US Election 2016

[Jezza]

[watt price tully]

With respect you said let's reverse it (i.e. a mirror image) however it wasn't.

As I stated it was comparing fact (Facebook) with a questionable photo (non fact).

This is (not) my final word on the matter

Racism is well & truly alive in the US before, during & after Obama.

[Skids]

[Pies4shaw]

Impeachment is a long process - only a mug would punt on successful impeachment in the first 12 months.

Are there assassination odds?

[pietillidie]

[think positive]

[stui magpie]

OK, anyone who thinks Trump is racist, grab yourself your beverage of choice, pull up a seat and read this.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/

It's a long read and has a lot of links if you want to use them, but it's damn good.

[David]

While many people might have called Trump a racist, I don't think it's likely that he holds a belief in racial superiority. Indeed, it's quite possible that he has more progressive views on race than many in the Republican Party. The problem with Trump is that he happily exploited racist sentiments in order to win the vote of people with racist and xenophobic views (and if people think that those sentiments are limited to a few thousand members of the KKK, they're not paying attention). So, is exploiting racism for political gain the same thing as being a racist? Many would say it's just as bad, and I'm not sure they're wrong.

The blogger above takes a far too literal interpretation of what Trump has said. They also seem to misunderstand the idea of dog-whistling, which Trump is a master of (far from being some expression of 'secret' feelings, it's the simple art of saying something indirectly that will appeal to a niche group without risking being associated with them � most politicians do it). Consider an example that few in the media chose to raise: at the beginning of the Republican Party's convention, the Trump campaign chose to put on a parade of victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants. Why did he do this? Clearly, to send the message that illegal immigrants (nearly all of them Hispanic) are violent, rapey thugs waiting under your bed to kill you. This is despite the fact that illegal immigrants are no more likely to commit violent crimes than anyone else.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/07/16/voices-gomez-undocumented-immigrant-crime-san-francisco-shooting/30159479/

If you still don't see what's racist about that, imagine an Australian election ad focused solely on victims of crime committed by Aboriginal people. Or on people killed by Asian drivers. This is why the "Mexican rapists" line appalled even Republican politicians, themselves accustomed to participating in racist dog-whistling on subjects like voter fraud. Trump took it to the next level.

Is Trump 'openly racist'? Probably not. But it's hardly breaking news that people are given to hyperbole � like, literally. I've argued this line in the past, that it's counterproductive to refer to xenophobia as it blinds us to what real racism is, makes our public discourse more hysterical and overlooks some of the reasonable sentiments underpinning xenophobia (which make it a no less dangerous phenomenon). But focusing on this particular exaggeration seems like a red herring when Trump has already pushed public discourse on topics like immigration and ethnicity well beyond the realm of normal decency. The concept that we need to wait until someone actually puts a white hood on before denouncing their views as racist is absurd, simply because no serious political candidate � even one literally advocating Klan policies � would ever do this. If you can't read between the lines of what politicians say, what they mean and what they want various people to think they mean, then you can't understand politics. And you'll run the risk of falling for a picture of Trump eating Tacos as evidence that he's not really using anti-Hispanic prejudice for political gain.

[pietillidie]

He's not racist, he's narcissistically exploitative. You know, kick-the-old drunk-in-the-balls-and-stomp-on-his-head-for-applause exploitative. Doing that is not racist, because he'd do that to anyone whose suffering or misfortune would buttress his desire. That's his psychiatric condition.

The very discussion is cringeworthy. You wouldn't do it; I wouldn't do it; only the lowest piece of rat filth either of us has ever met would do it for self glorification.

[Wokko]

Nope, you're just another brainwashed regressive

www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/10/report-donald-trump-stopped-baseball-bat-beating-on-new-york-city-street-in-1991/

[David]

Just a couple of years after he paid for a full-page newspaper ad calling for five innocent African-American men to be given the death penalty, right?

Whatever Trump's personal virtues (and they're not exactly much to write home about), his campaign strategies speak for themselves.

[stui magpie]

OH dear, the brainwashing runs deeply.

I'm not going to argue, the content of the article speaks for itself.

[HAL]

Oops. Too much data.

[What'sinaname]

I hope Trump takes over from Eddie

[pietillidie]

"People are as they have always been" is both basic wisdom and basic science. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Turnbull, Abbott, Howard, Keating - there was nothing new to see with any of them.

You can pretty much extend that to: "People are as they have always been, know what they have always known, and care about what they've always cared about".

I see no special reasons to waive that assumption. And there doesn't seem to have been any dramatic life experiences, wise ageing or existential crises which have mellowed the individual concerned.

The more reasonable hope is not that Trump's essential psychiatry has changed, but that the left-field move of importing him into the oddball context of politics, with its push and pull, can produce good outcomes. That is still possible, regardless of his psychiatry.

However, as explained, that is a very high-risk, un-costed play. There's simply no low-cost way, based on the decades of given information, to get around that.