corrupt politician may steal money for himself. They can even expect that he may steal for his family. But no one can expect that a corrupt politician would steal money for a daughter of a fucking psychic who claimed to speak with her dead mother. No one, not even the most cynical Korean, expected that the president would refuse to cut ties with Choi Soon-sil, a woman with no discernible talent other than manipulating the president and humiliating her in the process. Koreans may expect that the president would be corrupt, but they never could have expected that the president might be feeble in her mind.
One thing may not be quite right is that everything did not start with Park's daughter getting an admission into Ewha Women's University, but rather an arrest for gambling, according to this WaPo article
Anyway, know that as bad as it may be, it is always worse somewhere else...
A few weeks ago Sprog the Elder, who was born in 1989, asked me to explain why some people hate Hillary Rodham Clinton so very, very much. She knew that it went back to the Bill Clinton administration, but had no idea what it was based on. This is more or less what I told her:
It was misogyny, of course. But explaining the particular flavor of anti-Hillary misogyny involves both what I remember from the 90s, and things that have only become clear in retrospect. The simplest way to put it: as Sady Doyle says, she disrupted the narrative--which meant people were culturally prepared to cast her as the villain.
From the start of the 1992 campaign, as I recall, Hillary refused to sit in any of the usual boxes -- even the feminist/not-feminist ones. Every modern First Lady is expected to have a policy interest, and Hillary's has always been children's health and education. This should be perfectly ladylike and even conventional, but she never addressed it in a ladylike way.
Hillary's basic personality is Hermione Granger: she's the nerd girl who knows too much, whose hand is always up first, who studies the hardest and who always has the damn right answer. Even in fiction this can be irritating, and in real life (as you know) it really gets a lot of people's backs up, especially coming from a woman.
Even Michelle Obama fits into the "conventional First Lady" box more easily than Hillary did. Michelle has her signature policy issues (children's nutrition, for instance), but they're in a separate area from the "big issues" that men take seriously. And Michelle's persona as First Lady has been "the cool smart mom", more relaxed and friendly than Hermione could be.
For all his faults (and boy howdy, there are lots), Bill Clinton was always upfront about how much he respected Hillary's abilities, how he (a Rhodes Scholar) thought she was the brains of the outfit. During that 1992 campaign, Bill said that by electing him voters would get "two for the price of one" because Hillary would come, too.
In retrospect, "two [Presidents] for the price of one" was a prediction more than an exaggeration, but the implications were way too feminist for a lot of people to deal with. Not just conservatives, either: look at The West Wing, supposedly based on the Clinton White House but with one particular person conspicuous by her absence.
So I think that from the very beginning, Hillary was hated not just for being a woman who "didn't know her place", but because Bill himself had implied that she might want to be, and be able to be, President. Eleanor Roosevelt also was the target of vitriolic hate, and like Hillary was called "That Woman" -- for being uppity, for political activism, for civil rights. But Eleanor didn't have the smell of ambition, of the drive for power found in someone who's seriously going to run for President. That kind of ambition is considered acceptable and even admirable in men, but in women it really goes against the grain of our culture.
I remember talking with Mr Dr Science toward at the end of Bill Clinton's Presidency (around when Hillary was running for NY Senator) about a tabloid headline I'd just seen in the grocery store. It proclaimed "Hillary's Secret Plan to Run for President!" -- and we laughed and said, what secret? I also remember riding up to an Iraq War protest in early 2003 with a bunch of other rank-and-file Democrats, talking about how we were looking forward to Hillary running for President in 2008.
It's as though the campaign against Hillary becoming the first female President started in 1992--even though no-one was conscious of it in those terms, yet.
Since I talked to Sprog about this, I've concluded that another element was also involved, related to what Anil Dash calls the Law of Fail:
Once a web community has decided to dislike a person, topic, or idea, the conversation will shift from criticizing the idea to become a competition about who can be most scathing in their condemnation.
This isn't just an online thing: this happens in all kinds of human communities, from 6-year-olds on up. Oddly, I can't find a term for it in social psychology or sociology. Outgroup derogation misses A) how the outside element doesn't have to be a group, it can be an individual, an idea, a style, a tool (… an operating system, type of music, clothing, food, car, pet, you name it); and B) the positive feedback cycle of derogation. It's a kind of performative hatred, almost completely detached from its object. It's easy and can be a lot of fun, showing off how witty (obscene, insightful, sarcastic, scatological, depending your group's style) you can be, without attacking any of your fellow group members.
I think performative hatred toward women is a big ingredient in the Trainwreck phenomenon Sady Doyle writes about. You can also see a lot of performative hatred toward things associated with women: Justin Bieber, for instance, or yoga pants. It makes a fun, competitive game out of misogyny, one that both boys & girls can play. … Yeah.
What I noticed pretty early on in Bill Clinton's first term was that Hillary became a performative hate target for a *lot* of people (not all of them Republicans). It was possible to make a career out of Hillary hatred, even in the periods when she was most popular, and that has continued to this day.
When I see commenters here & elsewhere talking about how Hillary is an obviously "terrible candidate" and Democrats should have nominated someone else, it seems to me they're looking at Hillary Hatred and either buying into it, or else they think being hated should disqualify her. (And for those of you who think she's a criminal, a habitual liar, or corrupt: that's the Hillary Hatred bubble talking, I'm not even going to argue against it any more.) Frankly, it really burns my grits, because I don't think the first woman to get to the brink of the American Presidency could *not* be hated.
