Help an undecided voter

[Witherwings]

16 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

This didn't actually answer my question. Instead of deflecting to point out bad things about Hillary*, can you address how Trump seems willing to spread outright hatred and put people into power who believe the horrible things he says and strip rights away from minorities? I would like you to address the horrors of Trump and why people shouldn't be fucking terrified of him. 

*Not a Hillary fan at all. 

ETA: About the coal miner comment. If you read the whole thing in context it isn't that horrible. Especially if people are going to compare it to some of the awful thing Trump has said. 

 

First, I haven't stated I am going to vote for Trump. I will vote for Trump over Clinton (or third party) but I have not supported Trump whatsoever. If I vote for Trump, I am voting against Clinton, against the establishment, against a two-party system, against oligarchy, against the horrible Clinton past, etc. We could talk about the countless stories Secret Service and others have shared about the Hillary, but I will take those as stories. I doubt all are false. I could be wrong. Deflecting I am not. I can dislike things Trump has said, but I can also vote for him because I still feel Hillary is worse than him. 

Second, saying trump "seems" willing is quite different than being sure he is willing. Maybe he is. Maybe his is not. I do think there is a bit of hyperbole surrounding Trump and willingness to take him out of context. Sure, that probably isn't entirely the case, but he has a history of being pro-choice, in 2004 he said he identified more with being a democrat, and so on. 

So, "The horrors of Trump and why people shouldn't be fucking terrified of him" is an opinion you are welcome to have. If you can explain to me why I should be required to completely agree with this, go for it. 

 

[ShepherdontheRock]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/opinion/campaign-stops/do-sanders-supporters-favor-his-policies.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

Found this quite interesting, and am just going to leave it here, since it seems pretty relevant to the Sanders/Clinton/Trump thing, and everything I've been hearing on FJ, FB, and everywhere else.

[PennySycamore]

I'll just leave a couple of links here.

Posters have asked about why we have a two party system and why minority parties don't tend to work in the US:  This article explains it really well.  I also love that the title of the blog is Eleventy Dimensional Chess.

The Elks, the Party System, Solitary Masturbation and Bernie or Bust

The other I just read today, linked from a Daily Kos diary:

Too Easy: How Republicans Would Tear Apart an Unvetted Sanders in the General Election

Hillary is used to the attacks of the Right.  She's only been facing them for 20+ years.  The rightwing hates the Clintons.  Hills can handle the GOP.

 

[mizandry]

I don't have the will or energy to get into a discussion about Bernie Sanders and how insulting he is on so many levels, but I've gone from "Oh he seems okay!" to "Wow... I kind of really hate this guy" in a very brief span of time. For a lot of reasons, too many I can't even begin to get into without spending hours trying to type it all out.

There's just a lot of frustration all around. So... instead of posting a wall text from hell on my feelings, I'm going to do a link dump. 

• "'Berned' by Bernie Sanders" (if there's any piece you read, I recommend this one the most next to what PennySycamore shared above)
  https://shiksappeal.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/berned-by-bernie-sanders/
• "Progressive"
  http://sadydoyle.tumblr.com/post/138860699828/progressivesive
• "Former Senior U.S. Officials Raise Concerns About Sanders’ Continued Disinterest In Foreign Policy"
  https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/statements/2016/04/14/former-senior-u-s-officials-raise-concerns-about-sanders-continued-disinterest-in-foreign-policy/
• "Hillary Clinton Never Supported the Bush/Cheney Invasion of Iraq"
  http://www.hillaryhq.com/2015/05/hillary-clinton-never-supported.html

 

[AlysonRR]

What bothers me most about Donald Trump is his immaturity and reactivity. He seems to have no control over what he says, and no concept of the rational and practical reasons why his "suggestions" are disastrous (a wall, bashing our allies, poking unstable potential enemies) which would be pretty dangerous diplomatically. 

Bernie may want to change more about our economic system than many people are comfortable with. Hilary may be too centrist (or too hated!) for Democrats and too divisive for Independents and Republicans.

But the only one that makes me fear worldwide nuclear war is Trump. If he can't make rational, considered statements while campaigning, I can't trust that he will gain any maturity once elected.

