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61 comments to My view of today |
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I guess I’ll make my reading list one lightere–I don’t need a waste of from somebody that doesn’t care.
Well, whatever happens, you won’t get a comedian in the White House, or one would tell jokes like former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMa0j5A3nWw
Do I gather the old ‘You may not be interested in …, but it is interested in you’ is not quite adequate to the situation? Is it now, ‘You may not give a f***, but the winner will f*** you.’ ?
I sympathise with those who feel it is important to work out if one would be a truly revolting experience, while the other is merely guaranteed to be embarrassing and deeply disappointing.
However I also sympathise with Perry.
Reading history has far more often made me proud to be British than embarrassed to be British. I think that when I read of this day in history, that pride (and relief) will remain to me, although my own government is sometimes embarrassing to me and sometimes deeply disappointing.
Well to quote Hirohito:
The hardships and sufferings to which Our nation is to be subjected hereafter will be certainly great. We are keenly aware of the inmost feelings of all of you, Our subjects. However, it is according to the dictates of time and fate that We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is unsufferable.
When the choice is between two qualitatively different Greater Evils, I really don’t give a fuck who wins. That said it will be fascinating to see what happens in a morbid kind of way, like watching a shoot out between two gangs from relative and tenuous safety behind cover
Priceless. I want one.
Surely there is some entreprenuer out there who will jump on the opportunity to make a motza.
Well if you want leftism entrenched in the Supreme Court for a generation, a win for Hillary Clinton will get you that.
A left wing, judicially active Supreme Court will ensure that whoever is elected as President or to Congress for the next 20 years will have to conform to a left wing world view, or else get nothing done. It will ensure the economic and societal decline of the United States.
So I, for one, do give a fuck, and shall not affect the world weary cynicism expressed above.
My problem with your analysis John is that I am far from convinced Trump will be any better rather than just different. He is profoundly hostile to property rights & seems eager to start a global trade war, so like I said: it seems like two qualitatively different Greater Evils to me.
Of course if by some miracle Trump does win, the wailing and gnashing of teeth will certainly be amusing, but that will be a fairly expensive cheap thrill.
Perry:
No-one in their right mind would say that Trump is an ideal candidate, but when the alternative is a corrupt leftist of the worst kind, the choice is easy.
I do feel that the Supreme Court is the key to this election. With the sudden death of Judge Alito, it is balanced 4-4 between leftists and honest people. The next President will get to decide the make up of the Court, and thus the direction of travel for the United States.
I feel it is a flaw in the Constitution that so much power is given to nine unelected judges, but there is no way the Founding Dead White Males could have foreseen the development of leftism over the 19th and 20th centuries.
A win for Hlllary Clinton will ensure that the USA is locked into becoming a European style “social democracy”, and will end up going the way of Sweden, Germany, and, I am sad to say, Britain.
Hmmm. In my experience, people who truly don’t give a fuck don’t tend to yell about it from rooftops.
FWIW, I do give a fuck, and that was precisely the reason why I did not vote for either of the gresser evils.
But hey, cool GIF 😀
I care to the limited extent that either of these lowlifes will, on balance, reduce the quality of governance yet further of the US, a country I like. I am hoping beyond hope for gridlock, which recent evidence suggests correlates quite nicely with the performance of the stock market.
Chatting to fellow Samizdata contributor Brian Micklethwait the other night, we agreed that maybe there is a need for the parties to reconsider the primary system, so that people who want to run for office and represent a party must have shown a serious, sustained commitment over the years to that party, or at least be recommended by members in good standing (as happened when Eisenhower ran in the early 50s, etc).
I’m afraid that many of your American readers perforce have to give a f*ck. To mangle the old Polish proverb, this is our circus, and these are our monkeys. Have a little more sympathy for us, if you please. Whichever way it comes out, our lives are not going to be improved by this sh*t-show.
llater,
llamas
whose vote for President will not make a blind bit of difference.
That is exactly my point. The reason I do not give a fuck who wins is I do not think the USA will be a better place either way, because both have such major downsides.
On the contrary. Most people seem to think it is essential to have a preference and no right thinking person could possibly want the other candidate to win. Well I (loudly) disagree 😛 I really don’t give a fuck because I cannot see much upside either way.
Perry, your meter isn’t on zero, which is where it should be if you truly give no f*cks whatsoever.
It’s on negative twenty, and it’s . . . vibrating.