What I and other Hillary supporters see, in contrast, is someone who could endure and get work done in the face of decades of brutal, slimy, ceaseless attacks. We see the toughest, most determined and self-controlled person in American politics, with a truly astounding strength of character. But of course toughness, determination, and steely self-control are traditionally more masculine than feminine virtues, so they also disrupt the usual narrative.
It's interesting, then, that so many journalists & others have talked about Trump's campaign as being disruptive & driven by a desire for change, while overlooking how Hillary's candidacy and (probably) Presidency will disrupt our baked-in stories about what is possible in this nation and even in the world. I mean, there a a bunch of other countries where women have been elected leader, but I don't know if any have done so on such an explicitly feminist platform, before. That's what I really never expected to see in my lifetime.
I looked for various pictures to go with this post and got really depressed, so I think I'll just do videos.
Hillary supporter Beyoncé covering "A Change Is Gonna Come" (including all-female chamber orchestra):
"Roar" from the Hillary Campaign, song by supporter Katy Perry:
And later tonight, a livestreamed rally in Philadelphia with both Clintons, both Obamas, and NJ icons Jon Bon Jovi AND Bruce Springsteen.
Someone will throw up an open thread tomorrow for so-called "Election Day" (3:10 mark), including possibly me, in the meantime:
Kudos (do people say kudos anymore or is it like "swell" which has been uncool since at least Superman the Movie?) to the IRS - if ever there were an election where a Presidential Candidate's tax returns were going to be leaked to the press this was it, especially considering the GOP has engaged in a years long, mostly bogus, crusade against the IRS vilifying the agency and its employees again and again and again and accusing the Obama Administration of using the agency as a political weapon. And yet, as of the day before the election, nothing. Compare that to the FBI, leaking like a sieve....
Immediate post election Trump (or Trompoloco) meme: Election stolen by illegal immigrants, to wit "another key issue with the growing Hispanic vote is that the public polls seem to have missed it or at least missed it a significant amount of it." As Josh notes, an actual poll failure, as opposed to the apparently mythical "missing white voters."
Lest we forget the goings on the last time the GOP occupied the White House - and I don't think any of the GOP candidates from this election repudiated this approach (happy to be wrong).
Also, too, vote suppression is a long term GOP project that pre-dates and will post-date Trump. It may swing the Senate election in North Carolina, where according to the elections project twitter account it's the only southern state where African-American early voting declined.... UPDATE: Massive non-evidence of voter fraud!
Hope for after the election! Or is it merely bread & circuses?
The polls close in California at 11pm eastern time tomorrow....
I was reviewing old posts and I came across this on cybershaming
It is also the topic of a recent Black Mirror Episode (which is a series that I'm enjoying quite a bit).
Ten years have passed since I published that original article, and experience with the topic has suggested to me that the issue is worse than I guessed at the time. I think I'd like to get to a norm where most outside-of-work behavior doesn't cause problems for most jobs, and a situation where we can stop crazy shame storms from whipping across the internet. I think those two ideas are related. But I have no idea how to get there.
Consider this an open post on the problems (or not if you think it isn't a big deal) of cyber shaming OR on Black Mirror.
Grab your towel it's one week to go and per the radio this morning Trump leads by 1% in at least one poll among likely voters post-James Comey's stupidity (I'm being generous, but, please resign, thx).
In the latest news, unsurprisingly, Trump's tax losses may not be kosher for tax purposes. Will he release his returns and prove the haters wrong? No. The Nixon Administration wasn't a cautionary tale, it was a how-to manual!
More broadly, it seems the GOP has realized a few things. One, they will not be punished by voters for blocking any and all Democratic SCOTUS nominees, so why not? Even showing their "letting the voters have their say" via the Presidential election rhetoric was transparent BS is not going to stop or harm them (and, I mean, sh1t, "let the voters have their say" and then decide that you're not going to let voters have their say after all really should be beyond the pale). I predict if Hillary wins and the GOP retains control of the Senate, we will have an 8 member (or fewer) SCOTUS until after the 2020 election, absent something extraordinary happening.
Two, that the Democrats weakness is, in the immortal words of General Zod, that they "actually care[] about these . . . . . .these People. These earth People."* Whereas the GOP, ISTM, in large measure does not, in a kind of "fnck this we're shutting down the federal government and let people suffer, they mostly vote Democratic anyway." See also, aforementioned SCOTUS nomination, vote suppression, opposition to LGBT rights, promotion of torture, etc.
Three, there is no penalty for straight out lying to the public. The GOP has so severely discredited the dreaded MSMTM that even indisputable proof will not impact the minds of the GOP base, which is unsurprising, but also it seems large swaths of independent voters. So, if the NYTimes, or WaPo, or ABC/NBC/CBS or heck even the WSJ report that X is not true with proof, it's just more lies.
I could go on, but why?
UPDATE: To go on, one party seems to think widespread, organized, and invidious voter suppression and intimidation is just fine and dandy, thank you. Lying to the federal courts, also, too. But both sides, people, both sides.
*To which Ursa responded in a GOP tone perfect "Sentimental idiot."
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