I would like to see editorials from New Yorkers and San Franciscan of the form, "I grew up with these people, so I have special insight into their shitgibbon ways!" and then talk about how they can pass, unrecognized, in these parts and get the shitheads to let their guard down and talk freely.
Very careful statistics making the point that a rising tide lifting all boats is preferable to maintaining your superiority by descending into poverty more slowly than everyone else.
Sadly, you can't prove this with statistics.
In fact, statistics would suggest the opposite, what with relative deprivation and all.
Here, this is the people who react to the subject of gentrification with "Oh, but the neighborhood is so much nicer now, isn't it?" and deflect to the topic of restaurants. (Who are just as likely to be Democrats, but the ones who won't vote for tax increases.)
3/4: Psychology would suggest the opposite. Strictly numerical comparisons would tilt towards aligning one's selfish benefit with the good of the whole.
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
For example: sending your kid to private school costs $XK/year. Getting all the schools up to par costs $YK/year/family. Buying bottled water costs $W/year, safe drinking water for all costs $Z/year/individual. Just making an Econ 101 about bulk savings.
I actually did grow up with these people, but claim no special insight into the shittgibboness of it all.
5. You fail to reckon with American patriotism. People are willing to make sacrifices for the greater bad.
There's a lot of talk about Trump's betrayal of his supporters, but none of it is coming from his actual supporters. They always knew they were getting a plutocrat racist who would work to enhance the concentration of power and wealth in this country.
When was America great? The Gilded Age, that's when.
Buying bottled water costs $W/year, safe drinking water for all costs $Z/year/individual
Wait, you are seriously suggesting people drink from the tap like filthy commoners?
6: I definitely encountered this from someone recently - I kept saying people deserved basic living as a minimum guarantee, and he kept saying there needed to be some reward for working hard, as if other suffering was that reward - but he was a Chinese immigrant, so hard to extrapolate.
I can see we're going to need our most talented writers on this beat.
Under no avoidable circumstance should you work for somebody who thinks that people won't work except to avoid starvation. It's a very accurate assessment of how shitty they are as a boss.
Name the Shitheads! Why are we so scared of calling them shitheads? We're just obsessed with the rural yokels because they're such an easy, familiar thing to discuss. Journalists! Do your job and obsess about the real shitheads!
I do like the way this woman thinks. I've been mulling over similar thoughts since before the election. How to isolate and expose these fucking fucks.
I work with some of them (but a find a higher proportion among the sales fuckers of various vendors I work with than at my actual workplace). AIMHMHB, my current plan is to retire this summer and part of my thinking was removing the need for association with these fuckers. I want to be Pauline Kael of the fucking Alleghenies.
"I can name that shithead in five policy positions."
My parents and a brother are these shitheads. I so don't want to go back to the US this summer. And I barely talk to them anymore.
13 is very true. Also, the obsession with finding someone to be better than is the great American flaw.
17: This probably explains why journalists prefer to write about rural yokels. If they wrote about what total unrepentent assholes white UMC suburbanites are, it might make their visits home for the holidays uncomfortable.
19: That was a huge subtext in most mainstream media coverage of this election*. Who fuckers like Chuck Todd et al are capable of feeling empathy towards.
*Actually national politics in general for the last 20+ years.
At least rural yokels are mysterious. Is anybody really interested in the folk ways of suburban douche-bags?
Is anybody really interested in the folk ways of suburban douche-bags?
To add interest, the think pieces could be spiced up with pseudoscientific speculations about whether genetics or environment is the major factor in WUMCS's* being such douche-bags.
*If this thread is going to last, I don't want to have to write "white UMC suburbanites" over and over.
There's a lot of talk about Trump's betrayal of his supporters
There is? Goldman Sachs alumni appointments aside, and even that was utterly predictable, he's doing exactly what he said he would do.
At least rural yokels are mysterious. Is anybody really interested in the folk ways of suburban douche-bags?
