LOSERS: Krugman gets it right three times!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2016

Part 4—Getting it right from the start:
How did we liberals manage to turn ourselves into the world's biggest losers?

Paul Krugman's remarkable column helps answer that question. We refer to last Friday's column, in which Krugman said, two separate times, that white working-class voters "imagine" that they're looked down upon by us liberals.

We regard that as one of the strangest statements we've ever seen in print. It also helps us spot the traits which make us such massive losers.

Do white working-class voters "imagine" our condescension, our sneering disregard? Liberals, please! For an example of what such people actually see, consider a new post by Kevin Drum, our long-time favorite blogger.

Also, consider some instant comments to Drum's brand-new post.

Late last night, Drum offered a post about the new Timss scores. He ended his post with this:
DRUM (11/30/16): One other note. If you really want a takeaway from the latest TIMSS test, it's the same as the takeaway from every other test ever administered to America schoolkids: we do a terrible job of educating black children. The single biggest thing we could do to improve education in this country is to cut out the half measures and focus serious money and resources on poor, black school districts. But I guess the white working class wouldn't be very happy about that.
As we write, Drum's midnight post has produced few comments. Truth to tell, we liberals aren't drawn to topics like this.

That said, several commenters noted the gratuitous snark lodged in the highlighted comment. "I have a lot of respect for Kevin Drum, but this is a cheap shot at the white working class," the fourth commenter wrote.

That commenter seemed to be a liberal. A few comments later, an apparent conservative imagined that he had detected an attitude on Drum's part:

"If you can't get a cheap virtue signal in by back-handing workin whitey every now then, then what's the point of having your own blog. am I right Kev? Well done."

According to Krugman, that person was just imagining that! Other commenters offered jibes about the stupidity of the white working class.

Our liberal world now runs on snark; we hate it when the practice spreads even to Drum. That said, we weren't just struck by Drum's gratuitous remark about the evil of the white working class, full stop.

Yes, we were struck by Drum's comment. But we were also struck by the astounding array of clueless assessments contained in the handful of comments to his post about the Timss.

Tell the truth—does anyone on the planet know less than we self-impressed liberals? Is anyone more deeply sunk in pleasing tribal script?

Drum's comments were a thing to behold. Within the first two dozen, we encountered a rich array of bungled assessments, including these:

Inevitably, two commenters praised the greatness of Finland. They didn't seem to know that American kids matched their counterparts in miraculous Finland in these new Timss results.

(Devotion to the Finland script is found across the ideological spectrum. It represents a remarkably successful propaganda campaign.)

One commenter insisted that poor black kids score just as well on achievement tests as poor white kids do. That claim is pleasing to us liberals, but it comes from Fantasyland.

(On our one reliable domestic test, the Naep, lower-income white kids tend to outscore higher-income black kids. This depressing fact can be explained in various ways, of course. If we gave a hoot about black kids—as a group, we plainly don't—we'd be aware of such facts.)

One commenter seemed startled when another commenter said that some school districts which are heavily black "have spent heavily on a per student basis."

The first commenter's statement was plainly accurate, of course. The second commenter seemed fairly sure that this couldn't be true. We liberals tend to be like that, just as conservatives are.

As we type, Drum's post has produced 33 comments, some of which have nothing to do with the subject Drum discussed. Those comments are marked by the high degree of cluelessness displayed by a fair number of commenters—and by simultaneous comments assailing the dumbness of the white working class!

Alas! On balance, the cluelessness of this small group of commenters is matched by their arrogance and condescension. It you want to know how we liberals managed to become such losers, this small selection of self-impressed comments might start to provide a small hint.

Krugman seems to think that white working class voters are "imagining" condescension on the part of us liberals. You'll rarely see a person who is so smart—a person whose work is so invaluable—make such a ridiculous statement.

Krugman, please! Our own tribe's sneering condescension has been an obvious fact of life for a very long time. So has the dumbness we routinely display as we assail The Others, decrying how stupid they are.

(We'll offer one comment: Sad!)

