It’s official: Vladimir Putin stole the US election. Now what do we do?

@kupo & Gipsz Jakab

Admittedly I’m young enough that I can only speak for the last 12 years or so, but I remember a time when a troll was just that, the goofy harmless one who just comes in to fool around, being at worst a bit annoying (that was the great majority). Wasn’t much overlap between bullies and trolls either, in my limited experience.

And then you had the truly great ones. The ones that actually provided something. But they were pretty rare. Still, that’s how I met one of my best friends !

But that era’s over.

Upon proof-reading this I decided I should preemptively apologize for the ensuing rant-ishness haha:

While the alleged (forgive me if after the Bush years I take unnamed CIA sources with an enormous grain of salt) interference in our election is obviously an enormous problem, we can’t forget that Clinton was massively flawed. I think people tend to look over that point (idk about here I’m not in the comments much) and wholly blame her loss on the FBI director, Russia, and angry racists. These factors obviously had a hand in her loosing, but had she been more cognizant of/cared about reaching out to those who were angry because of lost jobs and wages she may have won the states like PA that haven’t gone for a Republican since the ’88 election.

Millennials, like myself, were one of the first groups to be blamed as well. However, there were more baby boomer/older Americans who switched from Democrat to Republican in this election. Many millennials saw a man who could ruin our futures for way more than 4-8 years and “held our noses” to vote for Clinton.

I guess my point is, I fear that if we don’t remember why Clinton lost and it comes to be remembered as a narrative entirely about the Russians hacking the DNC, liberals will lose in 2020 and beyond. We need to push Trump, and the DNC to actually have the interests of the country as a whole in mind rather than just their own.

Weird aside: Never seen a troll complain about not being banned yet lol.

The basic problem for Hillary was that the media is a corporate entertainment industry, and as with Al Gore the media disliked her because she wanted to talk about boooring issues in a pragmatic way, while Bernie was promising rainbows and unicorns and Trump was telling a new lie every day, making for great stories. Hillary was NOT massively flawed — she was a very intelligent, decent woman who had spent a lifetime preparing herself for political leadership. It is my impression that most “journalists” are not good at math and science, and their eyes glaze over when someone wants to talk about the details of policy. So we got endless stories about the fact that she handled emails in more or less the same way her Republican predecessors did, and rather than Russian attempts to influence the election being a big story, the media eagerly scooped up the hacked emails and used them to make Bernie voters think that the nomination had been stolen from him. (Hillary could have easily destroyed him at any time but chose not to because she needed the votes of people who were starry-eyed over him.)

A lot of progressives seemed to think this election was about universal health care and free college. It was, in fact, about whether we got to keep Obamacare and Medicare and some restrictions (Dodd-Frank) on the banksters and Roe v. Wade; now we are going to see the US turned into a giant hedge fund for the benefit of the most rapacious corporate interests, with gay rights and reproductive rights cut in order to keep the religious right happy. But Hillary was flawed and would have been SOOOOOOO much worse.

And, believe me, if I lived in Lithuania or Latvia or Estonia, I would not have an hour of decent sleep in the next four years, because Trump will sell them out in a New York minute.

@GrumpyOld SocialJusticeMangina: Well put, and something that I have been wanting to express for a while.

@angry feminist:

had she been more cognizant of/cared about reaching out to those who were angry because of lost jobs and wages she may have won the states like PA that haven’t gone for a Republican since the ’88 election.

I feel like this is throwing everyone who isn’t white and male under the bus. The whole ‘economic anxiety’ thing was predominately about white middle class people, while exit polls show a different story (as kupo pointed out above.)

When you see headlines telling people to stop with the identity politics and focus on what really matters, white men with less money than feel they should have, it’s pretty shitty for all the women, POC, LGBTQ people, etc etc etc. Why do those who historically have the least protections have to continue to suffer so that this ‘economic anxiety’ thing can be fixed? Can’t we do both? Didn’t Hillary have plans on how to bring jobs back to coal country, jobs that wouldn’t be phased out as there is no such thing as ‘clean coal’ and the world is moving away from using it as a power source?

(As an example, we don’t use it any more in where I live. All those plants are closed.)