No, but I'm interested in shaming the everloving fuck out of them. Also I don't find the rural yokels mysterious.
I am 100% on board with this plan, but I have no idea how to go about it.
Tactically, shaming the white UMC suburban Trump voters is going to work better. For the most part, they want to participate in modern life and culture and all. There isn't nearly as much leverage over the yokels.
It's the very definition of anecdata, but Trumpgrets is interesting.
What I'd really like to see is some piece that turns the "bubble" rhetoric back on people who are the subject of these mysterious thinkpieces. I have a doctorate, so I live in a bubble. Sure. It's a bubble that's included living and working in several states, including a deep red state, being from a red area of a blue metropolitan region, knowing immigrants affected by the travel ban, knowing foreigners worried about their ability to work, my preschooler knowing that (in his terms) his Muslim classmates are allergic to ham, and that Spanish and Chinese and Arabic are other ways of saying words. I grew up shooting guns. I'm married. I have neighbors of different religious traditions than mine.
But I'm in the bubble. If I stayed in Washington County and never dared to go to CCAC because Pittsburgh was just so far away at fifteen miles, I'd be, well not in a bubble. If stayed in Upper St. Lily White, and worked an office job where we talked about That Hillary, I'd not be in a bubble. If I labored under the mistaken impression that the steel industry hadn't imploded in 1979, I'd not be in a bubble.
In conclusion, the fuck a bubble.
I never go to CCAC because it is on the wrong side of the river. Unless you mean CCAC Boyce, which I never go to because it is on the wrong side of the tunnel.
29: The problem is that suburbanites don't understand the Jordan curve theorem. If you're connected to an unbounded set--the world, those different from you--you aren't in a bubble. Maybe the schools aren't very good in Upper St. Lily White (great name)?
You real American, you.
Honestly, the thinkpiece about suburbia has to include a navel-gazing discussion of why nothing penetrates their bubble. Like, I'm hoping it occurs to my dad that if people on Breitbart advocate violence against evil liberal professors, that it includes me.
31: The schools are fabulous in Upper St. Lily White. They turn out kids who go to Ivy League schools, and then can't talk to their parents about politics.
If god wanted us to associate with the others, she would have put them on one of the 61 bus lines.
Yes. Everything is on the 61, 71 or 64.
Upper St. Lily White can't turn out a Mac Miller, whoever he is. The kids seem to know.
33: I was being an ass. I tend to think of Mount Lebanon as the good school district that I would consider if I ever gave up on the city, but USC is up there. But even with good schooling there's still a self-sustaining element to that population; Facebook has done a great job showing me how many in my high school cohort--I went to a good, but religious, school--are growing up into right-wing suburban assholes.
Also I don't find the rural yokels mysterious.
Well, neither do I, but neither of us write for the NYT.
The focus on non-college whites from a Democratic party perspective is that there are no structural reasons for them to be class enemies of social democratic policies, and any real political chance of having new universal social entitlements would need them to be behind those policies (in the way that many Trump voters are behind existing Medicare / SS).
Selfish suburbanites are always going to be on the other side.
37: I'd forgotten you knew the region! I think I'd agree. Lebo, St. Lily White, BP, maybe.
39.2: I think Heebie's plan for the selfish suburbanites was not to win them over, but to make their lives unpleasant by constantly reminding them of the fact that the rest of the world thinks they're assholes.
The universities are the digestive tract of a dodo bird to the suburbanites seeds of whatever tree it is that must be shit out by a dodo to germinate. That's why the fights over things like PC are so better and that's where a lot of the leverage is.
The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed, from time to time, with the shit of dodo birds.
The OP was such a satisfying meal of righteous contempt that I almost don't want to read the thread for fear of spoiling it. I will just say "seconded," and comment that I am really delighted by the new-to-me epithet, "shitgibbon."
I HAVE SOME BAD NEWS FOR YOU
46 And we're all out of dodo birds.
But pwnage flows like the tears on Lincoln's statue.
Lovely piece of writing, nice sentiment.
