On Sunday, 23 October 2016 8:49:48 AM AEDT David Turk via luv-talk wrote:

The same as our country, people falling for personality over substance.

I think that has happened ever since tribal times before the idea of democracy as we know it was invented. The problem is not people making bad decisions, but the leader disrespecting democracy and inciting violence. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):

Russell Coker via luv-talk wrote:

...

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/10/20/1584963/-Donald-Trump-calls-on-Hi...

What's wrong with that country?

WRT their elections[*], the main problem is that they're badly broken.

See e.g.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/01/14/the-most-depressing-g... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law (as Rick Moen has repeatedly mentioned here) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_past_the_post#Criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Ruins_Everything (S1E7, populist version) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_States

Apparently the last major reform they had was to take control of presidential debates away from the suffragettes - a NON-partisan group - and instead give it to some BI-partisan group. i.e. any growing third party is now explicitly told to Fuck Right Off WRT debates. Not an improvement.

[*] at the federal / state levels, anyway. Apparently some e.g. mayoral elections actually use STV.

Spot-on, sir. I also had somehow missed League of Women Voters having been replaced starting 1987 by a conspiracy of^W^W commission co-founded by the two major parties. That is indeed very annoying. Attempting to face Russell's question straight-on, near as I can tell, what's wrong is that one of the two major parties has been going gradually crazier for 20 years, building a constituency of deranged citizens, leading to the current asymptotic spike of craziness and possible near-term disintegration of that party. I say that with cheerfully acknowledged bias, having been registered as a Democratic Party voter for 40 years -- and yet it's nonetheless true. (As a point of clarification, there is no membership fee to register for a USA political party, and you cannot be ejected for opposing the party's tenets, in marked contrast to the setup in most parliamentary countries. All I really am saying by registering Democratic is that I opt to vote in that party's primary elections, rather than primaries of one of five other parties qualifying for the California ballot.) As Adam Conover points out (as do I on http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/election-2016-11-08.html), as a voter in one of the bluest (most liberal) of the blue US states, I might as well not bother voting in the 2016 presidential general election, but will nonetheless cast my vote for [a slate of 55 electors pledged to vote for] Clinton and Kaine, nonetheless, because why not? Getting back to the Republican Party, its slow descent into psychosis was initially difficult to see because I'm a Californian, a state where Republican office-seekers partially ignored the national trend. But in a nutshell, the national GOP took some of Ronald Reagan's worst notions, put a sprinkling of sexism, racism, xenophobia, and paranoia on top, and fed that to their 'base', which then reflected it back and amplified it. Before Trump, all of that unsavoury racism, sexism, etc. was confined to deniable 'dogwhistled' appeals to extremist elements to secure their vote, with the extremists not getting anything from the candidate once elected, but Trump has brought now all of that ugliness out-front -- mainstreamed it. It's going to be interesting to see what happens to the Republican Party after Trump's defeat. It's _not_ in any way guaranteed that it'll reform itself and divorce the crazy, because the crazy are now arguably a significant constituency.

Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):

Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:

...

It's going to be interesting to see what happens to the Republican Party after Trump's defeat. It's _not_ in any way guaranteed that it'll reform itself and divorce the crazy, because the crazy are now arguably a significant constituency.

I must confess, the whole brexit / May / BoJo outcome, & reading about how the 2015 European Refugee Crisis was (un)managed, has made me worried that USA might actually be angry and afraid enough to actually put Trump in charge.

My hope is that the difference in demographics between the UK and the USA has put paid to that (otherwise worrying) possibility. Despite significant influxes of new Britons from ex-Empire countries under PMs Wilson, Heath, and Callaghan[1], the UK has remained racially, ethnically, linguistically, religiously homogeneous just about everywhere outside Greater London -- with the result that Brexit-leaning yobs truly do feel threatened by imaginary mobs of Polish plumbers, and yearn for the days of John Bull's Island going it alone. By contrast, the USA hasn't been particularly homogeneous since, oh, maybe 1880 or so. Opposing multiculturalism is kind of... well, sinister but mostly harmless on account of lack of realism, rather like most of the outre criminal gangs Steed and Mrs. Peel investigated (if you'll pardon my crossing the Atlantic again in pursuit of a simile). If you look at the Trump-core demographic, it's Fox News viewers, which is to say aging, white, male, rural or suburban, mostly uneducated, and angry at their loss of privilege over the decades. They are certainly noisy, but they are nowhere near a majority, practically anywhere.[2] I cannot promise that Trump won't reach 270 electors (or selected by the House of Representatives in a Twelfth Amendment 'contingent election' such as we haven't seen since 1824[3], if no candidate tops 270). It really all depends on voter turnout. Fortunately, the Democratic Party is usually pretty decent at General Election turnout. (It just sucks at turnout for midterm elections.) Speaking of that, the Trump organisation's tactics going into these last couple of weeks have been impressively logical: They've been putting out targeted campaigns, often 'dark pages' (non-public ones) on Facebook attempting to heighten points of conflict particular classes of Democratic Party voters have with Secretary Clinton -- a somewhat novel kind of voter suppression tactic, i.e., an attempt to motivate the opponent's natural supporters into staying home on Election Day.

