Sunday, November 27, 2016

Democrats try to discredit election


This ad does not offend me, but what do you expect from ppl recruited from such an ad?

For what Hamilton really said, see Hamilton Denounces Jefferson for Putting Immigrants on the Path to Citizenship or Alexander Hamilton, Immigration Skeptic.

The NY Times reports:
Nearly three weeks after Election Day, Hillary Clinton’s campaign said on Saturday that it would participate in a recount process in Wisconsin incited by a third-party candidate and would join any potential recounts in two other closely contested states, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

The Clinton campaign held out little hope of success in any of the three states, and said it had seen no “actionable evidence” of vote hacking that might taint the results or otherwise provide new grounds for challenging Donald J. Trump’s victory. ...

In Wisconsin, Mr. Trump leads by 22,177 votes. In Michigan, he has a lead of 10,704 votes, and in Pennsylvania, his advantage is 70,638 votes.
Not surprising, but remember this the next time you hear from all those creeps in the mainstream news media who were saying that Trump was a threat to democracy for refusing to concede the election.

Friday, November 25, 2016

Trump's margin of victory

I posted this in 2004:
To measure how close an election was, I believe the best way is to look at how many votes a loser needed to have won in order to change the outcome. The closest elections in my lifetime were 2000, 1976, 1960, and 1968. (Data from this article.)

Gore could have won in 2000 with about 500 more votes in Florida.

Ford would have won in 1976 with about 18k more votes in Ohio and Hawaii.

Nixon would have won in 1960 with about 60k more votes in Illinois and Texas.

Humphrey would have won in 1968 with about 106k more votes in New Jersey, Missouri, and New Hampshire, assuming Democratic control of the House.
So how close was the election this time? The NY Times reports:
As of Wednesday, Mr. Trump’s lead in Michigan had shrunk to 10,704 votes, or 0.2 percent, according to the National Popular Vote Tracker maintained by the Cook Political Report.

Mr. Trump’s lead in Wisconsin has narrowed to 22,525 votes, or 0.8 percent. In Pennsylvania, his lead slightly grew on Wednesday, to 70,010, or 1.2 percent.
So by this measure, Trump won by about 100k votes. This was about the same as Nixon's margin in 1968, and about a third of Obama's margin in 2012.

Update: This NY Times story on Election Facts says that the margin was 12882 (MI) + 24081 (WI) + 65690 (PA) = 102653, with Trump'a margin in Florida being +112,911, and a few votes still being counted.

But the story is misleading by saying:
Hillary Clinton definitely won the popular vote, and that lead is only going to grow. ...

Yes, the polls were off, but not in extraordinary ways.
No, Clinton did not win the popular vote, but only got a plurality of the popular votes.

The AP poll reported that Clinton led by 17 percentage points. The Princeton Election Consortium said that she had a greater than 99 percent chance of winning. She barely campaigned in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania because pollsters had assured her that she had huge leads there. Many experts complained that Nate Silver was giving too much encouragement to the Trumpsters, but even he gave Clinton a 95% chance at one point.

The NY Times says that these errors are balanced by the fact that Clinton did better than expected in some blue states. Maybe so, but the election was played out in the battleground states, and most of the polls were very badly wrong there. (A couple of polls, like IBD, did well.)

Update: This says that the margin is 80k, as of Dec. 2.

Thursday, November 24, 2016

Fear of Trump spying on your cellphone

Crytography advocate and professor Susan Landau writes:
We have elected a President who does not believe in the First Amendment protections of a free press and who urged the hacking of his opponent's email, including by Russia. Our President-elect has also repeatedly said that he will throw his opponent in jail over issues that the FBI Director, after a long investigation, determined did not present evidence of criminal activity. We are in unchartered territory. We have a president-elect who does not appear to respect the protections enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Those who disagree with President-elect Trump feel threatened not just by the policies he espouses, but by the hatred and dictatorial stances he has been supporting. ...

There is a risk that President-elect Trump means what he says. Given the President-elect's authoritarian statements, I no longer feel confident that the surveillance of journalists, the political opposition, or of protesters will not occur in this country. The President-elect has explicitly said that he wished he had the power to hack into the accounts of his political enemies.

