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[Cthulhu]

Between Hillary and Trump, yes.  America's got a ton of goofy-ass problems that it's going to have to address eventually.  The capture of ostensibly democratic government by various cabals of unelected influencers, the ideological divide so great you start to think about partitioning the US, abysmal performance in metrics from health to education, we still don't have any good dota teams, the list goes on.

Would a Clinton presidency have fixed any of that shit?  No, Hillary is hitting the snooze button when you're already late for work.  The longer you put off going to the dentist the more teeth you're gonna lose.

Bernie might've been different but Bernie had no chance. 

[RedKing]

And Trump was what....a brick to the face to knock out the bad teeth?

I get that "Everything's fucked up and we need CHANGE" was a reason for voting Trump. A shitty, shitty reason, but a reason I understand.
Events have seemingly invalidated any part of Trump being that agent of chaos change.

[MrRoboto75]

Would a Clinton presidency have fixed any of that shit?  No, Hillary is hitting the snooze button when you're already late for work.

Trump is about burning the workplace to the ground over a red Swingline.  At this point, who cares about being late.

Trump isn't going to mend any divides in the country, he's put a homeschooler as head of education, and would probably just promote private schools for the rich anyway, and his party is taking shotgun and chainsaw to the current healthcare system.  And as a 70 year old he cares none for competing with Korea over any moba.  Unless our Dotes team names themselves the Trump team.  Either he'd care or sue their asses.

You can work towards making problems so alarmingly bad that everyone has no choice but to care, but in the meantime you have to live with everything being alarmingly bad as opposed to whatever status quo you started with.  Up until whatever change you sought after happens.  If it happens.

[Cthulhu]

Trump is a deep-bone abscess.  His existence makes it impossible to ignore how fucked up our mouth is and he demands immediate and sweeping corrective action.

If we're shifting analogies, Hillary is putting some oragel on and popping a vicodin and acting like everything's fine. 

You can work towards making problems so alarmingly bad that everyone has no choice but to care, but in the meantime you have to live with everything being alarmingly bad as opposed to whatever status quo you started with.

They were already alarmingly bad before Trump got elected.  The root canal's gonna happen, you just have to decide when you want to do it.

[EnigmaticHat]

Why?  The country showed notable improvement under Obama.  Even if he did nothing but the ACA and Paris Accords, which isn't true, that would still be a damn good presidency.

[RedKing]

Okay, fine, whatever.
Here's the problem: It's not as if the country has been wandering for forty years in the desert, just waiting for someone to lead the way. We've had leaders. And for each one, half the people think they've been great, the other half think we've been lucky to survive them.

 
We have a fundamental problem in this country, which is that we are increasingly two separate populations with diametrically opposed political ideologies. For a long time, those ideologues were just the tails of the bell curve, and while they could tug a little at the overall distribution, the bulk of policies were made with the center largely in mind.

Now, 25+ years of "the only thing in the middle of the road is a dead skunk" politics and media tomfuckery has yielded an electorate that's a W-shaped graph, where the valley in the middle are largely those who are disengaged from the process and are only "swing voters" because they don't pay attention until a week or so before stepping into the voting booth.

To expand on your dental analogy, if Trump is a deep-bone abscess, then we're in the middle of a schizophrenic breakdown where half our brain wants to have expensive restorative surgery, and the other half just wants to yank ALL the teeth and change our name to "Bleeding Gums Murphy". And we're on the verge of picking up a knife and cutting ourselves to make the voices stop.

All Trump has done has been to show us just how bad the divide is (which anyone paying attention during the last eight years could have told you), and then make it worse. So thank you ever so much for contributing to that.

[Starver]

Meh, this is applicable to the Republicans as well, or any politician really.

It doesn't apply to Trump!

(Whoops...  And even August 2015..!  But then I imagine there's not many people left here who credibly believe he's beholden to nobody but himself, financially...)

[PTTG??]