 

*His inconsistent and regressive positions on civil rights issues important to me such as abortion, gender, race, and immigration would be enough for me to not vote for him. In a normal election year I might be quite disappointed if the election was won by a candidate I didn't prefer. In this election I actually fear the election of Trump.

[Sundaymorning]

@AlysonRR

I completely agree that Trump's waywardness is a huge danger for the world. Just today, there was an article about how dangerous the times are we live in. And this is not some tinfoil-hat alarmism, the man who wrote this is a well-respected historian and journalist.

This article in unfortunately in German, but what this history professor writes is very alarming. It basically sums up why I always say that the world simply can't afford a President Trump.

The article (translation by google translate with a bit of cleaning up from me)

Spoiler

A new global arms race has started. This advances a nuclear exchange closer again. The lessons of the Cold War were unfortunately forgotten. This is extremely dangerous.

The bad news - at the first glance they sound good. The nuclear powers USA, Russia and China are going to equip their nuclear arsenal with warheads of a smaller format. Therein, however, to see a turn toward "Global Zero" - a dream goal of nuclear disarmament since a decade and openly represented by the best strategic minds - is not only premature, but also is to failure to recognize that smaller formats are more practically controllable and threatening.

From the almost abstract hypothesis of the nuclear exchange of blows in the cold war and the grim logic of mutual escalation, will become, step by step, in a diabolical logic, the scenario of self-destruction of Earth's civilization. William J. Perry, US Secretary of Defense under Clinton and one of the protagonists of "Global Zero", warns the new, smaller and high-precision weapons, which the Obama administration plans, would make the unthinkable only conceivable.

Perry: "It makes them easier to use, even if there is no credible approach to control the escalation." What is true of the American military-industrial complex, applies with gradations for Russia and the People's Republic of China.

It rules a double paradox that threatens the world and which must once again make the reliable NATO Formula, 1967 in the Harmel Report of deterrence and détente, a priority objective. Over four decades of nuclear stalemate - peace impossible, war improbable - the armaments of doomsday appeard, tared reasonably in rough balance, practically and theoretically as a prohibition of the Great War and also sometimes reined in proxy wars.

Long before the recent nuclear duel, the situation has forced unconditional avoiding of any direct confrontation. There was something like a cartel of peacemaking and conflict prevention between the nuclear superpowers. But that is largely over. From the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea, Americans and Russians stage confrontations on the edge of the emergency case, which would have made glowing all warning signs during the Cold War - but now no more, and that is life-threatening.

The philosophy to survive together or perish together has lost its validity and effect of power. The relentless lessons from the world crisis over Berlin and Cuba half a century ago - balance, saving face and confidence-building rituals - have gone lost with a new generation of military and political leadership. It is frightening to hear, in fact, and to read, as the military and political leaders talk down the weapons of the apocalypse, as if they were just a special kind of artillery.

Today's state of tension between Russia and the West, where the dangers are far greater than all the acute issues from the Crimean peninsula and the eastern Ukraine to the Western sanctions and the Russian counter-sanctions are worthy of, contains many options to misunderstandings and tactical maneuvers, that can escalate horribly until no one can control them anymore

Currently, the razor-sharp overflights of Russian bombers over American destroyers in international waters of the Baltic Sea scare the people breathless. The courage to clear (the isues) lacks everywhere. The US missile defense in Romania, which alarmes the Russians, is hardly consistent with the assurances of NATO enlargement from 1997.
.
In addition, there are now  new nuclear and high-tech conventional technologies. They bring back the temptation to seek ways out of the double-shell armament and the politics of warheads in limited format. Thus this is currently happening in the general staffs, without putting an end to the madness and making every effort to return to the peace-keeping mode of nuclear and conventional arms control and the, to the military precision, regulated equilibrium of the 80s.

There is such a hostile silence and the fear that you can’t put anything past the potential opponents, not even the worst.  The changing scenarios of hybrid war avoid though – and that's their political meaning – to get close to the threshold of nuclear conflict. But if nuclear war in the modern war scenarios is workable again and penetrates the military doctrines which goad each other, it gets dangerous - more dangerous in fact than in the theory and practice of the Cold War.