Protecting the privacy of speech is crucial for preserving our democracy. We live at a time when tracking an individual — a journalist, a member of the political opposition, a citizen engaged in peaceful protest — or listening to their communications is far easier than at any time in human history.
I am inclined to agree with her about ppl having rights to private communication, but she seems to suffer from some delusions. Almost everything she says about Trump is wrong.

The chief threats to privacy come from the leftists at Google and Facebook. Trump supporters are being shut down while Trump-haters are not. The leftists currently complain about "fake news" and use that as an excuse to censor news.

Her complaints are hollow. She does not say what is so terrible about listening to communications of citizens engaged in peaceful protests. I would think that such citizens would want to be heard!

In some ways we have less privacy today, but in others we have more. It is easier than ever to organize a peaceful protest, and such protests are not inhibited by govt spying.

This recent TED talk got 700k views:
The smartphone you use reflects more than just personal taste ... it could determine how closely you can be tracked, too. Privacy expert and TED Fellow Christopher Soghoian details a glaring difference between the encryption used on Apple and Android devices and urges us to pay attention to a growing digital security divide. "If the only people who can protect themselves from the gaze of the government are the rich and powerful, that's a problem," he says. "It's not just a cybersecurity problem — it's a civil rights problem."
This whole thing is strangely misguided.

First, there is no significant security difference between Apple and Android phones. Apple famously refused to cooperate with an FBI investigation of a Moslem terrorist, but the FBI used an off-the-shelf tool to get into the phone anyway.

Second, the rich have better house, cars, lifestyles, and everything else, so why shouldn't they have better phones also? Ppl should be able to pay more for a better phone.

Third, the major privacy invasions come from Facebook and other leftist companies, not FBI investigations of Moslem terrorists. Why do these supposed civil rights advocates devote so much energy to defending Moslem terrorists when Facebook is spying on a billion ppl.

Landau obviously suffers from Trump derangement syndrome. Both have some leftist blind spots about what privacy is.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Defining white nationalism

The NY Times explains:
A question has been posed in a puzzled whisper in many of the nation’s living rooms and newsrooms ever since Donald J. Trump’s triumph in this month’s presidential election: What, exactly, is white nationalism? ...

Professor Kaufmann says the terms are not synonyms: White supremacy is based on a racist belief that white people are innately superior to people of other races; white nationalism is about maintaining political and economic dominance, not just a numerical majority or cultural hegemony.

For a long time, he said, white nationalism was less an ideology than the default presumption of American life. Until quite recently, white Americans could easily see the nation as essentially an extension of their own ethnic group.

But the country’s changing demographics, the civil rights movement and a push for multiculturalism in many quarters mean that white Americans are now confronting the prospect of a nation that is no longer built solely around their own identity.
So white nationalism is just the "default presumption" from a few years ago? If so, did we have some vote or collective decision to change it?

Maybe some of these ppl have some sinister beliefs, but the NY Times appears to use the term to include those who have little interest in race, but do not want to flood the USA with Third World immigrants and Islamic terrorists.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

The Real War on Science

I have argued on this blog that the Left is much more anti-science than the Right.

John Tierney writes about this in detail:
The Real War on Science
The Left has done far more than the Right to set back progress.

My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science?

My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?

Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced?
As he details, the Left has corrupted vital research, but not the Right.

The biggest example 8 years ago was stem cell funding, but Barack Obama's policy was not much different from G.W. Bush's, and little has come of the research. The biggest example now is probably global warming, but that is also well-funded under Republicans and Democrats.

The Republicans even fund areas that are overwhelmingly Leftist, and where the research has Leftist conclusions.