I don’t understand why not reaching out to one group that probably wasn’t going to vote for her anyway would have helped her win the election. It seems like it was fear that was the deciding factor here.

To put my despair more succinctly:

Only 18% voted for Trump,

Yeah.

That was all he needed.

I’m not sure what people wanted Hillary to do. Obviously she was not willing to compete with Trump in making promises that she knew she couldn’t possibly fulfill.

The Carrier deal is a good example. Trump is crowing about having “saved” about 750 of 2000 jobs (it seems like there are different numbers in each article) by giving the company a $7 million tax giveaway. [If you look at the deal carefully, it amounts to rebating the state taxes the EMPLOYEES pay to the COMPANY, so it is in effect a pay cut for them — their taxes that would go to their roads, schools, etc., go to the company instead. But anyway … ] But the promise he made was not merely to keep a part of US jobs from going abroad, it was to BRING BACK millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs, so that white men can live a middle-class lifestyle without being put to the inconvenience of working hard in school and going to college.

And I guess I’m a cynical old curmudgeon, but when people talk about Hillary’s flaws, I always think, “Yeah. The biggest one — no penis.” Not just being a woman, but being a woman who doesn’t show much traditional feminine deference to men.

I’ve been thinking about these things a lot over the last month …

(I’m going to oversimplify quite a bit here, but I think there’s a real point.) Feminism has made a major impact on college-educated women, and I think a majority of college-educated men are moderately to seriously sympathetic to feminism. At least it is unfashionable to be openly male supremacist. But feminism has had a much lesser impact on non-college-educated women, and has found not much sympathy among non-college-educated men. A lot of men in that category have lost a lot of ground, particularly relative to college-educated women, and they are bitter not only about the feminazis who are trying to rob them of their male birthright, but about the male “cucks” and “betas” who are not only the enablers of the feminazis but seem to feel that they are superior to more traditional men just because they refuse to work to keep women in their place. (We see these attitudes constantly in the complaints of the manospherians that David provides.) I think this election gave such men a chance to give feminazis and their unmanly male enablers a good hard kick in the crotch. That’s where Trump’s “grab ’em by the *****” talk elicited a “Right on, dude!” reaction.

There’s an add for a “male enhancement” product that I hear on the radio constantly. “American men have lower testosterone levels than their fathers, and they had lower levels than THEIR fathers. Are we becoming a nation of powder puffs?” Apparently there are a fairly large number of men with fragile, easily threatened masculinity. Independent women are a terrible threat to them, but it is unmasculine to say so out loud. To such men Hillary is a living symbol of what is wrong with society these days. Unfortunately, it seems like all too many women (particularly on the religious right) are much too strongly invested in the role of caring for a fragile male ego.

@SFHC — I had my questions about whether @angry feminist is really a feminist, but …

I mean, the idea that a feminist would think that Hillary’s “flaws” were within several orders of magnitude of Trump’s boggles my mind.

Kurt Eichenwald is one of the better writers on topics involving finance — numbers do not make his eyes glaze over. He wrote a lot about Trump’s finances, which of course was mostly ignored. I liked this article: http://www.newsweek.com/myths-cost-democrats-presidential-election-521044.

@WWTH

I think it’s not that white men want to be prioritized, it’s that many of them want to be the only ones prioritized

It’s this exactly. American whites will do absolutely anything to prevent PoCs from getting a leg up.

because
when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

I’ve seen this a lot, and honestly I think it gives these assholes way too much credit; it’s not even actual equality that they’re claiming is oppression, it’s the mere suggestion that there ought to be any, or that a white supremacist is a bad thing to be.

@Moocow One person responding to a Newsweek article on Trump’s financial affairs having a negative impact on US interests makes the following comment:

The outgoing administration used the Justice department and the IRS to punish their enemies, corrupted the FBI and CIA, and took millions and millions of dollars in bribes in exchange for sweatheart contracts. There is no way that Trump could match that record. When it comes to corruption, the Democrats are NUMBER ONE!

In other words, whatever you say, I’ll make up my own facts to prove that you’re worse.

Other flawed politicians include literally every politician that has ever lived. Every vote is a compromise.

@Viscaria

(Source: https://twitter.com/bryne/status/808481890738896896)