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2016 Presidential Election Thread Archive


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Hey, remember that Colin Powell guy?  This article reminds that there were days in which my country was run by adults.

 

haha nope.

hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman

a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father

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Hahahahahahaha, good one!

 

I said Russia, i could really care less if he wants to Sodomize like Mexico or something

 

i like Mexican American food, thats about it

 

Mexicans seem like good people and they make good music, but know who else are good people with good music, the Germans!

 

.....i dont know where im going with this 

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Interesting comment buried in the basement of an otherwise-boring article:

 

Trump voters are old. Streetfighting is a young man’s game.

The last white race riot in America was Chicago in 1919 if memory serves, almost a century ago.

I don’t think Trump is unleashing violence, he is unleashing strenuous opposition, which is ultimately healthy for a real democracy. . . whether or not he sucks if he is elected for President.

As someone almost as pessimistic as you, I agree the macro-trend is toward civil war, but we aren’t there yet. It will go at least one more cycle.

Further, the dream of the populist candidate taking over is a dream. There is too much money at stake, and when there is a risk of a populist democratic revolt, a Sulla will be selected by the ruling classes to put it down. The problem for money is that while money can buy force, once force becomes the means of control, money becomes powerless. I think a good example of this can be found in contemporary Russia.

 

It's interesting to see someone in this day and age applying Toffler's old idea of forms of power, and doing so in a much more coherent way than he could manage.

 

In theory, violence is the crudest form of power - it can only deter and silence, but it is incredibly strong (nobody likes pain). Wealth is a more sophisticated form of power - it can compell both positive and negative action, but is weak (a person may do something for money, but you can't buy back your life). Knowledge and ideas are the most sophisticated form of power - an idea in the right place can guide actions very finely and be hard to compel against (a person may be willing to forgo reward or hazard pain in the service of an ideal). But knowledge/ideas are very difficult to use, and very prone to going astray. In addition, all of the above have attenuation effects. Violence, once used, becomes normalised and thus less effective. Wealth (and its products) depreciates in value as it gets spent. Ideas get attenuated and cannot be infinitely stacked together (you can't get people to believe both in Christianity and Islam at the same time to the point that they're willing to lay their lives on the line for both).

 

As a result, power in societies tends to shift between violence, knowledge, money and back to violence. Violence, after all, can only be countered be more violence (with depreciating returns) or the inherent resolve of ideologically-motivated people. Ideologies, in turn, become weakened and corrupted by wealth - which promises immediate rewards rather than insubstantial benefits. Finally, wealth is destroyed by violence in the way described above.

 

Looked at under this lens, our global society is transitioning from a period in which wealth was the seat of power to one in which violence is.

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I think Trump will be fine president, he is one of the few candidates who i believe wont start a third world war with us 

 

Aha, thank for bringing this up.  I am very curious; how were Hilary Clinton's remarks that she wanted to establish a no-fly zone over Syria regarded in Russia?

Our source was the New York Times.

 

Is the general consensus there in Putinville that Trump's foreign policy would be less antagonistic towards Russia?

I am also curious at how important Russians think improving relations with the US would be.  Sure, it's a pain the ass that the US keeps funding Russia's enemies, or at leas the enemies of their clients, and supporting annoying, church-desecrating opposition groups in Russia, but Russia seems to be winning, so how much does it matter really?

 

 

Interesting comment buried in the basement of an otherwise-boring article:

 

 

It's interesting to see someone in this day and age applying Toffler's old idea of forms of power, and doing so in a much more coherent way than he could manage.

 

In theory, violence is the crudest form of power - it can only deter and silence, but it is incredibly strong (nobody likes pain). Wealth is a more sophisticated form of power - it can compell both positive and negative action, but is weak (a person may do something for money, but you can't buy back your life). Knowledge and ideas are the most sophisticated form of power - an idea in the right place can guide actions very finely and be hard to compel against (a person may be willing to forgo reward or hazard pain in the service of an ideal). But knowledge/ideas are very difficult to use, and very prone to going astray. In addition, all of the above have attenuation effects. Violence, once used, becomes normalised and thus less effective. Wealth (and its products) depreciates in value as it gets spent. Ideas get attenuated and cannot be infinitely stacked together (you can't get people to believe both in Christianity and Islam at the same time to the point that they're willing to lay their lives on the line for both).