Monday, November 21, 2016

Failure of Identity Liberalism

Columbia prof Mark Lilla writes in the NY Times:
It is a truism that America has become a more diverse country. It is also a beautiful thing to watch.
Especially beautiful if you hate white ppl.
Hillary Clinton ... tended on the campaign trail to ... slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.
Mentioning them all no longer works for the Democrats. She loses votes by saying "All lives matter." To get the votes of those who hate whites and Christians, she has to signal that she will appoint ppl who hate them also.
But it is at the level of electoral politics that identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in healthy periods is not about “difference,” it is about commonality. And it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny. Ronald Reagan did that very skillfully, whatever one may think of his vision. So did Bill Clinton, who took a page from Reagan’s playbook. He seized the Democratic Party away from its identity-conscious wing, concentrated his energies on domestic programs that would benefit everyone (like national health insurance) and defined America’s role in the post-1989 world. By remaining in office for two terms, he was then able to accomplish much for different groups in the Democratic coalition. Identity politics, by contrast, is largely expressive, not persuasive. Which is why it never wins elections — but can lose them.
But the Democrats have nothing going for them, except hating whites and Christians.

Advertising Age reports:
… It seemed like every ad that Clinton and her allies released in the ensuing months was simply a variation on the theme that Donald Trump is a big jerk. In fact, as recently as Sunday, Clinton’s campaign released a video titled “10 minutes of Donald Trump demeaning, objectifying, and insulting women.”

Whereas Trump’s campaign released dead-simple, exceedingly traditional ads related to Big Issues. In Trump’s first TV commercial of the general election, a narrator declared that “In Hillary Clinton’s America, the system stays rigged against Americans. Syrian refugees flood in. Illegal immigrants convicted of committing crimes get to stay, collecting Social Security benefits, skipping the line….”
On foreign policy, the Democrats and NeverTrumpers have become the warmongers:
Of all the people in the world, it is nationalists who are now the least inclined to support devastating world wars. It is globalists who want to intervene in Syria, establish no-fly zones, put troops on Russia’s border, encircle China with military bases, and overthrow governments in the name of “democracy.”
That is why President Trump will be much more liked and respected overseas than Barack Obama, or than Hillary Clinton would have been.

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Overturn the international order

Atlantic mag reports on a liberal Trump-hater:
Last week, Thomas Wright, an expert on U.S. foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, made a bold claim on Twitter about the presidential race in the United States. “Pretty clear this is the most important election anywhere in the world since the two German elections of 1932,” he wrote, in reference to the parliamentary elections that ultimately resulted in Adolf Hitler coming to power. “No other election has had the capacity to completely overturn the international order — the global economy, geopolitics, etc.” ...

Wright: Somebody has to do the heavy lifting, so who would do that? People made that argument pretty credibly in the 1990s to mid-2000s about Europe — that Europe could take on a lot of the burden, ...

Europe should do more, but realistically, if the U.S. pulled out of Europe, what’s likely to happen in France, for instance? Is it more likely that France will become very internationalist and liberal, or is it more likely that it will trend to the right and that [National Front leader] Marine Le Pen will have a better chance of being elected — [that France] will have a nationalist government that will look out for itself?
Really? The USA is meddling in Europe in order to deter France from looking out for itself?!

I was all in favor of using NATO to deter a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. But that was during the Cold War and France is currently in a military emergency because it is not nationalist enuf, and it is letting Moslems destroy its nation. Electing Le Pen is probably the best thing that France can do now, and if Trump does something to encourage that, so much the better.

By "international order", I guess he means some sort of New World Order where globalists destroy nations.

Saturday, November 19, 2016

Chomsky is in election panic

Noam Chomsky says:
On November 8, the most powerful country in world history, which will set its stamp on what comes next, had an election. The outcome placed total control of the government -- executive, Congress, the Supreme Court -- in the hands of the Republican Party, which has become the most dangerous organization in world history.

Apart from the last phrase, all of this is uncontroversial. The last phrase may seem outlandish, even outrageous. But is it? The facts suggest otherwise. The Party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life. There is no historical precedent for such a stand. ...

It is hard to find words to capture the fact that humans are facing the most important question in their history -- whether organized human life will survive in anything like the form we know -- and are answering it by accelerating the race to disaster.

Similar observations hold for the other huge issue concerning human survival: the threat of nuclear destruction, which has been looming over our heads for 70 years and is now increasing. ...

Turning finally to the question raised, to be precise, it appears that Clinton received a slight majority of the vote. ...

According to current information, Trump broke all records in the support he received from white voters, ...