Liberals, can we talk? We're stupid and ugly and nobody likes us! This has been true for a very long time, but we ourselves grasp this fact very slowly. This remarkable lack of self-awareness helps explain how we became the biggest losers.

Krugman has been the most important journalist of the past sixteen years. We assume this will continue. When a person as smart as Krugman is so clueless about some point, it helps us see how blind we can be to our team's shortcomings.

Our tribe's sloth and cluelessness extend back many years. In the next few weeks, we'll be discussing the ways this slacker behavior has played out over those decades, helping send Donald J. Trump to the White House next year.

We plan to focus on several areas in which our world-class cluelessness helped doom our chances:

Next week, we plan to examine the way we failed to respond when James B. Comey—Comey the God—intruded on the presidential campaign on July 5, then again two days later.

James B. Comey, and the emails, will be our focus next week. In other weeks, we'll focus on the various ways Candidate Clinton got "defined" as corrupt and dishonest in the past few years. We'll recall the various ways Candidate Trump got a pass on those same themes, with a giant assist from corporate stars like our own Cantinflas, Rachel Maddow.

Alas! We'll also venture back through the years, examining the ways our ineptitude and sloth got started. This brings us back to the recent columns in which Krugman, as is his wont, got it very much right.

The defining of Candidate Clinton didn't start this July. It didn't start this year, or in this election cycle.

On the national level, the defining of Candidate Clinton started in 1992. Relentlessly, we liberals have agreed to enable this process, or even to help it along.

On three occasions since Labor Day, Krugman made a belated attempt to note this remarkable history. His attempts came much too late, of course. But we'll note them today all the same, for a particular reason.

On three occasions since Labor Day, Krugman tied the press corps' conduct toward Candidate Clinton to its earlier conduct toward a previous Democratic nominee. Even though his comments were fleeting, he was right every time.

Below, you see his first statement of this theme. Accurate headline included:
KRUGMAN (9/5/16): Clinton Gets Gored

Americans of a certain age who follow politics and policy closely still have vivid memories of the 2000 election
—bad memories, and not just because the man who lost the popular vote somehow ended up in office. For the campaign leading up to that end game was nightmarish too.

You see, one candidate, George W. Bush, was dishonest in a way that was unprecedented in U.S. politics. Most notably, he proposed big tax cuts for the rich while insisting, in raw denial of arithmetic, that they were targeted for the middle class. These campaign lies presaged what would happen during his administration—an administration that, let us not forget, took America to war on false pretenses.

Yet throughout the campaign most media coverage gave the impression that Mr. Bush was a bluff, straightforward guy, while portraying Al Gore—whose policy proposals added up, and whose critiques of the Bush plan were completely accurate—as slippery and dishonest. Mr. Gore's mendacity was supposedly demonstrated by trivial anecdotes, none significant, some of them simply false. No, he never claimed to have invented the internet. But the image stuck.

And right now I and many others have the sick, sinking feeling that it's happening again.
Guess what, dumb-asses? It was happening again! In the end, it produced the same result.

We're revisiting this for a reason. Pardon us while we quickly record Krugman's other statements:
KRUGMAN (9/30/16): [A]s recently as August Mrs. Clinton held a commanding lead. Then her polls went into a swoon.
What happened? Did she make some huge campaign blunders?

I don't think so. As I've written before, she got Gored. That is, like Al Gore in 2000, she ran into a buzz saw of adversarial reporting from the mainstream media, which treated relatively minor missteps as major scandals, and invented additional scandals out of thin air.

Meanwhile, her opponent's genuine scandals and various grotesqueries were downplayed or whitewashed; but as Jonathan Chait of New York magazine says, the normalization of Donald Trump was probably less important than the abnormalization of Hillary Clinton.

KRUGMAN (10/21/16): Hillary Clinton is a terrible candidate. Hey, that's what pundits have been saying ever since this endless campaign began. You have to go back to Al Gore in 2000 to find a politician who faced as much jeering from the news media, over everything from claims of dishonesty (which usually turn out to be based on nothing) to matters of personal style.
We agree with Krugman's assessment on September 30. ("The normalization of Trump was probably less important than the abnormalization of Clinton.")