I can only conclude that you are in a quivering incandescent rage over the situation.
Meet me at the outdoor bar at Senor Frog’s on Boulevard Kukulcan. We can work on the rage. I’ll be the guy wearing the Hillary cap and repeating Russian phrases from the language text on the bar in front of me.
JohnK
I hope that you meant ‘Scalia‘ when you wrote Judge ‘Alito‘, to lose one is a calamity, to lose both…
How can I resist an offer like that, bobby? 😆 😎
Not having a preference for either candidate is not at all the same as not giving a fuck. Either candidate’s win will render some very bad results – some are likely to be similar no matter who wins, but some not at all. I for one don’t have a clear idea about the latter, but even if I did, I still give a fuck, simply because I happen to have skin in this game (see Llamas’ comment for reference) – YMMV.
Mr Ed:
Sorry about that one. Obviously, if Hillary Clinton is elected, there will be more “heart attacks” amongst conservative Supreme Court Justices. Autopsies? We don’t need no steenking autopsies.
Seriously, though, with a left wing Supreme Court, little matters like the First and Second Amendments won’t be worth the paper they are written on. Most of the others too I imagine.
I simply cannot see any reason for a person who believes in freedom in any way not to hold their nose and vote for Trump.
Well America, you can’t say that you haven’t been warned…
JohnK, it wish it was ‘seriously’ but there’s a prima facie case there. I was frantically ‘Bing’ing for news about Alito then. And yes, you are being asked, in effect, whom you prefer, not whom you would like.
And yet Dale Among as so sure the libertarian candidate would muster a third of the popular vote today!
http://www.samizdata.net/2016/07/it-is-not-just-the-uk/
I’m so shocked things appear to not have worked out as he expected.
Of course people in Utah can vote in such a way that there is definitely a very small chance that we’ll avoid either of the evils. (To paraphrase Ghostbusters.)
People in many (most) States might as well avoid voting, or vote symbolically for Reagan; the vote won’t count, but Reagan does not stand a chance anyway.
In the States that are in play, i’d vote for Trump mostly on the grounds that (a) if Hillary is not to be punished by the courts, then she must be punished by the voters and (b) given the choice between 2 evils, at this point i’d choose the most disruptive.
But leaving that aside, a few questions about Perry’s doctrine of not voting for any evil, whether lesser or greater. I understand that it is not a matter of principle, it is a strategy; i also understand that Perry cannot identify a lesser evil between the 2 on offer, so my questions are not relevant to the present case.
What if an election were to be held in the UK tomorrow? aren’t Tory voters simply voting for the lesser evil?
What about the choice between Chirac and Le Pen in 2002? were the French stupid for voting for the lesser evil?
What about Italy when the alternatives were the Commies and (a coalition led by) the Christian Democrats? the Italians (most of them) voted for the lesser evil for decades! that did lead to increasing corruption, but what were they to do?
Well to keep repeating myself, it is not that I do not give a fuck about the aftermath (i.e. what happens tomorrow), but rather I do not give a fuck which of them wins the election today as both are an appalling choice for POTUS. I backed Cruz.
I will be complaining about different things depending on whether or not it is Shelob or Fluffy who wins, but I very much doubt I will be wishing the other one had won regardless. That is what I do not give a fuck about. Hence the word ‘today’ 😛
Yes. And that all makes perfect sense. I have only ever voted for one person in my entire life and she won on all three occasions, and I did not see her as a lesser evil at all within the context of the time. If David Davis ran for PM, I would absolutely vote for him. I do support the occasional Lesser Evil vote, but as I see only two Greater Evils, my view is either don’t vote or vote Gary Johnson. And as some wag put it:
Heh. Quite.
I note that you have not answered the specific questions that i asked. I cannot infer an answer from the fact that you voted for Thatcher.
Of course you won’t bother to vote for May: it’s because you know that there are lots of other people who will vote for the lesser evil.
I watched Trump last night in FL. He singled out a guy near the front with a placard reading, “Blacks for Trump”. I have looked into this character (and he has been to many Trump and pony shows) which is why I looked into him. His placards often have the URL “gods2.com”.
This is the guy…
For good reason, social media was buzzing about a white woman holding a “Blacks for Trump” sign at Donald Trump’s rally in Sanford, Florida, on Tuesday.