The Democratic Party abandoned any real concern for working people by the 1970s, and they have therefore been drawn to the ranks of their bitter class enemies, ...
No, Clinton did not get a majority of the vote, and Trump's support from white voters was nothing unusual.

Russia was apparently much more concerned about Clinton starting a nuclear war, than Trump.

If global warming is his big concern, then the best remedy is nuclear power, and Republicans are much more likely to encourage that than Democrats.

If you want to preserve Western Civilization as we know it, then Trump is the only major politician who stands firmly for that.

Here is a liberal who denies the existence of Western Civilization:
The idea that the best of the culture of Greece was passed by way of Rome into western Europe gradually became, in the middle ages, a commonplace. In fact this process had a name. It was called the “translatio studii”: the transfer of learning. And it was an astonishingly persistent idea. More than six centuries later, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the great German philosopher, told the students of the high school he ran in Nuremberg: “The foundation of higher study must be and remain Greek literature in the first place, Roman in the second.”

So from the late middle ages until now, people have thought of the best in the culture of Greece and Rome as a civilisational inheritance, passed on like a precious golden nugget, dug out of the earth by the Greeks, transferred, when the Roman empire conquered them, to Rome. ...

If the notion of Christendom was an artefact of a prolonged military struggle against Muslim forces, our modern concept of western culture largely took its present shape during the cold war. In the chill of battle, we forged a grand narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna Carta, Copernican revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. ...

How have we managed to tell ourselves that we are rightful inheritors of Plato, Aquinas, and Kant, when the stuff of our existence is more Beyoncé and Burger King? ...

We live with seven billion fellow humans on a small, warming planet. The cosmopolitan impulse that draws on our common humanity is no longer a luxury; it has become a necessity.
So he is uncomfortable talking about the Greece-Rome-Christendom tradition, and prefers overpopulation and global warming as the cultural ties that bind us together.

This is nutty. Western culture made the world great, and we should keep it.

Friday, November 18, 2016

Trump gained non-white votes

Psychiatrist Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) writes:
Now the votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him. ...

Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. ...

Nor was there some surge in white turnout. ...

I stick to my thesis from October 2015. There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up. ...

I work in mental health. So far I have had two patients express Trump-related suicidal ideation. ...

Stop fearmongering. Somewhere in America, there are still like three or four people who believe the media, and those people are cowering in their houses waiting for the death squads.

Stop crying wolf. ...

Stop talking about dog whistles. The kabbalistic similarities between “dog-whistling” and “wolf-crying” are too obvious to ignore.

Stop writing articles breathlessly following everything the KKK says. Stop writing several times more articles about the KKK than there are actual Klansmen. ...

Stop saying that being against crime is a dog whistle for racism. Have you ever met a crime victim? They don’t like crime. ...

Stop turning everything into identity politics. The only thing the media has been able to do for the last five years is shout “IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS!” at everything, and then when the right wing finally says “Um, i…den-tity….poli-tics?” you freak out and figure that the only way they could have possibly learned that phrase is from the KKK.

Stop calling Trump voters racist.
Funny. Yes, the Trump-haters suffer from some sort of collective mental illness. The voters wised up to this racist fearmongering by the mainstream press.

The NY Times reports:
An automated army of pro-Donald J. Trump chatbots overwhelmed similar programs supporting Hillary Clinton five to one in the days leading up to the presidential election ...

The role fake news played in the presidential election has become a sore point for the technology industry, particularly Google, Twitter and Facebook. On Monday, Google said it would ban websites that peddle fake news from using its online advertising service. Facebook also updated the language in its Facebook Audience Network policy, which already says it will not display ads in sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites.