I think there will be two difficulties in getting traction with this aggressive line of attack: Single-issue voters interested in abortion are not susceptible to shame, and they live in the suburbs also. Second, the defensive deflective mode for many others will be "I just want people to obey the laws-- I'm not anti-immigrant or anti black".
And of course a refusal to think about anything systematically, everyone just has their own personal opinion.
My suburb has just had a councilwoman propose sanctuary city status, and the resulting discussions, while mostly positive, have yielded exactly such statements in opposition.
I started looking at wait times for various visa status applications. seriously confusing. I can't do more now, here is one link:
http://cis.org/vaughan/waiting-list-legal-immigrant-visas-keeps-growing
Personally, I'm most interested in El Salvador, birthplace of maybe a quarter of my neighborhood.
Basically, legal immigration is pretty broken; being able to say so concisely and convincingly seems like a worthwhile starting point. On the other hand, US immigration levels now are actually pretty high historically, and there are some tensions-- along with health care, figuring out sanely how an improved system would look is pretty important.
Immigration policies that are very restrictive and more popular than those supported by liberals could easily put Democrats on the defensive if we lived in a world where thoughtful conservative leadership was something besides pornography imaged by David Brooks.
51
the defensive deflective mode for many others will be "I just want people to obey the laws-- I'm not anti-immigrant or anti black".
It seems like this should be relatively easy to preempt. "WUMCSs' first line of defense to any perceived threat is obeying the law, and it's not just a line of defense. The Law is all that matters to them. They venerate it like snake-handling rural Americans venerate the Bible, and have roughly the same critical understanding of it. The fact that The Law was largely written by and for people like them never comes to mind, or if so, only as one of the tragic ironies of life. 'It sure would be nice if more immigrants could take part in the American Dream, but there are limitations on the visa process.' 'It's horrible what those Nazis are doing, but we all benefit from freedom of speech and assembly, even if it doesn't seem that way right now.' They can happily agree that The Law was deeply wrong in decades past or other countries or even on anodyne issues like zoning regulations. But The Law, when it touches racial or economic issues, is the end of the story."
Not saying that would change any minds, just that that deflection shouldn't change any minds either.
Single-issue voters interested in abortion are not susceptible to shame,
I've been wondering about those same people for the past couple weeks. I remember discussing this here before, so I went looking and found this. TL;DR: the unifying and founding principle of the religious right isn't abortion but the right for schools like Bob Jones University to segregate.
My first thought is, it's tragic, because we've mostly moved beyond such overt racism and the vast majority of Americans would now agree that segregation is bad, so it's too bad that that movement has taken on a life of its own.
My second thought is, of course we fucking haven't moved past that, not with how many people are pushing for charter schools.
I'm amused by the thread's references to the various south suburbs of Pittsburgh, and even far-off Washington County. My mom taught art in the Mount Lebanon schools for many years, and I'm a proud grad of Upper St. Lily White Clair High School. We lived in the edgy part of the township - Joe Gilliam, a black! quarterback for the Steelers, lived nearby, and there was one Japanese-American family that lived on our street. I, my family, and my friends all thought these neighbors were "Chinese."
51.1 Nicely written. Maybe add a clause where lawbreaking banks go unpunished. Myself, I think that a concise statement that current law is broken (Salvadoreans who sign an affidavit of financial responsibility for a sibling still need to wait X>10 years to begin a visa application) would be more useful than an abstract argument that's hostile. Policy over personality, basically.
51.2 Sure, I know, but the bible-obsessed anti-abortion people I know are not going to respond to historical reasoning.
Legal immigration is higher than 1930-1990, but lower than 1860-1930. It's currently roughly 0.3% per year.
Total immigrant percent (12%) is below it's peak in 1910 (15%), but well above it's low in 1970 (5%)
Canada's rate hit almost 1% this year and their total number is 20%.
Half a percent per year (nearly twice our current rate) is totally achievable without any significant national disruption.