 

As a result, power in societies tends to shift between violence, knowledge, money and back to violence. Violence, after all, can only be countered be more violence (with depreciating returns) or the inherent resolve of ideologically-motivated people. Ideologies, in turn, become weakened and corrupted by wealth - which promises immediate rewards rather than insubstantial benefits. Finally, wealth is destroyed by violence in the way described above.

 

Looked at under this lens, our global society is transitioning from a period in which wealth was the seat of power to one in which violence is.

 

Violent coercion is always the fundamental seat of power within a society.  People don't switch from violence to commerce because they have a sudden Libertarian realization that all of this rapine and looting is causing a negative-sum exchange to occur.  Stealing crap from people works better than trade provided that you're the one doing the stealing.  Commerce is only possible within the context of someone having an effective monopoly on violence, and thus a monopoly on cheating and robbing people, and when the people with this monopoly are effectively enforce it to keep actors within their sphere of influence from cheating and robbing each other.

 

If violence breaks out it is because the agency that is supposed to have a monopoly on that sort of thing either permits certain types of violence, or because the filthy peons have gotten enough guns that they can effectively challenge the hitherto dominant agency.  When that happens it's usually Hobbesian full-contact rules, and that sort of thing tends to wreck everything.  But the important thing is that this doesn't reflect a rock-paper-scissors change in tactics.  It reflects a change in what the government considers permissible or is able to enforce.

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That Federalist article doesn't know what the hell it's bleating about. If you want Trump explained - seriously - read and listen to Rush Limbaugh on the subject.

I concur

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That Federalist article doesn't know what the hell it's bleating about. If you want Trump explained - seriously - read and listen to Rush Limbaugh on the subject.

I am confused. I linked to that article because it explains how I and other people feel about Trump, which it got right and pretty much is the only subject it discusses. So how does it "not know what the hell it's bleating about?"

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Violent coercion is always the fundamental seat of power within a society.  People don't switch from violence to commerce because they have a sudden Libertarian realization that all of this rapine and looting is causing a negative-sum exchange to occur.  Stealing crap from people works better than trade provided that you're the one doing the stealing.  Commerce is only possible within the context of someone having an effective monopoly on violence, and thus a monopoly on cheating and robbing people, and when the people with this monopoly are effectively enforce it to keep actors within their sphere of influence from cheating and robbing each other.

 

If violence breaks out it is because the agency that is supposed to have a monopoly on that sort of thing either permits certain types of violence, or because the filthy peons have gotten enough guns that they can effectively challenge the hitherto dominant agency.  When that happens it's usually Hobbesian full-contact rules, and that sort of thing tends to wreck everything.  But the important thing is that this doesn't reflect a rock-paper-scissors change in tactics.  It reflects a change in what the government considers permissible or is able to enforce.

 

Violence as the seat of power is a tad overblown, as anyone who has tried to run an organisation entirely on it quickly finds out. This is not to say that the monopoly on violence isn't a workable principle, but rather that it can only exist where other factors are present as well (a certain amount of legitimacy, ancillary advantages accrued to supporters etc.). Additionally, commerce seems to exist just fine between nations even when none of them have a monopoly on violence, so your second point is absurd on its face.

 

My point was in any case towards the use of violence et al as techniques in and of themselves (ie: ignoring the role of the actors). This is intuitive, as there is nothing essentially stopping people from doing whatever they can think up, but all applications of effort have limits and qualifications. A man can only hit his neighbour so many times before it becomes preferable to try to kill him rather than do what he says. Similarly, no amount of money provided by the government will make me content to throw myself and my family into a furnace. The way it all works out is that some forms of power are inherently more or less useful in certain contexts than others, and this has predictable ramifications for when and how they are deployed. Thus (for instance) a regime which favours violence cannot be overthrown by actors within it trying to bribe it to death.

 

This is, then, something like an underlying theory for the iron law of oligarchy or Plato's five regimes - an rough mechanical hypothesis to provide a mechanism for a broader sociological trend. You may dispute the power of the theory (because, let's face it, political philosophy is rank bullshit) and, in doing so, point out the places where it holds no explanatory power or predictive merit. But simply quoting another theory at it as a rebuttal is weak.

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Michigan went for Trump and is going for Sanders. That's a big middle finger to NAFTA and other trade agreements.

 

Suicide watch for the Rubio campaign.

 

Edit: And again, it looks like there was a greater turnout of GOP voters in the Michigan primary compared to Democrats.

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