Unfortunately, the newsworthiness of the contradiction overshadowed the fact that the woman was with a multiracial group of people wearing matching shirts that read “Trump & Republicans Are Not Racist.” At the bottom of the shirts was printed Gods2.com.
Gods2.com redirects to the personal website of Michael the Black Man (formerly known as Maurice Woodside and Michael Symonette), once a prominent member of the Nation of Yahweh, a violent black supremacist group prominent in Miami in the 1980s.
According to Miami New Times, Michael “was accused of two gruesome Yahweh murders in the ’90s and has since been charged with — but never convicted of — four other felonies while starting his own bizarre religious enterprise.”
Michael has since reinvented himself as a musician, according to the New Times, which described him as “an anti-gay, anti-liberal preacher with a golden instinct for getting on TV at GOP events.”
…
The Nation of Yahweh lost momentum after its founder, Yahweh ben Yahweh (born Hulon Mitchell Jr.), was imprisoned in 1990 on 18 counts of conspiracy related to 14 murders, two attempted murders, extortion and arson. He was released in 2001 and died of prostate cancer in 2007.
…
Michael, meanwhile, continues to post to his website — which declares devotion to Yahweh in the header — as well as his YouTube and Facebook pages. His posts include long-winded essays and video diatribes comparing Hillary Clinton to the biblical Whore of Babylon and/or explaining why she will start World War III.
He also attends his fair share of Trump’s campaign events:
There are pictures. This is a person that Trump singles out as a supporter at a key point in the, err… race.
The quotes are from Salon.
Anyone who tells me Trump is a lesser evil is nuts.
She lit the fuse for ww3 in the Middle East and Libya. His focus on domestic issues for good or ill and suspicion of Islam may just put it out. I don’t live in the US but I do give a fuck.
Increasingly, I’m of the opinion that it doesn’t matter much who the President is. The enabling acts that Congress calls legislation (written by staffers and lobbyists, so Congressmen don’t matter much either) ultimately put most power in the hands of career bureaucrats in the Executive branch. Those unelected bureaucrats are the ones who ultimately write and enforce laws (as well as planning and executing foreign policy). They tell the President what to do and his job is to sell it to the public.
Likewise, the argument about Supreme Court justices doesn’t convince me. How confident can anyone be that Trump will be thoughtful and wise in selecting a justice? His opinions blow around like a leaf in the wind. He’s only interested in having the spotlight. He’ll do whatever the insiders tell him to do. So at best we’ll end up with a justice that betrays us at the critical moment like Roberts did.
The only way anything will change is if the character of the people changes first. They need to stop obeying the state and stop looking to it for solutions. We need widespread nullification and civil disobedience. I don’t think that will happen, but it’s the only thing that will make a difference.
Of course I voted for Thatcher. And no, I would not vote for May, and hopefully I will not have that option as it is quite possible she may be knifed in the back between now and then next general election, as she seems foolish enough not to force a General Election right now (which she would indeed win with a crushing majority). And the other questions are indeed answered by my reply on occasional lesser evil voting. Italy actually makes my point about the woes of doing it for decades though (as indeed does Trump).
Oddly enough, some of us in the US are quite intent on voting today.
Mindful that the so-called “down ticket” races are where the REAL action is.
“Unelected SCOTUS Judges”? Look up “advise and CONSENT” it MAY be a clue how a republic works.
(Or else a known progressive socialist would already be the ninth judge, “discovering” new enlightened definitions of what “is” is.)
Oops! 8:30 EDT! Time to go 3/4 mile to spend 10 minutes with pencil, paper, and box. It’s a tradition we maintain here in “New” England.
This is pretty much my view as well and a major contributor to my not-giving-a-fuckedness levels. Of course, I would love to be wrong about Trump if he somehow wins.
She lit the fuse for ww3 in the Middle East and Libya
In fairness, one could say the same of any President since, oh, Eisenhower, who foolishly prevented we Brits and French from dealing with Nasser in 1956.
Hence the word ‘YMMV’ 😉
Wow, Nick, that is just…bizarre…
And, what rfichoke said – all of it.
Jonathan Pearce: as SoS she enabled the biggest arms deal ever to be done w the Saudis, she increased arms sales to Qatar by almost 1500%, both of them the funders of Isis; she removed a secular government in Libya which was preventing the migrant wave across the Mediterranean. No US president has done as much damage to the security of the West while still only a candidate.