56 is true. But assuming reasonable treatment for those already here, I'd take a reduced number of legal immigrants and an electorate where most of the racists stay home over whatever the political costs would be to increase legal immigration.
I realize "reasonable treatment for those already here" would be effective a huge increase in our legal immigration rate, but it is politically more palatable (I think) and morally more important.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just made 375,000 high resolution images of the public domain part of its collection available for free under a Creative commons license that lets people do whatever the hell they want with them. This will feed some cool creativity. Not everything is doom and gloom!
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How many of them are uncaptioned cats?
My intention was to point out that the case for increased immigration is not a slam-dunk certainty. I personally agree with doubling the current rate, but I know that this is not a popular opinion.
In contrast, reasonable treatment for people already here, especially those who came as minors, is completely unambiguous, there's no reasonable case against it not based on nativism. Unfortunately, there are lots of nativists.
Mobes mentioned earlier enforcement against people who employ undocumented immigrants and don't pay much. That would be a nice start.
I feel as if 61 and preceding are missing a key aspect of the immigration "debate": nativists want an all-white America and know that shouting "amnesty" appeals to law-revering WUMCS. WUMCS would never admit to being nativist enough to oppose increased legal immigration, but increasing legal immigration without allowing some form of amnesty for those already here is a dealbreaker for liberals/Dems.
WUMCS basically hold the tiebreaking vote, but their self-interested assholery--and I couldn't agree more with theOP--keeps them on the side of evil nativists they'd never admit to supporting.
This is actually one reason that I supported the Clinton strategy of trying to peel off WUMCS women: they are far, far more susceptible to appeals to decent humanity than their husbands, and getting them to refuse to vote R just once could have had huge cascade effects*. I haven't seen anything granular enough to say whether they were flipped by the Comey letter at higher rates than others, but it's certainly plausible. At any rate, we now know that there's literally nobody that Rs won't vote for if they have an R next to their name.
*that is, they may not have been the readiest source of another 250k votes, but winning them would have put a big crack in the GOP electoral coalition and threatened hithertofore safe Republican seats going forward.
39.2: I think Heebie's plan for the selfish suburbanites was not to win them over, but to make their lives unpleasant by constantly reminding them of the fact that the rest of the world thinks they're assholes.
I know this issue has been done to death (part of the reason for the OP, I guess), but I was responding to this:
We've made rural America defensive and tribal; that horse is so dead and boring and I no longer give a shit about understanding their poor feelings.
And my take on the dead horse is this one:
But before Democrats decide whether or not to abandon white working-class voters altogether, here's something they need to keep in mind: Trump's base is not a monolith. In fact, among the white-working class people I studied for three months in Youngstown, Ohio--which witnessed a 20-point swing from Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016--two distinct groups emerged.
First, there are those who support Trump primarily because they agree with the authoritarian, nationalist moral order he seeks to establish. We'll call them the Nationalists. Second, there are those who support Trump primarily because they believe he embodies a cleansing of establishment politics that has left white working-class people poorer and forgotten over recent decades. We'll call them the Exasperated.
The Democrats might never hope to gain the support of Nationalists, for whom Trump is a messianic figure--but they might hope to gain the support of the Exasperated, who are wary of Trump and voted for him out of frustration with the past few decades of politics, embodied by Hillary Clinton.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/trump-voters-white-working-class-214754
The nature of the beast is that the Dems might have thought they were playing a smart move by cutting down legal expansion of immigration without simultaneously relief for undocumented/unauthorized (which is the word I prefer) immigrants, but that they weren't actually.
Legal immigrants are affluent, attractive, employed and generally increase positive perceptions of immigration (generally). They are the beachhead upon any kind of serious reforms rest. By denying themselves the easy stuff (legal immigration) they have now based themselves in a hard corner (non-legal or unauthorized immigration).