On October 21, though, he offered this assessment: "Mrs. Clinton won the Democratic nomination fairly easily, and now, having pummeled her opponent in three successive debates, is an overwhelming favorite to win in November, probably by a wide margin."

As you may have heard, that didn't exactly work out.

We've requoted Krugman for a reason. When he recalled the mainstream press corps' earlier war against Candidate Gore, he was taking the longer view of what happened this month. When we discuss Comey the God next week—inevitably, Rachel ignored what he did!—we'll be taking a shorter view of the process.

That said, Krugman was discussing a very important fact. The "abnormalization" of Candidate Clinton was accomplished through the repeated pimping of certain themes over the course of twenty-five years. In part, this "defining" of Clinton was fueled by Comey this year. In part, it was fueled by the earlier media wars which were aimed at her husband, then at Candidate Gore.

All across the liberal landscape, career liberals took a pass on that longer, destructive series of wars. Quite correctly, Krugman tried to evoke the war against Gore in three citations this fall. By way of contrast, we began discussing that war in March 1999. We began discussing that war the week that war began!

We were right about that war in real time, about the war which continued this year. We mention that to suggest that you listen to what we'll be telling you now. To suggest that you listen to someone who was right about this from the start.

We have no illusions, of course. Our tribe has made one point quite clear—we treasure and prize our right to be clueless. We treasure our tribal hauteur.

Our identity very much turns on the way we look down on The Others. When this sense of superiority is mixed with our trademark dumbness, it tends to produce a highly poisonous brew.

Trump voters don't have to "imagine" these things. Everyone can see these phenomena. Everyone but Us, that is. We're the world's most self-impressed losers.

42 comments:

  1. It is bad enough that Clinton was cheated out of the presidency but now we have to be called losers every day by Somerby. I don't care if it is a literary device. I am tired of hearing it and I wish he would stop it. It hurts. There is a limit to how long I will keep reading when I must hear that crap along with my daily dose of rationality.

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    1. But you did lose. You let female college sophomores for whom political aggrievedness is recreation take over your rhetoric and agenda and smarter, less wealthy voters reacted. Hillary Clinton adopted that agenda, having started out at the beginning of her Senate career as perfectly positioned for a presidential landslide. That's not just not winning, it's losing badly.

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    2. Better trolling please.

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  2. I think you meant "rationalizing."

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  3. What exactly are we all so dumb about?

    Why assume that all of Drum's commenters are liberals (or representative of liberals)?

    Is the supposed condescension on the left matched by similar condescension on the right? If so, are we being blamed for being bad liberals or bad people?

    What exactly are we supposed to do about this situation. We don't all have columns like Krugman. Most of us did our best to combat Trump. It wasn't enough to overcome the forces against us. Does Somerby imagine we were wasting time calling conservatives names instead of walking precincts, making phone calls, donating money, talking to our friends and neighbors in a civil manner, and some of us did more than that...traveling to other states to support Clinton's campaign, suspending work to help campaign. But we supposedly undid that effort by calling The Other stupid?

    Get real.

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    1. Dave the Guitar PlayerDecember 1, 2016 at 12:56 PM

      The way politics currently works, the candidate that turns our "their" people wins. Clinton would have won Michigan if she would have gotten the same number of Democratic votes from Detroit as Obama. She did not and she lost Michigan. Similarly, Republicans needed something to energize their base. Bob is pointing out that every time we insult people we disagree with, we are motivating them to get out and stick it to the snobbish liberals. It does not serve our purpose to demonize whole groups with broad accusations of "racism", even if we believe that it is true. We can resist bad policy and deplore specific acts, but why do we enjoy the name calling so much? What purpose does it serve?

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    2. Calling people racist when they do racist things establishes a social norm against racism. That will serve as a deterrent to the daily acts of casual racism that minorities experience and it will help change institutionalization of racism in policies within organizations as people form a consensus that racism is bad.

