The Gaming Den

Oh sure DSM, polls are just flat out worthless just because you refuse to blame the party and its supporters that made the wrong decision according to again, in Glen Greenwalds words "all empirical evidence we had at the time".

The fact is polling is what we have and the results we got were not out of line with what the polls warned.

It is not unreasonable to assume the rather massive advantage Sanders polled compared to Clinton against trump would have, even within margin of error, even with accounting for unpolled protest vote, even accounting for the actual margin of error observed in this event was more than enough to win it.

And if you had the chance today to go back in time and magically select Sanders as the candidate instead of Clinton that WOULD be the rational thing to do. But considering that selecting him ahead of Clinton WAS the rational choice to defeat Trump at the time and everyone except the Clinton cheerleaders knew it and had plenty of evidence for it they didn't do it then and EVEN in hypothetical wishful retrospect THEY STILL CAN'T BRING THEMSELVES TO DO IT NOW EVEN IN THE HYPOTHETICAL.

But if you cannot bring yourselves to admit that a neoliberal consensus democrat cannot win elections anymore you will KEEP losing elections and it WILL get worse.

PL wrote:Oh sure DSM, polls are just flat out worthless just because you refuse to blame the party and its supporters that made the wrong decision according to again, in Glen Greenwalds words "all empirical evidence we had at the time".

PL, polls which are proven to not be predictive are in fact not predictive, and polls which are proven to be predictive are in fact predictive. A specific type of evidence is exactly as valuable as you can prove it to be, and the specific type of evidence you are citing - no matter how loud, obnoxious, and bitchy you get about it - is proven to not be valuable. You can hammer angrily at the keyboard until your fingers are literally bleeding and it will remain true that the specific type of evidence you are citing is wrong at least as often as it is right and you will never be a magic wizard who can divine when "the numbers really mean it this time, honest."

It's bird entrails through and through. You have zero respect for the actual statistics and just want things to come up Bernie in order to feed your entirely predetermined narrative. It's what Fox News does, it's what the stereotypical - but apparently not nearly as mythical as imagined, if you're any indication - Berniebros do, and it's fucking annoying.

PL wrote:And if you had the chance today to go back in time and magically select Sanders as the candidate instead of Clinton that WOULD be the rational thing to do.

This is the most boring observation imaginable. If Sanders had been the nominee and lost, it would be obvious that we need to go back in time and select Clinton. If the outcome of X vs Z is known to be Z, of course you'd fucking try Y vs Z instead. That's not a statement about the power of prior evidence, it's a statement about the power of hindsight; once an option is ruled out, even if it were the rationally preferred choice, it only makes sense to try options that are not that one. Hurrah, hindsight!

PL wrote:But if you cannot bring yourselves to admit that a neoliberal consensus democrat cannot win elections anymore you will KEEP losing elections and it WILL get worse.

Clinton would have won this election if Obama had appointed a Democrat to head the FBI, end of story. Internal and public polling shows that Clinton's lead dropped hard when the FBI opened its mouth, and had that not happened even if the polls had been off by the same margins Clinton would have won comfortably in her firewall and Florida and maybe even Ohio.

Your narrative about this election is completely false. It's bullshit you made up because it makes you feel good. The 2016 presidential election is a story about an FBI coup, not the weakness of Obama-style democrats. Clinton had a comfortable lead that was erased by the FBI deliberately putting the emails back in the news based on absolutely nothing at all. Full stop. Left with a slim lead, she went on to win the popular vote and lose the electoral college because her support was poorly allocated.

No, that FBI thing was nothing but the tail end of the same bullshit beat up investigations Clinton has been setup with her entire fucking career. If you couldn't predict that they were going to have beat up fake investigations of Clinton right up to fucking election day YOU are the idiot who knows nothing about US politics, because thats what the Clintons might as well be FOR by now.