“Those unelected bureaucrats are the ones who ultimately write and enforce laws (as well as planning and executing foreign policy). They tell the President what to do and his job is to sell it to the public.”
Those unelected bureaucrats are executive-branch employees, subject to the command of the head of the executive branch, The Prez.
As we have seen from the employee complaints from our Border people, Obama gave direct orders to that department to not enforce existing law. Because he’s the boss of them, they had to comply, albeit not happily.
So, no, they’re not that kind of power in our system. They’re tools, used by the executive.
Re: USSC: We KNOW that Hillary will appoint disasters as justices. If Trump shows a 10% chance of appointing someone decent, he’s a better choice than Hillary.
Re: Trump’s supposed hatred of property rights: Yeah, he benefited greatly from the Kelo decision, and he claims to be sympatico with it. I’m not sure he’s ever given the issue much thought. I’d like to see more of his thoughts on this beyond the hit-man quotations that the liberal press provided. Plus, the list of Republicans who have actively tried to fight the Kelo option is . . . very short.
Good old libertarian false equivalence. It never gets old.
If I was American I would hold my nose and vote for Trump, because as bad as he is, Hilary is far worse. As Instapundit says, “You fight with the army you have.”
Basically, I agree with this Cruz-supporter:
http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2016/11/07/stop-hillary-n2242151
The biggest concern for me is the way the way the US executive has openly declared war on anyone not on the left. This has got to be stopped soon, or we are in serious trouble.
NickM: I think you give Trump credit for much more extensive knowledge and thought than he deserves.
He sees a placard saying “blacks for trump”, and of course he’s going to call it out. He needs black votes – it’s a source no one ever thought would be available to him, and it looks as if he might get some significant portion of them. (Meaning, more than five percent, not eighty percent.)
I would guess that he has no clue about what you uncovered. Not that that speaks well of him by itself, but I doubt he’s going to be supporting the Nation of Yahweh platform any time soon.
Yes, Alisa,
rfichoke is on the nail. Trump has a moral compass like a weathercock in a typhoon. His infamous changing of his mind dramatically on abortion (encompassing everything from basically “pro-choice” to “lock-up women who have abortions” and three stations between in the space of three days is telling. It is telling whatever you think about abortion. And that is a Trumpicide for me. Obviously, Clinton would nominate “liberals” for the SCOTUS but God knows who Trump would go for. Hilary might be a cannon firing the wrong way but this is a known quantity. Trump is a cannon that could do anything.
“Hilary might be a cannon firing the wrong way but this is a known quantity. Trump is a cannon that could do anything.”
This confuses me.
Hillary will do the wrong thing 100% of the time. Trump may or may not do the wrong thing. Doesn’t this still leave Trump the less-bad choice?
Bobby, ‘Trump’ and ‘thoughts’ in the same sentence? Seriously? Mind you, I’m not saying that the man is stupid – he’s far from it. What he is not, however, is thoughtful, not to any noticeable extent.
Incidentally, I agree with your reply to Nick, but I didn’t see Nick implying any of that anyway – as far as I can tell, it is no more than just another bizarre component of this bizarre election season.
Anyway, I can’t wait for this to be over (including the forthcoming bickering over vote counts and voter IDs), and to finally get to the stage where we all begin telling each other ‘I told you so’. Ain’t politics fun?
I sort of give one today. I’m going to haul out to vote in the hope that we get the LP to legal major-party status. Which would dilute the intellectual base a bit while it took federal funds and render it more libertarian-lite. But I consider even libertarian-lite a vast step forward from Red Faction and Blue Faction.
Otherwise, yeah, I usually consider Nov. 8 to be “no crowds taking the family out to eat night.”
Alisa — don’t forget enjoying the tasty, salty tears of whichever networks’ preferred candidate lost. That’s always good for a smirk.
Alisa: “Bobby, ‘Trump’ and ‘thoughts’ in the same sentence?”
Well, yeah, that was sort of my point. I thought Nick was crediting Trump with more thought than was warranted. Trump doesn’t seem to entertain too many complex concepts.
NickM, November 8, 2016 at 1:07 pm, I agree with bobby b’s reply to you (November 8, 2016 at 2:23 pm), but, more to the point, since Ted reproved Trump’s ‘New York values’ during the primary, surely this bizarre ‘Nation of Yaweh’ guy would have been even keener on Ted Cruz.
(I also would have been keener on Ted Cruz, though for other reasons.)