      Calling this "name calling" is part of the push back from the right, along with relabeling civil rights as "identity politics." I'm not sure why Somerby has adopted it. My theory is that he is immersed in a Southern state and doesn't realize what is going on.

      My theory about the vote in those traditionally blue states is that Clinton's people depended on the unions for the GOTV effort, as they always do, but that union membership is way down. My alternate theory is that there really was voter fraud and the recount may discover it.

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    3. "Calling people racist when they do racist things establishes a social norm against racism. "

      Calling people racist when they don't do racist things establishes Trump as President of the United States, and likely creates more genuine racists as it forces allegiance to the side that isn't calling the non-racist a racist, but is also harboring true racists. Some of those who throw in with that side will become racist. Democrats are stupid. They ensured a conservative Supreme Court for a generation because their angry feelz needed indulgence. "Racists sexists xenophobes homophobes Islamophobes" is the phrase that cost Hillary the election, but virtue signaling sure feels good.

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    4. We are dumb for not fighting back against Comey in July. That's one of many examples. If one doesn't have the Krugman or Maddow platform, they should at least be aware that they are being underserved by dummies.

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    5. AnonymousDecember 1, 2016 at 1:08 PM -- here's my problem with your statement "Calling people racist when they do racist things establishes a social norm against racism." The definitinon of "racist thing' has expanded so that we don't have a common definition. Most (supposed) racist actions aren't as clear cut as violence or outright bans on hiring or housing.

      Here's an example showing how fuzzy the definition of "racist action" has become. IMHO the people who vociferously assert (falsely) that the President-elect is a racist are themselves committing a racist act. They're encouraging the country to believe that its leader is racist, which encourages other racists. But, does it do any good for me to call Democrats racists because of this racist action?

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    6. The definition of racism shouldn't be limited to just the most extreme actions (like lynching).

      The President-elect has been called a racist for (1) refusing to rent to black people, (2) discriminating against them in his casinos and other workplaces, (3) using the N-word in public, and (4) stating that he considers black people less intelligent and lazier than whites. I believe all of those qualify without having an overly loose definition.

      The rest of your example is silly. A person doesn't become a racist by attacking someone who is a member of any race, white or black. He or she becomes a racist for using race as the basis for making that attack. Trump has been accused because of his actions, not because of his skin color.

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    7. 3:42

      You have to realize that we are not going to get anywhere trying to pin Trump as a racist. You can do it. It's your right but it's a nonstarter politically. It's dumb.

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    8. And yet 2.5 million more people preferred to vote for his opponent. He won only because of cheating and the electoral college, not because people preferred to vote for the racist.

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    9. AnonymousDecember 1, 2016 at 3:42 PM -- It's hard for me to respond to your four point without cites to support them. I do know that #1 is wrong. Many years ago, Trump was accused of refusing to rent to black people (which would have been a crime), but he was not convicted of this charge. Surely you believe in the priciple of "innocent until proven guilty."

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    10. He settled two housing discrimination lawsuits. He didn't win them.

      Trump denies things he is on record saying. You cannot rely on his denials. One source is the ghostwriter of one of his books. Another is the producer and various staff at Celebrity Apprentice. There are also multiple sources for his casino discrimination and his statement that he wants Jews not blacks doing his books. Some of his white superiority garbage was on Howard Stern.

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    11. " He or she becomes a racist for using race as the basis for making that attack. "

      Like when racist Obama and the racists at MSNBC tried to rally violent mobs against innocent men (private citizens and police officers) who acted lawfully in defending themselves, because the innocent men's violent attackers were black. This happened a dozen times in the last three years.

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    12. Trump didn't win the lawsuits, but he settled them with no admission of discrimination.

      However, I have little doubt that Trump's properties were discriminating against blacks at that time, as many renters were. OTOH that was 43 years ago.

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  4. Poverty and racism are correlated. That suggests that the white working class is more likely to be racist than people with higher incomes. Higher incomes are correlated with higher education levels. The more education, the greater the earning potential across the lifespan. That is still true and there are greater boosts in income for completing college and for postgraduate education.