The Russian military doctrine contains the idea, which is also to Western strategists not an entirely alien idea, that the first use of nuclear weapons could have a de-escalating effect: whatever you think of this in theory, the threshold gets in any case reduced in the hope of the an early buckling of the opposite side. This is an irresponsible game with the nuclear fire. Wherever you find the beginnings, the dynamics of the armament, when unrestrained, will generate new escalation, not towards mass but toward class.

The megaton destructive potential, their dynamics reached their peak in the 70s and which caused that with each rotation of the nuclear arms race, further rotation followed, triggering an absurd race towards overkill capacity, was militarily speaking, a contradiction in terms. Because there was, equally for both sides, the paradox that, the greater the destruction potential was, the less practically applicable it became in the case of an open confrontation.

This insight had a very sobering effect on military personnel and politicians, no matter how deep the differences in words, works and values were, and still has decisively contributed that the upheaval in the world two decades ago and the decline of the Soviet Union happened halfway peacefully, and in any case without a great war. The Budapest Protocol in 1994 between Moscow, Washington and London, which promised the Urkraine territorial grandfathering for the surrender of the remaining nuclear arsenals in the Ukraine, obviously doesn’t work anymore. The mutually assured destruction (of nuclear weapons) - in English appropriately abbreviated MAD - is no longer reliable.

The threats develop their own sinister dynamic. The deregulation of world politics finds its expression in hybrid wars and in the thinkability of a nuclear emergency without aim and limit. "Global Zero" remains a philanthropic idea. But currently, the world powers propel in the opposite direction.

 

http://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article155584911/Vor-dem-Atomkrieg-bewahrt-uns-kein-Protokoll-mehr.html

 

[RoseWilder]

4 hours ago, AlysonRR said:

What bothers me most about Donald Trump is his immaturity and reactivity. He seems to have no control over what he says, and no concept of the rational and practical reasons why his "suggestions" are disastrous (a wall, bashing our allies, poking unstable potential enemies) which would be pretty dangerous diplomatically. 

Bernie may want to change more about our economic system than many people are comfortable with. Hilary may be too centrist (or too hated!) for Democrats and too divisive for Independents and Republicans.

But the only one that makes me fear worldwide nuclear war is Trump. If he can't make rational, considered statements while campaigning, I can't trust that he will gain any maturity once elected.

 

*His inconsistent and regressive positions on civil rights issues important to me such as abortion, gender, race, and immigration would be enough for me to not vote for him. In a normal election year I might be quite disappointed if the election was won by a candidate I didn't prefer. In this election I actually fear the election of Trump.

Your post summed up perfectly what I wanted to say. I'm remembering back to the 2008 election when Michelle Obama was asked if she and her husband are bothered by the negative attacks and, I can't remember her exact words, but she spoke of how you have to be thick skinned in order to be in politics. If you spend two minutes on Trump's twitter page you can see how poorly he responds when someone disagrees with him. It's terrifying to think of how he would behave on the national stage. 

[Sundaymorning]

On 22.5.2016 at 1:59 AM, Mama Mia said:

@Sundaymorning. Have you looked at any of the actual polls? Sander's beats Trump in a general election. Particularly in swing states. By double digits in most of them. Clinton does not. This comes from all of the major polling companies.

Another thing to keep in mind is that not only are most voters independents, but Independents lean more left than right. Which gives Sanders an advantage.

And , please, his essay from 40+ years ago that described the results of sex stereotyping and tied it to rape fantasies ( also, please see feminist literature of era and educate yourself - or even collections of fantasies held by real women , as collected by Nancy Friday during that time frame ). -- And compare that to Trump's constant and on-going objectionable statements about women, Muslim's, " the blacks" , Mexicans and on and on and on. Seriously ridiculous.

A good article about the recent polls in which Sanders allegedly beats Trump. If they start attacking him for real, he will be toast. But right now, he is just a very useful tool for the Republicans to weaken Clinton.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/24/bernie-sanders-is-crushing-donald-trump-head-to-head-and-it-doesn-t-mean-a-thing.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/02/bernie_sanders_radical_past_would_haunt_him_in_a_general_election.html