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[EnigmaticHat]

I'm not going to defend some hypothetical post by someone else.

I feel like you must not hang out with blue state liberals much.  The dumb hick stereotpe is unfortunately common among the Anerican left.  Plus around the time of the election the internet was flooded with "I'm from small town America and I can explain why people are voting for Trump" type articles.

[RedKing]

From whom? Certainly not me

That's not a coherent argument. Who mentioned you?

From other people who were ideologically opposed to hearing that large numbers of working class people were siding with Trump, for whatever reasons. As I said, this happened to me, and wierd mentions something similar happened to him, so let's just admit it was
a thing that happened".

The point was ... reality happened, and some people on the liberal side of things tried to define it as not happening. And that is a much bigger threat to the left than the alt-right is.

I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm saying let's get some sense of proportion here.

IIRC, that "Ancient Aliens" dude on History channel has a Ph.D.
If you say "Look, scientists are saying it was aliens" you're ignoring that a tiny, tiny, unstable fraction of scientists are saying it was aliens.

Mainiac was not (other than in his own mind) the Official Spokesperson of The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. I'm gonna have to go dig up the old threads and find some evidence to back this up, because I was pretty goddamn active in those discussions, and I don't remember "Trump's base is all/mostly upper-class elites" being a mainstream argument *at all*.

but the opinion that "Middle class and poor people voting for Trump makes precisely zero sense." was mainstream then.

That can be categorically true, without excluding the possibility that people often make decisions which are entirely against their self-interest.

[Reelya]

I think you're missing the big picture, where I mentioned that was one of the ways in which a cognitive disonnance between labor-era politics and modern politics expresses itself.

e.g. this is an example of the type of way that holding onto a flawed or outdated model with conviction causes people to make serious errors when trying to interpret what's going on in reality.

Arguing about whether you ever expressed this exact idea doesn't seem like a coherent argument against that general concept.

In fact you seem to be engaging in the very behavior you claim not to. You are

(1) denying factual things that happened with multiple witnesses purely because they challenge your deeply held belief system

(2) over-reacting and strawmanning that if you accept what I'm talking about it's a "great left wing conspiracy". Since nobody is saying anything of that sort, you're just engaging in hyperbole to shut down what you feel is an opposing viewpoint, which also proves the point.

[RedKing]

Dude. STOP.

by arguing how you as an individual never uttered that sentence as an argument against the fact that someone did

I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm saying let's get some sense of proportion here.

EDIT: Oh Jesus in a handbasket...."vast-left wing conspiracy" is a sardonic way to refer to the Left as though it were some grand, coherent organization (which it's not). Any inference of an actual conspiracy, or aspersions relating to an actual conspiracy are just....


No, that's not what I meant. >_<

[Reelya]

Why are you bringing up a "great leftwing conspiracy" strawman argument, if you're only worried about keeping things in proportion?

If you start arguing like that it just makes you seem insane. you cherry pick one thing you doubt, based on no evidence, take that completely out of context, then accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist, without having addressed any of the points I made.

[Reelya]

The issue is he pulled that one sentence from my post and made the whole discussion about it. That's the opposite of keeping things in proportion.

I'm not the one that highlighted that statement as the main issue here, RedKing took exception to the original sentence (which was just part of a much larger post), I then clarified that it was a real thing, RedKing then objected to it being a topic of discussion in itself, despite the fact that it was RedKing who originally acted confrontational over that statement.

[RedKing]

The issue is he pulled that one sentence from my post and made the whole discussion about it. That's the opposite of keeping things in proportion.

I'm not the one that highlighted that statement as the main issue here, all i did was clarify what I was talking about.

I actually broke your post into three seperate chunks and discussed each in turn. The one you're referring to, I spent one sentence on. Literally the least attention.


EDIT: Also, I was not literally referring to the Messiah fitting into a handbasket. In case that needed clarification.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Let's just stop discussing this. This is one of those arguments that's insubstantial and doesn't get anywhere, just spins its tires until someone ragequits.

[Reelya]

I've gave you the information you asked for repeatedly, each time you made additional demands that were more unreasonable each time.

e.g. first time you said "nobody ever did X!" so i just pointed out "well people did X to me" and we had other people point out they'd experienced the same thing.

then you scoffed "Who did X? I never did X", which is ... just being a dick on purpose now. It's not even a coherent point, it's just dismissing people's personal testimony based on exactly nothing.

After that you accused me of pushing some grand conspiracy theory ... which is just madman raving territory now.

Seriously dude, not doing your own argument any favors here with these tactics.