You kinda had to hope and pray that the Republicans *would* eventually consent to illegal or unauthorized immigration reform. But I don't think it was ever an advisable strategy to force it into such an awkward compromise. Not because it is impossible, but because you realize the vegetables are the vegetables and give people sweets to pair them with, not by telling them they are morally impelled to.
11:
I think it's a pretty common sentiment among ethnic Chinese. They have a high tendency to regard success as due to their own hard work. I think the wanting others to suffer thing in order to justify one's past suffering is so that they can feel their own hard work was not 'wasted'. It's a common attitude towards conscription-dodgers in Narnia---everyone hates conscription, but they hate it even more when others get to dodge that suffering.
If Republicans weren't so overtly racist they'd be winning the Chinese American vote.
Which unicorn's ass were the Democrats supposed to pull relief for undocumented immigrants out of?
If Republicans weren't so overtly racist they'd be winning the Chinese American vote.
538 had a piece during the election on how polls were showing that Trump was leading Asian-Americans toward voting more consistently Democratic. There was a lot of variation by individual nationality, though.
Trump went back to supporting the One China policy by making sure they both think we're assholes.
Anyone notice Trump tweeted about "Prime Minister Shinzo" today? Want to bet someone told him about how Chinese family names come first- he just had a call with the Chinese president and the tweet just previous used Mr. Xi- so he assumed Japanese is the same? They all look the same, amiright?
Before the election, I saw a "Chinese Americans for Trump" billboard by the expressway near O'Hare. I had a hard time figuring out why they'd like him, but eventually I decided it was because of the casinos.
69: Well, that is how it works in Japanese too, but for whatever reason the standard seems to be to flip the names when writing in English. No idea if that's what they do in formal diplomatic settings too.
Huh, that hadn't occurred to me, but it is true that Japanese names are conventionally flipped in English, unlike Chinese (and Korean, and I think Vietnamese) ones. Hungarian names are also flipped. Not sure what to make of this.
I mean, the obvious explanation is that countries that are higher on the "like us" scale are flipped while the others are left alone as Inscrutable Orientals, but Korea at least seems to have moved from the second category to the first in recent decades without the change.
On reflection I think 69 is more logical reasoning than 45 has ever actually demonstrated. More likely it's just pure luck we never saw a tweet about President Jinping.
Anecdotally, I know tons of UMCCs* who voted for Trump. Mainly it was about taxes, and they thought that they weren't the sort immigrants or minorities targeted by racist Republicans. They also deserve t be called out as shitgibbons.
*Upper middle class Chinese
Trivers! And yes, this is a great post.
Just encountered a new Trump epithet: Trumplethinskin. I love it.
What we need is a bit of gibbon-take.
A comic last week bemoaned that her group, Indian-Americans, while majority Dem, are the least lopsidedly so of all Asian-Americans. I wanted to shout "Fuckin' BJP!" but there wasn't a good opening.
I would love to see white suburbanites called out. I avoid politics at work because I'm pretty sure I'm surrounded by assholes. I grew up with these suburban assholes (not UMC, but ceetainly would view themselves as middle class). I would love a bunch of thinkpieces about exactly why they are assholes, regional variation in assholishness and discussions of polling that gets at what drives them to be such assholes. Their ideology, from what I grew up with, is a mess and can be summarized by "I got mine." It's a basically Reaganesque worldview as far as I can tell: government is bad and wastes our hard-earned tax dollars, abortion is bad, crime is bad, law and order is good, America is great. I wish at tax time, state, local and federal government sent households an approximate breakdown of where "their" dollars went the previous year, maybe with their notices that payment was received or something. Like, $10 on roads, $50 on schools, $1200 on social security (or whatever). At least it would push back against the idea that it's all $400 toilet seats. Amazing what people want to believe. Fucking Norquist.
I agree. FYIGM has been the dominant political philosophy in America since the "Greed is good" 80s. Everything else in politics is about how we trigger FYIGM feelings to stop progressive policies or how we try to trick people into adopting progressive policies by temporarily forgetting FYIGM.
@Buttercup (75):
That is mostly about affirmative action, probably.