In some cases, the bots would post embarrassing photos, make references to the Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s private email server, ...
The Left controls 95% of the news media, but that is not enuf to win a Presidential election this time. So they need greater control, and they are conspiring to censor other views by calling them fake news.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Academic left suffering from paranoia

Texas complexity theorist (and typical Jewish liberal) Scott Aaronson writes:
The entire question might be moot at this point: I’m not certain that the United States will have additional elections, as opposed to Putin-style stamps of approval. But the good news is that, if there are more elections (and no mass expulsions or executions), then the country’s demographics are ultimately on our side.
IOW, unless Donald Trump takes drastic action, the Left will succeed in their plan for White Genocide.
But there’s even a further issue. Namely, while I have trouble predicting exactly what Trump and his cronies will do, I have no trouble whatsoever predicting how the academic left will respond. Namely, as Scott Alexander explained in detail, faced with a complete loss of power over the direction of the country, SJWs will respond by consolidating their power over what they still do control (e.g., academia and various tech organizations), punishing the slightest dissent or heresy with a vehemence that made them look like Care Bears previously. If that’s not what happens, come back here in a few years and tell me I was wrong.
So Clinton and the academic left are nearly pure evil, and he cannot blame Trump for anything, but he still fears Trump.

A reader responds:
Scott, the left has been tormenting you all your life, as you stated right here on this blog. Right now they are rioting and burning things in the city you live in, and making dire death threats in every direction. Meanwhile, I have to wonder if you’ve ever even _met_ a Trump supporter. And yet, you reel in terror before the one but not the other. Why is this?
You can read Scott's response, but he essentially admits that his fear of Trump is completely imaginary. He is just brainwashed to adopt stereotypical Jewish positions even if they are against all of his personal interests.

In spite of Aaronson's outstanding academic credentials, I am convinced that he suffers from a mental disorder. He lives in a pro-Trump state, but all of his colleagues are doctrinaire leftists, and he does not even know any Trump supporters.

Friday, November 11, 2016

Salvaging Western Civilization by peaceful means

The Daily Stormer wrote on election day:
The election today in America is by far the most important in any of our lifetimes. The outcome will determine if Western civilization will be salvaged through peaceful means or if it will descend into a chaotic abyss.

Hillary Clinton is a puppet for the same Jewish interests who have subverted Western civilization through their takeover and manipulation of our financial systems. ...

She will implement policies leading us into a war with Russia while continuing to flood America with an increasing number of third world savages. ...

Contrast Clinton with Donald Trump a billionaire who can’t be bought off by Jewish financial interests. All of his policy proposals if put into practice would give us a chance to restore Western civilization and move things back in a proper direction. ...

Most importantly he wants to end America’s unnecessarily antagonistic foreign policy stance towards Russia. The West has much more in common with Russia than any nation in the Middle East. ...

We are at a tipping point. The greatness of Western civilization has been forever tied to the racial stock of the White Europeans who created it. Anywhere in the world where White Europeans have settled, they have created great societies and civilizations. The on-going racial decline of White European populations brought about through the Jewish promotion of race mixing and mass third world migrations will end Western civilization if it continues.

It is the duty of every American of White European descent to vote for Donald Trump today. He is a symbolic representation of the people who built Western civilization. Hillary Clinton represents the Jewish interests who seek to destroy it.
It is possible that Clinton would have flooded us with Third World immigrants and provoked a war with Russia for reasons that nothing to do with the Jews. And I very much doubt that Trump subscribes to these theories.

But it is clear that Clinton would have been a disaster for Western Civilization. We dodged a bullet.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Calling the President-elect a racist

Politico reports:
For months, every story on the Huffington Post about Trump came with the following note at the bottom of the article.

"Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S."

A note sent to staff members from Huffpost’s Washington Bureau Chief Ryan Grim on Tuesday evening said the decision to remove the note was for a “clean slate”.

“The thinking is that (assuming he wins) that he’s now president and we’re going to start with a clean slate,” Grim wrote in the memo, obtained by POLITICO. "If he governs in a racist, misogynistic way, we reserve the right to add it back on. This would be giving respect to the office of the presidency which Trump and his backers never did."
The London Guardian reports:
As Donald Trump's shock election victory reverberated around Silicon Valley late on Tuesday night, some high-profile technologists were already calling for California to secede from the United States. The broader west coast is a stronghold for the Democrats, and significantly more politically progressive and racially diverse than large swathes of central U.S.
WiliLeaks showed that Google was secretly working for the Clinton campaign, and here is a statement from its CEO last year attacking Trump:
I came to the US from India 22 years ago. ...

And it’s not just about opportunity. The open-mindedness, tolerance, and acceptance of new Americans is one of the country’s greatest strengths and most defining characteristics. And that is no coincidence — America, after all, was and is a country of immigrants. ...