    So, Drum's dig at the white working class is unfortunately supported by facts. It doesn't mean each and every white working class person is racist, but it does mean that as a group, white working class people are more likely to be racist than higher income people. Because education is negatively correlated with racism, and directly correlated with income, it also means that educated white people earn more money and are less likely to be racist.

    He is stating facts. Somerby may not like hearing them. Somerby may think that generalizing is wrong, even when talking about groups instead of individuals, but Somerby is wrong.

    Working class white people may be offended by such statements. Too bad. No one chooses their skin color, but most people choose their level of education. Poverty is no excuse, given the low cost of community colleges nationwide. Anyone who is willing to put in effort can become more educated.

    Education is independent of intelligence. Someone is not stupid because they are uneducated. However, someone who is low income and does nothing to improve the situation is behaving stupidly.

    No one is more condescending than someone who was born into poverty and disadvantage but managed to work their way out of it. Such people worked hard and know exactly what it takes to improve and they tend to have little sympathy for the explanations that suggest environment determines outcomes.

    Somerby doesn't appear to have been born to disadvantage. I think it has blinded him to some of the realities experienced by people who came up the hard way. He keeps arguing that we should cut some slack for The Other, no matter how much The Others harm this country. He suggests that name calling is self-defeating. I believe that it is dishonest to respect that which is unworthy of respect. It undermine the reality-based community when we pretend The Others are not saying and doing stupid stuff. So I strongly disagree with today's essay and others like it.

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    1. People with higher incomes are generally safely walled off from epidemic crime. Opposition to how Democratic activists and politicians apologize for black crimes, is what the opposition the left calls "racism." Consequences of elitists causing racial division and apologizing for crime are experienced in the lives of lower income people but not the wealthy. What you call "less racist" is instead ordinary elitism, everybody knows it, and "RACIST" coming from activists means nothing now and has no impact, except to install Republicans into the presidency, both houses, and the Supreme Court.

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  5. Bob, is the last half of this post real, or snark? I hope it's snark, as Krugman, on Twitter, essentially accused Comey of treason a week ago. Plus, the idea that the MSM gave Trump a pass is a laugher.

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  6. It's not the progressive left's smugness or sneering that offends, that the smugness and smearing is coming from such a low-information, ridiculous crowd.

    They are ignorant and uneducated, but thoroughly indoctrinated on college campuses. The average white male Wisconsin voter who never attended college knows more about the founding principles and history of this country than most progressive left postgrads, who never learned why they should be expected to tolerate speech that hurts their fee fees, or why Bernie's utopian agenda is peak idiocy.

    No Trump voter cares if he is "looked down upon" by these retards, but they were concerned that their insane and dangerous thinking and behavior was becoming mainstreamed.

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  7. "Liberals, can we talk? We're stupid and ugly and nobody likes us! This has been true for a very long time, but we ourselves grasp this fact very slowly. This remarkable lack of self-awareness helps explain how we became the biggest losers."

    This is accurate, but then you go on to blame the press for giving Hillary he Gore treatment. Hillary was all in with the clueless activists and the evidence is her famous "deplorables" speech to donors, in which she hit all the requisite -ism notes. Over the last several years she became one of the stupid, ugly, and unliked. Maybe she always was, privately.

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  8. Identity politics is the most fundamental of politics, and in an increasingly multiethnic hodgepodge like the U.S., it is becoming the only sort of politics. What we have witnessed with Trump's election is the waning of the age of ideology and the dawning of the age of identity.

    Identity politics is also zero sum, i.e., you cannot have both the black vote and the white vote, because the interests of both groups are too divergent. Yes, Democrats could increase their share of the White vote as Bob desires, but only by tamping down minority enthusiasm, which they have come to depend on, especially that sweet sweeeet 90% Black voting block.

    Republicans are smartly choosing to be the White party, while the Democrats appear to be stuck in their role of the Black and Brown party. Of course, in the long term (unless the GOP really delivers on shutting down Brown immigration) the Dems will ultimately prevail.