The FBI bullshit moved the polls not one shit worth actually mentioning. The only thing that ever did was the pussy grabber video and it wasn't enough and it wore off fast THE END. NO sane narrative places the responsibility for this on one fucking guy at the FBI and any attempt to do so is such blatantly insane and obvious scapegoating I think even you will be embarrassed by it once you stop panicking.

People just didn't turn up to vote for Clinton because basically everyone fucking hates her and everything she represents and always did and the totes professional career politicians running her campaign didn't know that and didn't have a working plan to change it.

PL wrote:The FBI bullshit moved the polls not one shit worth actually mentioning.

Surprise: PL hasn't looked at polls, has strong opinions on them anyway.

We're done here. I don't think anyone actually needs further convincing that you're a dumbass who has no fucking idea what he's talking about.

Odd you should say that since I'm searching for the devastating impact you talk about for the date on a graph of average polling over the period and what I'm seeing is mother fucking background noise even compared to the unremarkable dips and rises in what was all in all since long before the completion of the primaries a graph that was pretty fucking stable and way too fucking close.

Well, Clinton herself seems to be using the e-mails as an excuse for losing to her donnors.

Walking it back, the Trump legacy

http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37969112

http://www.bbc.com/news/live/election-us-2016-37899679
(requires some scrolling to get details beyond the summary box)

On the one hand, I'm not terribly shocked, since anyone who wasn't braindead (which sadly seemed to be too few voters) could tell Trump is a practiced liar and gets by on telling people what they want to hear, but... it seems rather early to be backing down on outrageous claims with... waffling.

It seems designed to piss off his supporters while not really offering anything real to the opposition. What is the point?

In the circumstances, walking his election promises back is the absolute best we can hope for.

Here's to four years of fighting Congress over term limits and breaking campaign promises!

Voss wrote:It seems designed to piss off his supporters while not really offering anything real to the opposition. What is the point?

A Trump presidency represents a breaking of the social contract. First, by the most obvious sense of the fact that the electoral college is and always has been bullshit and Hillary got more votes and Donald Trump got less votes. But also in the sense that part of the deal of Bush v Gore was that liberals didn't break the country in half over that failure of democratic norms because the promise was that it was a one-time event and we could go back to fair elections in the future. Well, it's less than twenty years later and that promise was broken too.

The Republicans have openly flaunted the rules on the supreme court and legislative rules. The Republicans have openly betrayed the country by going over the president's head to contact Israel and Iran. The Republicans have set fire to even the thin fiction that federal law enforcement is a non-partisan endeavor. The Republicans have broken every promise, shattered every norm, and pushed the republic to the breaking point.

So... what's the calculus on a civil war? Certianly lots of people will die, and liberals predictably don't want that. And of course there are the chances that the bad guys could win that and we'd end up with a new slave holding Confederacy. But if Donald Trump seemed poised to carry out his election year threats to cut off the health insurance of twenty million Americans and put 11 million people into concentration camps for being too Mexican looking or Muslim adjacent, those arguments don't sound that compelling and taking arms against the Red States sounds pretty good.

At this point the Trump transition team desperately needs to convince the majority of voters who did not vote for them that they are going to be "not that bad" because if people think they are still serious about all the fascism they promised during the election by the time their ascendency seems like a real thing then liberals becoming gun wielding partisans is an extremely real possibility. Soft selling and walking back their hideous campaign promises is probably enough to keep people from bombing Trump Tower. In any case, doing the opposite would probably be enough to ensure that California was an independent country inside of ten years.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:So... what's the calculus on a civil war? Certianly lots of people will die, and liberals predictably don't want that. And of course there are the chances that the bad guys could win that and we'd end up with a new slave holding Confederacy.

Come on. Really?

What? You don't think the bad guys could win? They're on a roll.

FrankTrollman wrote:So... what's the calculus on a civil war? Certianly lots of people will die, and liberals predictably don't want that. And of course there are the chances that the bad guys could win that and we'd end up with a new slave holding Confederacy.

Seriously? A liberal vs. conservative civil war in the US as currently constituted?

The liberals lose: hard.