Upper middle class Chinese suffer discriminately basically in terms of affirmative action.
84
That's a good point, and can also explain the lack of solidarity with Latino immigrants.
Still, Jews managed to operate under a very discriminatory set of quotas without going fucknuts.
81: My recollection (of the fivethirtyeight article teo mentioned) is that Vietnamese-Americans were the most Republican subset of Asian Americans.
86
Eh, Chinese-Americans still vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Probably a similar number of Jews and Chinese-Americans have gone fucknuts in similarish ways.
Here's a detailed report on Asian-American voting preferences conducted before the election.
http://naasurvey.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/NAAS2016-Oct5-report.pdf
Also, exit polls show Asian-Americans going more for Trump than pre-election polls, it's hard to know which ones were off. Also, WTF is wrong with Pennsylvania? Since we're moving into an age of collective responsibility, some commenters here have much to answer for.
84:
I'm not sure. I think there's also a lot of racism. Most East Asian cultures contain strands of strong traditional racism against people with dark skin (including South Asians, but especially against blacks).
69: Abe called Trump "Donald" repeatedly during his remarks at the press conference, which sounded horribly over-familiar in Japanese. Given how deeply he's been toadying throughout the visit, he probably went through a big "Let's not be formal, please, call me Shinzo. May I call you Donald?" routine at the start of the talks, and wants to keep emphasizing it publicly so Trump gets the message about what good buddies they are. I'd guess Trump just followed suit in that tweet.
Huh. I'd only seen the English transcript of Abe's remarks. Watching the actual video, his actual Japanese is completely standard - it's the interpreter who puts in "Donald" several times instead of "the President" or "President Trump."
@86
Jews suffer in modern day a lot less than Chinese in terms of affirmative action.
It's not really in the same order of magnitude
I don't justify it any sense. But I think there is basically a direct tradeoff between Hispanics and East Asians in term of any kind of attempt to correct systematic adversity.
So, structurally I think we would theoretically expect, *even with Trump*, East Asians to trend more GOP.
Asian Americans, including Chinese Americans, overwhelmingly voted for Clinton, so Buttercup's anecdotal shitgibbons are unusual.
I'm really late to this, but just wanted to note that heebie's post is one of the best post-electoral things that I've read.
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Hey neb are you going to The Passenger at Opéra Parallèle? We're on the bus headed to the show!
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No.
OP has really alienated me with the way they've promoted it.
Wow I haven't seen any of the promo materials ... deets?
They also sent me a pandering and off-putting email (which I can't seem to find anymore) soliciting my attendance at a preview for "NextGen, Opera Parallèle's young professional group".
Okay totally understand that getting up your nose, but it was good!
I thought exit polls were thought to be especially limited in their ability to characterize small groups, and Asian-Americans would qualify. (They appeared to show a swing by Hispanics toward Trump, which other evidence militated against.)
It's like they either conceive of the potential opera-going audience as a bunch of philistines and rubes, or conceive of their own particular operas as being unable to be sold on their merits.
I feel like Colubmus is going to be one of those mispronunciations that it forever lodged in my brain. It just sounds like such a shlubby holiday.
Oh, it's a shlubby holiday with Colub.
Colub needs to blow his nose.
When the skies are drippy and congested,
Colub brings the mithletoes.
Door #2, I think! Extremely good singing all around, the Minkswoman brought it all - voice, musicianship, acting, but all were very good. Nicely staged, band was great, lady tuba player!, and the marketing didn't turn off too many of your peers as audience didn't skew completely geriatric.
Did Columbus disappear or is my brain not working?
108: seriously, what the hell happened?!
I thought exit polls were thought to be especially limited in their ability to characterize small groups, and Asian-Americans would qualify. (They appeared to show a swing by Hispanics toward Trump, which other evidence militated against.)
I've seen arguments on both sides about that latter questions (Hispanics). this says:
The severe limitations of traditional exit polls to properly capture the Latino electorate have long been obvious to scholars. Improper precinct selection, for example, leads to non-representative samples that inflate support for Republicans.