There are surely enough reasons to criticise Trump without taking ridiculous pot-shots (sourced from Salon !) of a kind that Salon would have been deploying against Cruz, had things been otherwise.
That can actually be turned into an argument for supporting Trump: if you can offer substantial support (and that excludes you and me) then you can hope that he’ll listen to you if he wins.
Having said that, this is a tactic that Machiavelli and Guicciardini used, to no avail; and if M. and G. failed, who can possibly succeed?
Perry: i did not notice that “occasional” remark. The fact remains that you can avoid voting only as long as lots of other people vote for the lesser evil. Occasionally, there is the danger that not enough people will vote for the by-far-lesser evil, and then you would presumably vote; but in Italy, it was not occasional.
I could have quoted other sources as well as Salon. I didn’t. Neither did I explain myself as well as I might – I do have other things to do than always post my exact thoughts here. Sorry ’bout that. I do get all of the “stopped clocks” stuff though. After I’d hit “Post” I knew.
I didn’t because of time and also it is hard to explain. Here is a partial explanation: I don’t like Hillary for many reasons but she is at least a known quantity and a known enemy is better to have than the forces of utter chaos.
And that is not an endorsement of Mrs Clinton.
More importantly, he needs to show that he and his supporters are not racists.
Right on!
That is why i explicitly said that i shall accept no responsibility for anything Trump does; though i’ll be happy to take credit if he does something right.
Here we have to disagree: i’d vote for Trump (in a swing state only) exactly because i want to unleash utter chaos. At this point, i see utter chaos as the lesser evil.
I was wondering earlier who Cthulhu’s VP pick would be.
I think you’ve hit on it: Lesser Evil!
(Now off to vote and do my stint as election judge. And, after today, I won’t ever need to discuss HC v. DT again!)
Snorri,
Bullshit. This guy has been haunting GOP stuff for ages. He is demented evil. Trump specially selected him for praise. He should have known. Maybe he did and just didn’t care. Because Trump couldn’t give a fuck about anyone but Trump.
Perry and others.
Forget the Presidential race.
Concentrate on the Senate and Governor races – and on the popular votes on tax measures and regulations.
This is where comfort (if any comfort is to be had) will be found.
Indeed, Paul – too many people forget that, including myself.
A good friend recently became a US citizen, and was lamenting about this, his first chance to vote. I recalled to him how, through thoughtless timing on the part of my mother, “my” C-Section had been scheduled 2 days too late for me to vote for… Richard Nixon. Ahh, 20-20 hindsight and mother’s wisdom. But what really fried his ass, was that at the end of the Citizenship Swearing-In Ceremony, they piped in that god-awful Christian country song, God Bless the USA… to a room full of ex-pat Indians, Chinese, and the occasional ex-Canadian atheist (my friend). I wrote back how they should have had the decency to have picked more suitable music, like Miss America (my fave social commentary song on the topic), The Immigrant Song, or even Randy Newman’s Sail Away. Welcome to America! Where opportunities for irony abound… especially on Voting Day.
If we had gotten Bernie, he would have tried to turn us into Venezuela.
If we get Hillary, she’ll try to turn us into Russia or Turkey.
We don’t know what we’ll get if we get the Donald, but it’ll definitely be better than Venezuela, and probably better than Russia or Turkey.
This is definitely something worth giving a fuck over, albeit a negativist fuck.
I too voted for Cruz in the primaries and Trump in the general. When playing Russian Roulette I prefer my revolver not to have a full cylinder.
I’m glad that it’s almost over, though. I don’t think my liver could have taken much more.
FYI, if my precinct is indicative of anything, this election is spawning a huge turnout.
Normally, we have a morning rush, doldrums from 9 to 5, and a rush from 5 to close.
Today, the line was several hundred long all day long. When I left, around 5:30, the line was longer than I have ever seen, winding around the parking lot with maybe 400 people.
So, we may be stupid, and have idiots for candidates, but by gawd we’re engaged!
Let me put it another way. Churchill once remarked that, if Hitler should invade Hell, he would at least have a kind word for the devil in the HoC.
That’s where I am.
The election has already had one result- Australians have gone off the idea of having a President! We have a Westminster system, with an appointed Governor-General to stand in for the Crown. Our upper house is like the American Senate, with ten members from each of our six states, and a mixture of Senators for the territories.
Seeing what a Presidential campaign is like is an eye-opener!