First off, the military and security services (federal, state, and local law enforcement plus private contractors) are overwhelmingly conservative. They love Trump and hate immigrants. In the case of mass protest, never mind armed revolt just something Euromaidan-style, where Trump orders tanks rolled in, the commissioners and generals might hesitate but the rank and file will not.

Secondly, even if the military stood aside or simply dissolved (dubious) the bulk of persons with arms and, critically, the training to use them, are overwhelmingly conservative. The small percentage of gun-coveting households in the US (ones that own three or more guns) are so conservative it almost begs belief.

Thirdly, strategic factors. Liberal support is primarily urban, conservative support is overwhelmingly rural. In a civil war the conservatives simply blockade the interstates, concede control of the cities, and watch as the urban faction collapses from lack of food/water/power in a matter of weeks at best.

An armed conflict of pretty much any kind, even armed rioting of the Watts or Rodney King type, is generally a universal loser for the liberal cause. It simply empowers conservatives and worsens the divide in the country.

Even the best case mass protest (nonviolent) scenario is depressing, since it basically involves Trump giving in to his authoritarian impulses and sending in the army illegally and potentially against the order of the deeply conservative but not-completely-insane John Roberts and thereby triggering a military coup. Such a coup could potentially be very short term - Congress proceeds with impeachment and Mike Pence takes over and the military stands down but it would be the end of the US as a liberal democracy for the next several decades.

Trump should be fought politically, using all available tools, obviously, but violence is a recipe for disaster. The electoral college sucks and Trump's win is weak as a result, but 60+ million American citizens voted for the man. Overcoming him requires reducing that support base somehow and the most likely is that his own policies will cause such loses, just as they did under Bush. Trump has made campaign promises he cannot possibly keep, like restoring coal country jobs, and ones that will be ruinous, like repealing Obamacare. Liberal political holding actions will be tough, but they have a much better prospect of success than the madness of taking up arms.

FrankTrollman wrote: So... what's the calculus on a civil war? Certianly lots of people will die, and liberals predictably don't want that. And of course there are the chances that the bad guys could win that and we'd end up with a new slave holding Confederacy. But if Donald Trump seemed poised to carry out his election year threats to cut off the health insurance of twenty million Americans and put 11 million people into concentration camps for being too Mexican looking or Muslim adjacent, those arguments don't sound that compelling and taking arms against the Red States sounds pretty good.

It actually sounds fucking crazy. Never mind that the liberals aren't the people with guns, it would also push the moderates, the police and the military right onto the other side for, you know, insurrection and bloody civil war, which is pretty much an auto-lose. No one who isn't super-dedicated and also crazy is going to drop enough acid to buy this as a viable thing. The PR narrative and history pretty much writes itself: spoiled children rebel to force their Evil Socialism on Society (as the Right always Knew They Would) and are crushed. No matter how justified it seems in big picture land, it honestly isn't something you can sell to actual people who would have to face blood and fire.

Mechalich wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:So... what's the calculus on a civil war? Certianly lots of people will die, and liberals predictably don't want that. And of course there are the chances that the bad guys could win that and we'd end up with a new slave holding Confederacy.

Seriously? A liberal vs. conservative civil war in the US as currently constituted?

The liberals lose: hard.

First off, the military and security services (federal, state, and local law enforcement plus private contractors) are overwhelmingly conservative. They love Trump and hate immigrants. In the case of mass protest, never mind armed revolt just something Euromaidan-style, where Trump orders tanks rolled in, the commissioners and generals might hesitate but the rank and file will not.

Secondly, even if the military stood aside or simply dissolved (dubious) the bulk of persons with arms and, critically, the training to use them, are overwhelmingly conservative. The small percentage of gun-coveting households in the US (ones that own three or more guns) are so conservative it almost begs belief.

Thirdly, strategic factors. Liberal support is primarily urban, conservative support is overwhelmingly rural. In a civil war the conservatives simply blockade the interstates, concede control of the cities, and watch as the urban faction collapses from lack of food/water/power in a matter of weeks at best.