I think there's more kinds of voters:

1.) Low-Information Dedicated Voters: A large group of voters, possibly the plurality. They vote for the letter, not the person, and will not change.
2.) Low-Information Swing Voters: Those who don't pay much attention but vote anyway. They might change their minds.
3.) High-Information Voters: Those that know who they're voting for when they vote for county judges. They might have party preference or might not; they might even vote strategically against their preferred candidate in order to secure a win for a second-choice. Most importantly, they do dedicated research on individuals and policies before voting and that research is fact-based and useful.
4.) Ideological Democrats: Support the Democratic party, not any individual all that much. May be well-informed or not.
5.) Ideological Republicans: Support the Republican party, not any individual. In all neutrality, generally more poorly informed on issues (tends to watch Fox, tends to believe WMDs were found, tends to believe that the 2008 recession was caused by Obama.)
6.) Deconstructionists: Trump supporters. Not connected to reality in a politically meaningful way. See any government action as negative.

As bad as it sounds, I'm something of an optimist for supposing that #3 is an important group. Many of my friends say that highly informed people aren't a major influence in American politics.

[martinuzz]

After a long conversation with Trump, French president Macron says he is quite confident that Trump will change his mind about the Paris agreement, and join it after all.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Despite what Macron believes, he is not in fact the incarnae of Jupiter and cannot wrestle the storm.

[misko27]

Frustration is a powerful tool.

Trump is a deep-bone abscess.  His existence makes it impossible to ignore how fucked up our mouth is and he demands immediate and sweeping corrective action.

Can you provide any evidence whatsoever for the claim that Trump is impossible to ignore? It seems a large number of people are managing just fine, which would mean that it is not only possible, but happening.

They were already alarmingly bad before Trump got elected.  The root canal's gonna happen, you just have to decide when you want to do it.

Can I ask why exactly you are so convinced it will happen? I mean you speak here with the certainty of a saint and the authority of a prophet: why must it happen?

It's not a trivial question you know. Since you've gone with the teeth metaphor, a question: Do you actually know what happens when you don't treat an abscess? It doesn't just get worse and worse until you see a doctor after all. Often, an untreated abscess kills the patient, hollowing out nerve tissue and spreading the infection internally. An abscess untreated can be quite literally a death sentence: Ludwig's Angina, sepsis, meningitis, brain abscess... So again, as you (but I would never be so bold as to say only you) seem play chicken with our lives, tell me again why you think that worse is better? Typically, better is better; here you are asserting that it is otherwise, and I would expect a LOT of evidence to be brought to bear to defend such an audacious claim, but instead, it is merely- what, demanded of us that we believe that black is white? Are we not allowed to consider for ourselves what may well be collective suicide? For it certainly will be if those who demand we make things worse decide it...

What's most annoying is that I-no, we, as a society, have already had this conversation, and your side won! Trump is already the worse getting worse than it was! When is the better that comes after that we were promised? A month, a year, a decade? When do we get to say that, perhaps, you were mistaken...?

Despite what Macron believes, he is not in fact the incarnae of Jupiter and cannot wrestle the storm.

Perhaps, but there is no harm in trying. Either he succeeds, and the results will be a testament to his Jovian will, or he fails, and those who demand misery are satisfied while the rest of us are no worse off than before (although some will begrudge us even that).

[SalmonGod]

Why?  The country showed notable improvement under Obama.  Even if he did nothing but the ACA and Paris Accords, which isn't true, that would still be a damn good presidency.

I don't know that I can agree with the statement that the country showed notable improvement.  Just because he left with some accomplishments under his belt doesn't mean it was an overall win.

He also did a bunch of authoritarian shit that reinforced the means by which the USA does a lot of its worse stuff.

*He re-defined civilian to exclude any male of military age who happens to be in the vicinity of a U.S. military action.
*Continued expansion of surveillance apparatus that is heavily abused to hinder progressive activism, and supported extensions of the Patriot Act (with minor adjustments to improve oversight)
*Punished whistleblowers with greater fervor than all previous administrations in U.S. history combined
*Filled plenty of administration positions with classic revolving door/conflict of interest industry insiders.
*While he was certainly more friendly to the environment than any Republican, he waited until the very end of his presidency for his most concrete actions on the subject.  Approved Phase 3 of the Keystone pipeline - a pipeline which has already had a major spill.  Actually expanded offshore drilling after Deepwater Horizon, before returning on that issue in the last couple years.  Everyone points to the Paris Agreement, but that means nothing until we see how it translates into sustained action by participating countries.
*Kid gloved the rampant corruption that led to the great recession.  Inequality continued to increase at record-breaking pace to record-breaking extremes throughout his terms, while his administration continued to call their response a success.  And what protections were put in place after 2008 are being quietly knocked down in the midst of all the spastic Trump media hysteria so the same players can do it all over again, because none of them ever faced any goddamn real consequences.