And EVEN IF that trainwreck only lasts one term, the supreme court appointment will last a whole lot longer. & IIRC USA is also about due for its decennial gerrymandering?

Indeed Project REDMAP Phase II beckons, irrespective of who wins the Presidency. One thing that could help scotch that in a hurry would be one or two Clinton USSC appointments followed by a timely lawsuit challenging obviously racist and partisan redistricting -- a case like McCrory v. Harris (http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/mccrory-v-harris/), except bolder. It really shouldn't be too hard to construct a good test case that a five-member USSC majority could use to throw out gerrymandering forever. [1] Brits in quiet moments will sometimes admit that Thatcher's biggest point of appeal to voters when she challenged Callaghan was less 'She'll stand up to striking coal miners' than 'She'll cut off the flood of dusky foreigners.' [2] This isn't to deny the existence of white-bread reserves, In the 1980s on a railroad trip across most of the USA, I happened to stop for an hour in Denver. Walking around town, I was puzzled about why it seemed a little creepy, and then realised everyone looked Northern European and, um, like members of my family. As a San Franciscan, I couldn't help finding this very strange indeed as something to encounter in the USA. I mean, Oslo, sure, but Denver was a surprise. [3] I.e., the House could choose Evan McMullin if as seems possible he takes Utah's six electoral votes. Of course, that would be electoral suicide for GOP House members, but they could.

Quoting russell@coker.com.au (russell@coker.com.au):

With the significant exception of farm workers. Following the Brexit vote agricultural companies have speculated about moving some of their business to Europe. Apparently if they have to pay the sorts of wages needed to get people born in the UK to do farm work then they can't sell the produce at current prices.

What I mostly mean is that most of the UK remains lily-white and of old-British-nationality ethnic descent across society as a whole, in turn helped lead Brexit voters into the mistake of thinking that the bloody foreigners needed them more than they needed the bloody foreigners. Unfortunately they were then able to muster the voting strength to try out their (mistaken) hypothesis. That level of delusive belief is much more difficult to achieve in the USA, because of far lower homogeneity, and AFAIK a voting mandate to that effect is numerically impossible. (I was certainly not intending to suggest that the Brexiteers' grasp of economics was realistic about farm workers or anything else.) BTW, Charlie Stross has some recent dystopian projections about ruin likely to be caused if May pushes the Article 50 button: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/10/facts-of-life-and-death....

It's not just the core demographic. Trump has lots of fans outside his core demographic. There are more than a few young well-educated Australians who are fans of Trump.

In context, I was speaking of the USA electorate. There, Trump has so far negligible buy-in from any non-white ethnic group (black, Hispanic, east Asian, etc.), and also negligible buy-in from women voters -- none of these being idiots, and women being the one truly indispensible voting group of those tracked, and also the one with reliably high turnout. His powerfully offending even _conservative_ women is what finally utterly doomed his candidacy, in the view of most commenters in the press. (Who, of course, the Trumpistas dismiss in an orgy of epistemic closure.) I also hear that the Christian Right / Evangelical voting bloc has fallen into ruins over the last couple of months, as Evangelical voters, particularly the younger ones, have finally staged rebellion against their Trump-supporting leadership and refused to back the short-fingered vulgarian.

It's funny, the reports I've read concern Trump surrogates struggling to explain his position (which changes constantly), a general lack of focus on the election (taking time off to open a new hotel), and poor fundraising strategy (failing to support the Republican party). Most of that isn't the organisation's fault as they can't control Trump. But the reports suggest that it's not possible for them to persue good tactics.

Well, I can only repeat what I've been hearing, and can see no better tactic for his camp at this late stage than to try to calumnify Secretary Clinton so thoroughly that large swaths of her natural constituency stay home. He's already bouced hard off his 'ceiling' and isn't likely to sway many undecided voters at this point (who? fishermen swept out to sea a year ago? hermits?), so the logical alternative is to try to lower the 'floor' of Clinton's support.

Trent W. Buck via luv-talk <luv-talk@luv.asn.au> wrote:

ObRant: I'm sick of people referring to article invocation as "button pushing". Is "invoke" too complicated a concept the UK media?

No, but in this case I think the metaphor (associating invocation of Article 50 with pressing the button that triggers a missile launch) is apt in the context of discussing the immediate and grave consequences that may follow - capital flight, stock market decline, etc. Compare the reaction that occurred when the result of the vote was announced.

Jason White via luv-talk wrote:

Trent W. Buck via luv-talk <luv-talk@luv.asn.au> wrote:

...

ObRant: I'm sick of people referring to article invocation as "button pushing". Is "invoke" too complicated a concept the UK media?

No, but in this case I think the metaphor (associating invocation of Article 50 with pressing the button that triggers a missile launch) [...]

That metaphor honestly hadn't occurred to me. I push thousands of buttons every day, so it seemed trivialising.