An armed conflict of pretty much any kind, even armed rioting of the Watts or Rodney King type, is generally a universal loser for the liberal cause. It simply empowers conservatives and worsens the divide in the country.

Even the best case mass protest (nonviolent) scenario is depressing, since it basically involves Trump giving in to his authoritarian impulses and sending in the army illegally and potentially against the order of the deeply conservative but not-completely-insane John Roberts and thereby triggering a military coup. Such a coup could potentially be very short term - Congress proceeds with impeachment and Mike Pence takes over and the military stands down but it would be the end of the US as a liberal democracy for the next several decades.

Trump should be fought politically, using all available tools, obviously, but violence is a recipe for disaster. The electoral college sucks and Trump's win is weak as a result, but 60+ million American citizens voted for the man. Overcoming him requires reducing that support base somehow and the most likely is that his own policies will cause such loses, just as they did under Bush. Trump has made campaign promises he cannot possibly keep, like restoring coal country jobs, and ones that will be ruinous, like repealing Obamacare. Liberal political holding actions will be tough, but they have a much better prospect of success than the madness of taking up arms.

I'm not advocating for a civil war, but I imagine if one were to be implemented, it would start with mass assassinations and bombings, which sort of puts all that military and security forces stuff into question.

The police only works because most of the population goes along, if 50% of the country actually became complicit in a scheme of political assassinations, everyone important on both sides would be dead in weeks.

Mechalich wrote: Secondly, even if the military stood aside or simply dissolved (dubious) the bulk of persons with arms and, critically, the training to use them, are overwhelmingly conservative. The small percentage of gun-coveting households in the US (ones that own three or more guns) are so conservative it almost begs belief.

Hopefully, that will change. One of the good things to come out of Trump's election is that Pink Pistols is seeing an upswing in membership, since suddenly lots of gay people feel that being armed would be a good idea.

Best case scenario here, mainstream liberals become a part of the gun culture.

The civil war plan is clearly stupid on fuck knows how many levels, but most immediately if you throw a civil war on behalf of Hillary, and that's what you are talking about here, no one will turn up on her side.

It would just be a few party officials and high powered media personalities standing in front of trumps tanks while the public sits on the side line eating popcorn.

Frank, have you gone completely barking mad? Once bullets start flying, the people who are best at violence get put in charge. On the conservative side, this means something very similar to, and possibly actual implementation of, martial law. On the liberal side, this means the Crips and Bloods go from being generally friendly with BLM but not directly associated with them to being the leaders of BLM. American Muslim involvement in terrorist organizations would go from trivial to double digit percentage points.

Once it's a war, the soldiers are the most important people, and American liberals simply do not have anything resembling soldiers with which to fill out the ranks. This means that the "liberal" side is going to be people who do resemble soldiers and have a bone to pick with the Republican Party: Gangsters and terrorists. These will be the people teaching liberal partisans how to shoot irritating senators, and these will be the people shaping the culture of the anti-Trump resistance. It doesn't matter that they're a trivial influence on liberal sub-cultures now, but they will become respected members of the community once violent revolution is the selected path forward. Since they're the ones teaching other people how to do the violence, it's also basically impossible for them to be converted to mainstream liberal culture instead of the other way around, because the size of the revolution is constrained to the number of people they can train at once.

It would take a decade or more to actually establish a crop of American liberal partisans who can be trusted not to institute a despotic regime upon victory, and considering how the Republican armed partisans are working out, I'm really not convinced that instituting a despotic regime would be off the table even if Democrats did successfully cultivate a community of people willing to commit themselves to violent revolution who nominally share the ideals of the American left.

There's also no way California would last three months under an American blockade before the will to resist reincorporation into the Union was crushed. There won't be anyone to run an LA airlift and bail them out of it.