Let’s not let fear defeat our values. We must support Muslim and other minority communities in the US and around the world.
No, America was not, and is not, a country of immigrants. For most of our history, immigrants have been only 10% or so of the population.

Supporting Muslims around the world is not an American value.

His Google view is the opposite of tolerance. He moves to the USA and tries to tell us how to think and who to vote for. His fellow millionaires want to secede because they are intolerant of the American values that elected Trump.

Americans voting for Trump

Yahoo News reports:
Coulter roused support as well as plenty of outrage on Twitter Monday night when she posited, “If only people with at least 4 grandparents born in America were voting, Trump would win in a 50-state landslide.” ...

When asked by Isikoff during Yahoo’s election-night coverage to explain the meaning of her tweet, Coulter bemoaned the backlash as “the most amazing display of political correctness.”

“MSNBC and CNN talk about how the Hispanic vote is going, how the black vote is going, how the Muslim vote is going, how the women’s vote is going,” said Coulter. “I comment on a demographic that is so hated that merely stating something, I am called every name in the book. That’s one demographic you can’t even state something about.”
I just wondered why she said "at least 4 grandparents". Are there ppl with 5 grandparents? Maybe if you count step-grandparents, but is that what she meant?

No, she presumably wanted to look at the demographic of Americans with American roots. She is probably right that they overwhelmingly voted for Trump. If she is suggesting that voters with less American roots are less likely to have American interests at heart, she is probably correct.

Wednesday, November 09, 2016

Some election thoughts

Nearly all of the mainstream pundits said that (1) Trump does not know what he is doing, and (2) he cannot possibly win. They were all proved wrong.

The mainstream polls were also badly wrong. An AP poll a couple of weeks ago put Clinton ahead by 14 points! That difference cannot be explained by statistical error or ppl changing their minds.

Some pundits and pollsters got it right, and explained why the others were wrong.

Trump's win is an overwhelming mandate for the American ppl.

No one will win the popular vote, as no one got over 50% of it. If the election were based on a plurality of the popular vote, as some ppl urge, there might be fights for weeks.

I am believing more and more in the metaphor of The Matrix, where the authorities are constantly lying to us about how the world works. How else can you explain every authority figure being so out of touch?

Trump needs the Alt Right more than ever, as he will need popular support for his policies. Especially if he goes against entrenched business interests.

A great many supposedly-smart ppl seemed to not understand Trump support at all. How did they ever graduate from college if they are so stupid?

I read many essays, both for and against Trump. The pro-Trump essays were at a much higher intellectual level. The anti-Trump essays consisted mostly of name-calling and incoherent rambling. It was very difficult to find any pro-Clinton essay that made any sense.

I have come to the conclusion that most of the Trump haters, on the Right and the Left, suffer from a mental illness. There is no reasoning with them.

Of course the Left is scared to death that Trump will roll back their agenda. But they rarely admitted it.

We now have a redefined Republican party. Its backbone is the Alt Right, and not Reaganism anymore.

Friday, November 04, 2016

Internet is boon to democracy

Farhad Manjoo writes in the NY Times:
For years, technologists and other utopians have argued that online news would be a boon to democracy. That has not been the case.

More than a decade ago, as a young reporter covering the intersection of technology and politics, I noticed the opposite. The internet was filled with 9/11 truthers, and partisans who believed against all evidence that George W. Bush stole the 2004 election from John Kerry, or that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim. (He was born in Hawaii and is a practicing Christian.)
Funny that he does not mention the partisans who believe that Bush stole the 2000 election. Maybe because the NY Times itself spread that myth.

The argument about Obama was that he was not a natural born citizen, and that Islamic law would consider him a Muslim. Those are both legitimate arguments.

But the bigger point is that Donald Trump is a major Presidential candidate, even tho he is opposed by all of the mainstream news media. His candidacy is only viable because millions of ppl can use the internet to see that the media elites are lying to them about him.

Among voters who are deciding for themselves, Trump is much more popularity. His rallies are huge, while no one likes or trusts Clinton. Trump has been chosen by the people, as the elites would never choose him. The internet has made that possible.