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  9. I'm probably letting myself in for it, but it seems to me that the words 'racist' and 'racism' are used much too promiscuously. I can remember when blacks had to go to segregated schools, had separate water fountains and swimming pools, there were anti-miscegenation laws, Blacks were barred from voting etc etc. There were lynchings if a Black man looked at a white women cross-eyed, and on and on. What we have now is quite different (not to say that there aren't still a lot of people who really are 'racist', and are disadvantaged in large measure due to the effects of slavery and horrible discrimination after that) Blacks were invisible on TV or movies (except maybe for Amos and Andy and Rochester).The tea party Trump supporters seem to be fine with Clarence Thomas and Dr. Carson. Lots of Blacks did vote for Trump (though a small minority; probably a lot of them just didn't vote at all, thus making the difference in the outcome). Real racists would not accept Thomas or Carson. The topic is very complex, involving psychology, history, sociology, instincts, etc. The way the term is constantly thrown about, in an unintelligent, reductionist manner, probably has a lot to do with Clinton not getting elected.

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    1. If it had any effect on Clinton's campaign, it was a very minor one. Especially since Clinton didn't throw the term around. If any candidate is going to be blamed for the actions of liberals, then no candidate has a chance of ever being elected again.

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    2. Clinton didn't throw "racist" around? Her throwing it around was the most covered and damaging moment of her campaign.

      Voters watched Democrats try to shout down and define any effort to protect or restore correct, civilized behavior as "racist microaggression." They watched lies told to the gullible public by people trying to turn lawfully acting police officers into murderers and thugs into heroes and victims.

      When one side realizes the other side is attempting to punish people, in this case tar them with a lie, for defending right over wrong, they react.

      And you're right. Voters noticing what the crazies of the left were up to, including their candidate in her "deplorables" speech, black lives matter, and nut jobs on campuses, had everything to do with Clinton not getting elected.

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    3. Is it worse to be a racist or to call another person a racist?

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    4. Short of murder, falsely accusing someone of something despicable is at least as bad and often worse than the act. Better 100 racists hold racist attitudes than one non-racist be falsely accused.

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  10. And no one assembles circular firing squads as efficiently as the left.
    And each bullet strikes home: Comey, Putin, Wikileaks, Hillary, the LOTUS-elect (Liar-of-the-U.S), snooty libs, white racism, unfair media, and so much more. Got a gut? I got a gutshot for you.
    In the end, however, on a personal note, I'm most grieved by the loss of friends that voted for Trump. Conservatives I've known for years with whom I took great pains to avoid fruitless discussion of politics have let me know in certain terms that they can no longer call an educated liberal from Seattle a friend.
    So, Bob, where does it go from here? They know implicitly how I feel about climate change, about immigration, about racism, sexism and anti-semitism (all those isms); and, quite frankly, they are VERY pissed off. And let's be clear, these are not working class white people - they're owners: managers of businesses, farmers, ranchers.
    So where does all that self-righteous anger come from? Why the casual racism towards Hispanics and blacks and gays? Why the endless conspiracy theories about climate change? Why the covert (and often overt) dog whistles?
    The answer is I don't know. But the anger, while it's now directed at me, didn't originate with me or mine. It was around long before today's political climate. And I, for one, am not going to take the blame for it - neither am I going to normalize it, as our daily press seems to be trampling each other to do.

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    1. I am surprised that they would still be angry - they won.

      Also, how do you feel about immigration?

      As for climate change. Well, nobody seems to believe in it. I am so old, I can remember when it was global warming. I guess they decided global warming was a hoax and there's this new thing called "climate change"

      I say that nobody believes it, because if taken seriously it would seem to be a HUGE threat, and yet nobody proposes serious sacrifices to deal with it. That's the problem - people do not want to change the way they live because of global warming. So they will believe what they have to in order to avoid any sort of material sacrifice.