I know the response will be something about purity politics, or "well sure he wasn't perfect, but..."  The guy is like-able as hell, especially relative to the world of politics.  But responses like that still aren't going to make egregious violations of my values and interests palatable to me, even if they're combined with some positives.  It reads to me like the kind of logic you'd see from an abused spouse.

[EnigmaticHat]

Okay, fine, whatever.
Here's the problem: It's not as if the country has been wandering for forty years in the desert, just waiting for someone to lead the way. We've had leaders. And for each one, half the people think they've been great, the other half think we've been lucky to survive them.

 
We have a fundamental problem in this country, which is that we are increasingly two separate populations with diametrically opposed political ideologies. For a long time, those ideologues were just the tails of the bell curve, and while they could tug a little at the overall distribution, the bulk of policies were made with the center largely in mind.

Now, 25+ years of "the only thing in the middle of the road is a dead skunk" politics and media tomfuckery has yielded an electorate that's a W-shaped graph, where the valley in the middle are largely those who are disengaged from the process and are only "swing voters" because they don't pay attention until a week or so before stepping into the voting booth.

To expand on your dental analogy, if Trump is a deep-bone abscess, then we're in the middle of a schizophrenic breakdown where half our brain wants to have expensive restorative surgery, and the other half just wants to yank ALL the teeth and change our name to "Bleeding Gums Murphy". And we're on the verge of picking up a knife and cutting ourselves to make the voices stop.

All Trump has done has been to show us just how bad the divide is (which anyone paying attention during the last eight years could have told you), and then make it worse. So thank you ever so much for contributing to that.

Yeah, because we live in a country where an environmental scientist and a climate change denier both get equal screentime on CNN and that's "balanced".  Democrats have been trying to make themselves inoffensive to republicans for years and its got us nowhere.  Gimping ourselves by pretending that the other side has a point is dumb.  Yeah, both sides basically live in separate countries.  That doesn't mean that there isn't a genuine ideological conflict.  I'm tired of people pretending that Trump and Hillary are somehow equivalent.  Just as tired as I am of hearing that the democrats and republicans are equal but opposite.

Look at the Paris Accord.  A democratic president organized it.  A republican president backed out even tho literally every other country on Earth either signed it with two exceptions that still agreed with its goals.  And that decision was not against the party platform or the dominant conservative voices either.  The full range of authoritarian to democratic, polluting to non-polluting, developed to pre-industrial, doesn't matter.  We're the only ones.  You want to tell me that would have happened under a democrat?  Same thing for healthcare.  No other nation on Earth is making the same mistakes we are.  And its not because of partisanship.  Its because of republicans, full stop.  I ain't going to cooperate with that shit, and I'm not going to respect it either.  Not that you can shake a hand that isn't offered regardless.

Hillary isn't the same thing as Trump.  I'm not going to apologize for saying that.  And before you respond that that wasn't your point, my original post wasn't responding to you, it was responding to Cthulu.

[SalmonGod]

Example of why I'm critical of the perceived gravity of the Paris Accord -- the murders of environmental activists around the world continues to increase year by year.  You'd think that holding global corporations accountable in some manner would be a good place to start, since many who are implicated in these events are based in countries that signed this agreement.  The same year that the USA signed this agreement, it was using state forces to shove Native American protestors naked into dog cages, because they wouldn't step aside for oil.

[Frumple]

And it was still an improvement, if for no other reason than being a diplomatic signifier of intent to at least fucking look like you're doing something. Damn thing wasn't binding at goddamn all -- functionally, signing it would have been pretty much exactly the same as not. But that wasn't the bloody gravity of it, it was major countries coming together and publicly announcing that, yes, they can all agree we have a fucking problem of notable magnitude and we need to at least fake working together to fix it well enough no one notices we're not trying too hard. Maybe even actually ruddy do something.

It was a step forward and another brick in a foundation to get shit done, not a silver bullet or monument to survival erected in the flaming asscrack of existence. Gravity of it was precisely that and not much more, and whoohoo now we get to not have even that.