The more nuanced surveys by Latino Decisions, the firm where I work, found that Trump received the lowest level of support among Latino voters on record for any presidential candidate: a mere 18 percent.
For context, that compares with 23 percent for Mitt Romney in 2012 and 25 percent for John McCain in 2008.
But fivethirtyeight isn't so sure.
The various polls differ methodologically, sometimes in important ways. Latino Decisions argues that it captures Latinos' views more accurately because the firm's interviewers are bilingual2 and because it targets areas where a high percentage of the population is Latino, unlike exit polls, which are conducted in random sample precincts that often have few Latino residents. Edison Research argues that exit polls are superior because they don't need to make assumptions about whether respondents actually voted -- an issue that has emerged as a key question this year after pre-election polls overstated support for Clinton. Moreover, Latino Decisions finds people to interview in part by identifying people with common Spanish surnames; that means they may miss Latino voters who don't have Latino-sounding names, who tend to be more Republican-leaning. Exit polls, because they interview people at random at polling places, don't have that problem. In the end, there is probably no way to know for sure what share of Latinos voted for Clinton versus Trump, just as we can't be certain how any group voted in previous presidential matchups. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times has noted, different methodologies for judging how various demographics vote can produce different results.
...
Voting results don't prove that Clinton did worse than Obama among Latinos, or that Trump did better than Romney. But the results do suggest that if nearly 80 percent of Latinos voted for Clinton, as Latino Decisions argues, then Latino turnout must have been down in many counties, or Clinton must have done much worse than Obama among non-Latinos in those counties. Otherwise, the overwhelming pro-Clinton Latino vote would have swung heavily Latino counties more dramatically toward Clinton. The evidence, then, suggests that Clinton fell short among Latinos in one of two ways: Either she didn't win as large a share of them as Obama, or she didn't convince as many of them to turn out to vote. Since both the exit polls and Latino Decisions agree that turnout among Latinos was up, the latter explanation doesn't seem likely.
Which, I think, proves your point that it's difficult to measure precisely.
112: You also can verify that my Colub joke was rooted in a sensible prompt?
That would mean admitting I spelled it wrong.
Here's a claim I haven't seen before -- Clinton actually beat Trump among non-evangelical whites. Trump got more evangelical whites than any previous Republican (85%), because nothing in this world makes any sense.
How is that surprising? In contemporary political terms, "evangelical" basically just means "racist." (Kotsko is good on this.) Self-identified evangelicals these days are essentially the "Jesus hates Mexicans" crowd, and they love them some Trump.
It means 'racist', and also 'sucker'.
A lot of things make more sense if you postulate that it was never about religion, that religion was the means by which leaders who glommed on to racism sold it as respectable to the rest of society, and that in fact religiousness was a cost. (Maybe even a costly-signal of respectability.)
Sure, people would go to the meetings and put up with the bible-bashing if they got their tax cuts and their coded racism, but you know? If someone offered them straight-out Jorg Haider populism without the tiresome prayer breakfasts and irksome moralising, they'd take it in a heartbeat.
This is why all those Christian Coalition types were so horrified and disappointed about Trump - it turned out their followers were in it for the militarist posturing, pork, and racism all along. They all hoped some Jesus freak like Ted Cruz would turn out the church network in Wisconsin, but what happened? They summoned serpents from out the vasty deep, but they didn't come. The base wouldn't go for a sermon when it could have a Trump rally that serves beer instead.
It's surprising to me that the "hates Mexicans" part is all that matters, and that the "Jesus" part counts for nothing. They sure talk about Jesus a lot more than they talk about Mexicans.
Maybe it's a Mexican named "He-sus" that they're trying to say but they don't have enough Spanish to pronounce it?
Remember that bit in the gospels when Jesus grabbed Mary Magdalene by the pussy?
I've said it before but I've only ever met 3 or 4 Christians in my life.