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    2. "So where does all that self-righteous anger come from? Why the casual racism towards Hispanics and blacks and gays? "

      We think what you read as racism, casual or any other kind, is some manifestation of a mental disorder that interprets "black culture in America is the reason for epidemic black crime and poverty rates" as racism. We feel pity those with disordered thinking because you can't hate the ignorant, but are simultaneously angry when we see it affecting policy, when we see a U.S. president who should know better stepping up to the podium to try to get an innocent man imprisoned for defending himself, and when we see law enforcement officers gunned down in Dallas as a result of that posture by the disordered thinkers of politics and media.

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    3. This is the problem. When a group operates with its own set of incorrect facts and misunderstandings, it is going to be angry and make poor decisions. The media needs to do better, but people select the sources that support their preconceived beliefs.

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    4. Dr T: What do I think about immigration? In 25 words or less? That it's an issue that can't be solved with easy platitudes or nostrums or slogans. Dream Act though? All for it.

      Anon 4:43: You know you're using the same rationale as a rapist, don't you? (Yup, these librul sluts, dressing that way, deserve to be shamed)
      When I say casual racism in the Trump half of my state and amongst my former friends, I'll illustrate with the following true story. Two men ran for Supreme Court Justice a couple years ago. One of them was rated highly competent across the board by newspapers across the state, by fellow jurists and lawyers. The other didn't even campaign and was rated unqualified.
      The "highly qualified" candidate was named Gonzalez, the utterly unqualified (and uninterested one) was named Danielson.
      In rural counties, Danielson won by a landslide - more than 2/3rds of the vote; in the cities, Gonzalez won huge. The purest example of undeniable racism combined with pig ignorance. And it had fuck-all to do with Hispanic "culture" or "disordered thinking".
      DOn't believe me, google it.

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    5. Sherlock, you don't even recognize that you beg the question by arguing that "newspapers across the state, fellow jurists, and lawyers" are better equipped than Danielson's voters to determine qualifications.

      Newspapers have agendas and so do bar associations. You don't even entertain the idea that his opponent's ethnicity might have been the reason he was pushed by the establishment. You are blind to that possibility and that is why you see racism everywhere. You see two names and two populations and you reach a conclusion ONLY about the racism of the "rural" voters. You didn't even include information about philosophies of the two candidates.

      Here is another example. Every time Obama was opposed on a policy, your side decided "racism" accounted for it. When he first ran, you decided he was so much better than his primary and general election opponents that one must be racist to oppose him. "Newspapers" agreed with you. Even if someone had a good civil rights record, you decided it must be "unconscious racism." This is where it gets into mental disorder territory.

      Brainwashing accounts for not being able to reroute your thinking to consider other possibilities. It makes you blind.

      Whatever you were talking about with regard to rationalizing rape, the only similar behavior I've seen lately is Obama at a service for murdered police officers, blaming police officers. That's when I decided to vote for Trump.

      Delete
    6. Bullshit. You didn't google Gonzalez vs Danielson did you? Danielson did not campaign, did not attend Q&As held by any civic organization, newspaper, or legal body. There were NO criteria to judge him positive or negative as he did not involve himself in campaigning in any way. As much as you might beg to differ, the facts are plain.

      There is ZERO explanation for my racist pals' votes except for the obvious. They chose the non-hispanic over the hispanic. Jesus f christ - talk about disordered thinking.

      Delete
  11. I gotta jump on the Krugster here - because I happen to know some things.

    He says that Bush lied in claiming that most of his tax cuts were for the middle class.

    Well, actually it seems like Democrats decided Bush was telling the truth, because for some reason they made most of the Bush tax cuts permanent - in the name of the middle class.

    Of course, by doing so, they proved that THEY, the awesome Democratic politicians, were just as big of lying sacks of excrement as Bush.

    But the real irony is, that instead of calling them out as liars, Krugman proved that he himself was a partisan hack - he took a dive for them, and periodically praises Obama for making most of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as if those permanent tax cuts somehow represent an increase in taxes on the rich.

    My own guess is that Krugman is going to save a little bit himself this year from his permanent Bush tax cut. Not as much as the $1,000,000 that Mitt Romney will save, but doubtless far more than my own annual income.

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