There's exactly one plausible route to opposing Trump. We have to make the Republicans eat the other edge of the gerrymandering sword in 2018, get enough Congressmen in office to paralyze the legislation, and hope liberal justices can hang on long enough to hopefully get a Democrat elected in 2020. The odds there are not spectacular, but they're damn better than trying to bring down the world's most powerful military and economy with an army comprised of naive college students and impoverished minorities, with the junior officer ranks filled out almost completely by violent criminals and religious extremists.

TIL that people think there aren't liberals in the military. That's going to come as a big surprise to all the hardcore Democrat navy families I know. Also, spoiler warning, the U.S. armed forces are ~40% ethnic minorities who probably aren't super pumped about white nationalism.

A hypothetical civil war in the U.S. does not look anything like what people here are talking about. Nobody is ever going to stand up and say, "oh, an FBI coup? Viva la resistance!"

What actually happens in such a nightmare scenario is Trump does something even more terrible than expected and the civil unrest which results makes governance impossible. The U.S.'s major cities - including Washingon D.C. - turn into perpetual mass protests sprinkled with outbreaks of violence and law enforcement are simply numerically incapable of containing them. At that point, the existing government has three choices:
1) Ignore it and hope it goes away.
2) Mollify the mobs with concessions.
3) Order police and military to gun down a bunch of angry civilians, some of whom are throwing rocks and breaking shit. This potentially ends in civil war, but it's really difficult to imagine the police and the military being monolithically pro-government in that scenario.

Now, I don't think Trump is going to be able to do anything terrible enough to make that happen. Not because he's not terrible, but because he'll be terrible in ways people are depressingly willing to tolerate. Trump's presidency is probably going to amount to little more than extreme social conservatism and tax cuts for billionaires paid for with the debt. There will be a lot of protests early on, and he'll ignore them, and they'll go away. But I suppose there's the off chance that he sinks his claws into the fed and with terrible monetary policy to back up his terrible fiscal policy manages to trigger a recession that puts youth unemployment in the 20's or 30's ppt-wise, at which point crippling unrest is totally on the table.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:TIL that people think there aren't liberals in the military. That's going to come as a big surprise to all the hardcore Democrat navy families I know. Also, spoiler warning, the U.S. armed forces are ~40% ethnic minorities who probably aren't super pumped about white nationalism.

It's the thing were everyone believes the stories we tell instead of the reality. Just like Trump speaking to the white working class by promising to raise their taxes, cut taxes on the rich, bust unions, and not create jobs, just like they've always been asking for.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:TIL that people think there aren't liberals in the military. That's going to come as a big surprise to all the hardcore Democrat navy families I know. Also, spoiler warning, the U.S. armed forces are ~40% ethnic minorities who probably aren't super pumped about white nationalism.

It's not that there aren't liberals in the military, it's that I have no confidence in their willingness to turn their weapons on their coworkers in favor of a resistance whose opening gambit is bombing Trump Tower. The scenario DSMatticus outlines is perfectly plausible, but it's also something that Trump has to trigger by misgoverning to the point where cities are in a more-or-less perpetual state of extreme protest/low-grade rioting. At no stage is "bomb Trump Tower" or "assemble partisan guerilla army" a plausible step in the plan where anti-Trump soldiers defect.

Chamomile wrote:

angelfromanotherpin wrote:TIL that people think there aren't liberals in the military. That's going to come as a big surprise to all the hardcore Democrat navy families I know. Also, spoiler warning, the U.S. armed forces are ~40% ethnic minorities who probably aren't super pumped about white nationalism.

It's not that there aren't liberals in the military, it's that I have no confidence in their willingness to turn their weapons on their coworkers in favor of a resistance whose opening gambit is bombing Trump Tower. The scenario DSMatticus outlines is perfectly plausible, but it's also something that Trump has to trigger by misgoverning to the point where cities are in a more-or-less perpetual state of extreme protest/low-grade rioting. At no stage is "bomb Trump Tower" or "assemble partisan guerilla army" a plausible step in the plan where anti-Trump soldiers defect.

Agreed, anyone who pulls the trigger on serious action puts a 'justified target' tag on themselves. And bombing as a result of an election isn't something most military folks will support, regardless of whether extremists here think it's justifiable or not.