Because if you go round yelling about Mexicans and grabbing women by the pussy, people think you're Donald Trump. Like everyone else, their leaders assumed being Donald Trump was a disqualifying condition. The whole scheme finally foundered because Donald Trump - @realDonaldTrump - ran for president.
I'm not surprised that they're racist. I'm surprised that Trump ran a considerably more racist and less religious campaign than Bush, and they turned out for him more.
119 is apparently the literal truth, but why? Just skip church and hate Mexicans on your own time. Then you have your Sundays free. You can hate Mexicans as easily tailgating at the football game as you can at the church barbecue.
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A handy website I just encountered for finding out if your login info has been compromised: haveibeenpwned.com. My gmail account has been hacked and also an, um, adult website that I subscribed to a while back.
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Then you have your Sundays free. You can hate Mexicans as easily tailgating at the football game as you can at the church barbecue.
This was the Trump insight.
122.1: I have heard that some of the Gnostic ones are pretty close.
But why is church-going an important predictor of racism? You can be an atheist and hate Mexicans. Plus if you go to church, you might accidentally be exposed to some part of the actual text of the Gospels, and discover that Kevin Kline's interpretation from A Fish Called Wanda is not actually the correct one.
128 If you're an atheist and militant about it on the internets chances are you hate Muslims not Mexicans.
vHow is that surprising? In contemporary political terms, "evangelical" basically just means "racist." (Kotsko is good on this.) Self-identified evangelicals these days are essentially the "Jesus hates Mexicans" crowd, and they love them some Trump.
Fred Clark has been shouting this from the rooftops for the best part of a decade.
I had thought we'd managed to get through this weekend without anything more awful than an awkward handshake, but, no, it seems Trump decided to hold a national security strategy session in the middle of his club's fucking dining room.
Could have been worse. Think what he might have done if Abe hadn't been there to act as a restraining influence.
"fucking dining room"
Now that's an innovation I'd expect from Trump. No wonder people are willing to pay $200k to join. Must be hell during health inspections.
So-called health inspections.
But why is church-going an important predictor of racism?
Potentially, if you're the sort of person who's willing to believe an authority figure who tells you your group is inherently better than everyone else, you might also be likely to be the sort of person who's willing to believe an authority figure who tells you your group is inherently better than everyone else.
131: Selfies with the nuclear football guy! Spice up your Facebook wall by being at "the center of the action!!!"
Initiation fee has only doubled since the election so still a bargain. Christ on a stick.
I am reminded of the scene in Rollerball where the party guests blow up trees. We're gonna take that shit to 11.
All my IT security friends are going ape over that story: "The patio was lit only with candles and moonlight, so aides used the camera lights on their phones to help the stone-faced Trump and Abe read through the documents..." OH HI I SEE YOU'RE TRYING TO READ A HIGHLY CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT TO DO WITH OUR RESPONSE TO THE NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR THREAT LET ME JUST POINT THE CAMERA ON MY UNSECURED MOBILE PHONE AT IT
138 had occured to me too. Also, is this the phone he was texting on all through the campaign? Is it secured? Obviously the IT security people can't do anything about him using it to discuss war room issues in a restaurant, but IIRC Obama had an issue over his Blackberry when he took office...
139 Not only is it not secured, it can't be. It's totally obsolete. I wonder how many states have pwned it already. Just amazing the whole thing.
This brought to you by the campaign that had its email on IIRC unpatched Windows Server 2003.
Plus he fired the guy who was supposed to help him secure it.
128: The churches decided they liked people like Bannon, and hated people like me. So people like me mostly stopped going, so they're basically echo chambers with God's imprimatur.
139 Not only is it not secured, it can't be. It's totally obsolete. I wonder how many states have pwned it already. Just amazing the whole thing.
Tech people think it's a Galaxy S3, based on previous photos of him using one. The S3's most recent OS update (and are we confident he ever upgraded it?) was to Jellybean and the last security update was in August 2015.