[RedKing]

I've gave you the information you asked for repeatedly, each time you made additional demands that were more unreasonable each time.

e.g. first time you said "nobody ever did X!" so i just pointed out "well people did X to me" and we had other people point out they'd experienced the same thing.

then you scoffed "Who did X? I never did X", which is ... just being a dick on purpose now.

Seriously dude, not doing your own argument any favors here with these tactics.

No, if I wanted to be a dick, I'd say something like [citation needed] or "pics or GTFO".
 
As it is, I'm going to spend some quality time combing through a few months of the old, old Ameripol thread to find it for you, because it's quite possible I don't remember things accurately. I am getting on towards middle age, after all.

EDIT: THERE WAS NO CONSPIRACY THEORY! IT WAS A GODDAMN LAMEASS JOKE! 

[Reelya]

As it is, I'm going to spend some quality time combing through a few months of the old, old Ameripol thread to find it for you, because it's quite possible I don't remember things accurately. I am getting on towards middle age, after all.

Why do you care so much to troll through months of posts, it was before the election btw, so in the old thread. You have multiple people's testimony that it was a thing.

It's not such a big deal. Some people were in denial about how popular Trump was, and these biases fell on traditional labor/capital boundaries, however political boundaries are shifting away from the traditional labor/capital divide and towards other distinctions, e.g. the international cosmpolitans vs localist/nationalists.

So ... the moral of that story is to think outside the box of traditional models if you want to understand modern politics. If we're  stuck in irrelevant models then we are just going to make an ever-increasing amount of errors of prediction. This is not a controversial viewpoint.

[RedKing]

Why do you care so much to troll through months of posts, it was before the election. You have multiple people's testimony that it was a thing.

Because memory is a fickle thing. I know people who will swear on a stack of Bibles that they saw footage on TV of the poor Kurdish babies killed by Iraqi soldiers in 1991. Despite the fact that it never happened and there is no footage anywhere to corroborate what was later proven to be propaganda.

And as I said, it's quite possible that *my* memory is the fickle one here. But my gut feeling on this is that if this line of argument was present, it was largely from one rather vociferous and aggressive person (at least in the context of the Ameripol thread), and that it's gotten conflated over time to "everybody was saying X". I'm not trying to "win", I'm trying to figure out if that many people really were that freakin blind.

[Reelya]

Before you waste your time I'll look for supporting articles from the media.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/9/15592634/trump-clinton-racism-economy-prri-survey

For example, if you follow the argument here they're downplaying the white working class vote for Trump. And there are other articles that try and do the same. However, the authors omit the most important figure which would prove their point: what percentage of the white working class actually voted for Trump? They didn't think that figure was relevant to their argument which is basically:

(1) we surveyed thousands of white working class people
(2) we found that trump-like views correlate to voting for trump
(3) therefore class has nothing to do with it, agreeing with Trump does!
(4) therefore, it's just bad people (dirty racists) supporting bad candidates

However down below they tabled their data, and depending on the question up to 68% of the white working class expressed Trump-like views on a number of questions (while only 44% of college grads did), showing that the entire argument is largely circular and meaningless. If an overwhelming number of people in one demographic express support for the ideas of a candidate isn't that exactly the same as claiming that the candidate enjoyed support from that demographic?

Instead they give us the argument that people in a specific social class who voted for Trump agreed with him, therefore class isn't predictive: agreeing with Trump is. Which is both wrong and a circular argument.

[Starver]

(So, did he get his crowds?)

[sluissa]

Keep in mind, Reelya, that the media had an absolutely atrocious coverage of the 2016 election. For instance, here's a poll that was done gauging to see which candidate people thought would win.

Here's what journalists thought.

I find it hilarious that most of the media thought that the media was covering Clinton too harshly.


Effectively, what I'm saying is that a majority of journalists believed that Clinton was likely to win the presidency, and possibly shifted their own narratives to fit this conclusion. They deliberately took views that wound minimize the size of the Trump voter base, such as claiming that it had nothing to do with class and everything to do with world view. However, when you compare this to non-journalist voters, and their opinion on who would or would not win starts looking a lot more like a toss-up. Which to me indicates that either voters were far more accepting of the ideas that either a majority of the county are racists who agree with Trump, or that voters agreed on his economic positions and simply ignored the racist crap. Point is, the media for the 2016 election does not accurately represent what the actual public felt.

Not really a fair comparison. The first link is a graph of basically everything after the primaries. The "journalist" view is during the primaries and specifically the "harshness" is taking it in context of the democratic debates. I'm not saying I 100% agree with all of that, but from a POV in April(Poll was actually taken in March though), it definitely seemed like a much higher chance of a Clinton presidency than any time past the conventions excepting maybe the immediate flame up surrounding the "grabbing" tape.