I'm also not sure where a 'liberal partisan guerilla army' is supposed to hang out. In the rural farmland where people despise them, and will be willing to shoot them?

And don't think that if Trump does go way over the line to the point of (even more) serious rioting that the Republican leadership won't bail on him, hang him out to dry and pat themselves on the back for recognizing that he wasn't one of them in the first place. As far as the people up top in the RNC are concerned, if he really fucks up, he's entirely disposable at no harm (and possibly a ratings boost) to themselves. Selling that narrative wouldn't even be that hard if it comes from the chunk that backed off during his turn on the scandal machine.

Are there going to be problems and protests for pretty much his entire term? Yeah. But while our foreign policy might get fucked up beyond all recognition, domestically, his advisors are going to yank him pretty hard to keep it degenerating to DSM's nightmare scenario. It'll be bad, but not to the point that people will be seriously justifying civil war or even crippling unrest. Lots more twitter and facebook whining, though.

Jesus Christ is Frank actually advocating an armed revolution against the federal government?

angelfromanotherpin wrote:TIL that people think there aren't liberals in the military. That's going to come as a big surprise to all the hardcore Democrat navy families I know. Also, spoiler warning, the U.S. armed forces are ~40% ethnic minorities who probably aren't super pumped about white nationalism.

It's not that there aren't liberal service members or law enforcement, its that the groups are overwhelmingly conservative dominated. Generously, you're talking 65-35. Also the liberals tend to be concentrated in non-combat or administrative positions that matter less when it comes to armed conflict. The average police department, for example, has a lot of female administrators that help goose the gender balance toward parity even while patrol officers remain overwhelmingly male.

And there are plenty of ethnic minority members of the military and law enforcement who are totally stoked about a Trump presidency - anecdotally I work with a number of them, and that's in a very liberal state, it's worse in conservative areas.

Right now, if it came to a civil conflict, the conservative forces have a massive embedded advantage in pretty much all strategic areas except overall numerical support - where they have a minute disadvantage (and if you add Trump+Johnson voters together, a significant advantage).

DSMatticus wrote:What actually happens in such a nightmare scenario is Trump does something even more terrible than expected and the civil unrest which results makes governance impossible. The U.S.'s major cities - including Washingon D.C. - turn into perpetual mass protests sprinkled with outbreaks of violence and law enforcement are simply numerically incapable of containing them. At that point, the existing government has three choices:

In order for this to happen you also need certain specific electoral scenarios to unfold. Specifically you need widespread protests prior to the 2018 elections - meaning significantly more widespread and persistent than Occupy ever was at its height - and you need the conservatives to win in 2018 anyway, causing protests to snowball even further.

The specific set of policies for this to happen - screwing over the country while still retaining his razor thin conservative majority (the 2018 senate map makes it very difficult for the party to regain the senate, but if they made any gains at all that would still be meaningful) is a bit tricky. Gut Obamacare and take away health insurance from millions of white people? Not a great plan. Put together deportation force that has to tear kids from parents screaming on the news every night. Not a great plan. Actually overturn gay marriage. Not a great plan.

DSMatticus wrote:Trump's presidency is probably going to amount to little more than extreme social conservatism and tax cuts for billionaires paid for with the debt.

I think this is about right, domestically anyway. Foreign policy is where the real variance lies. What happens if Trump axed the nuclear agreement with Iran and in response Bibi decides to drop some bombs? I have no fucking idea. What happens if Putin invades any one of the several countries he's surely thinking about invading. No fucking clue.

I really think it would take some kind of massive foreign policy event to cause an immediate collapse of economic conditions in the US necessary to initiate a truly impactful mass protest regime. Still it could happen. A trade war with China could absolutely do it. A war with Iran has a good chance of doing it.

Grek wrote:Jesus Christ is Frank actually advocating an armed revolution against the federal government?

Well since the alternative might involve having been wrong about Hillary on the internet in some way...