My Facebook feed on Election Day is kind of interesting. Women, especially, who live in states that are guaranteed to vote for a Democrat, are posting that they are “proud” to have voted for Hillary. Example: “What a cool time in history to have the chance to vote for a female president! So proud! #imwithher” The implication is that it is a courageous act to vote as most neighbors will. The more solidly an area favors Democrats, the more likely the Facebooker is to include a hash tag such as ImWithHer (as opposed to just “I voted”). Posts from Northern California and Boston are filled with warm personal feelings regarding Hillary, e.g., a woman with a $200,000+/year government job in Boston: “I’m wearing a pantsuit, and I voted. #imwithher”
[Separately, I find it interesting that women can be “proud” of what some other woman has done. With more than 3.7 billion women on the planet, it seems like a significant achievement to convince women that if Hillary achieves something then they themselves have also achieved something. I’m not sure that female Russian peasants felt this same sense of pride to see Catherine the Great ruling as Empress. Tribute to modern PR and media? Note that the women who are most likely to report vicarious pride seem to be stay-at-home wives, single women living off money earned by a father or a (male) child support defendant, and government workers. The women who express the most skepticism regarding Hillary (but never on Facebook!) are those who own and run small businesses or those who are managers (up to the CEO or “SheEO” level) in private companies. In other words, the women who have spent the fewest years in the workforce identify most strongly with Hillary and are most likely to adopt Hillary’s professional achievements as their own.]
Men took part in self-congratulation as well. From an older Boston-area programmer: “I voted today. For me, it was not a political decision, but a moral imperative. I chose to take a stand against hate, against bigotry, against misogyny. May God have mercy on us all and bring us healing and reconciliation.” (i.e., he “chose to take a stand” by doing something (voting in Massachusetts) that cannot possibly have any effect)
People who have spent the last year fearfully linking to articles about expected voter intimidation by Trump supporters are gleefully linking (sometimes with heart symbols) to “Trump Booed at His Own Polling Place”, in which it turns out that residents of the East Side in Manhattan (PS59 address) attempt to intimidate a voter via booing and heckling. (Bostonians take a more direct approach, with “Kill Your Local Trump Supporter” spray-painted on the side of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston Herald)).
From a female liberal arts college undergraduate: “If you do not vote, you are only helping Donald Trump and his ilk. … I don’t like to swear on FB. But if you don’t vote, FUCK you.”
A woman who sued her rich husband (i.e., now simply “a rich woman”) posted a picture of herself with Bill Clinton (let’s hope that her close relationship with Mr. Clinton was not the cause of the divorce!). [Massachusetts family law put a high price on her brief career as a wife and follow-on career as alimony and child support plaintiff; I wonder if she is concerned that the rise of a female leader will be followed by the elimination of alimony, as it did in Germany.]
Female Facebookers are self-identifying as “Nasty Women” and talking about wearing pants suits.
Male Facebookers are saying that we need to elect Hillary to protect women. (Same argument that we use for our military interventions against traditional Muslims in Afghanistan and other places?)
One male Facebooker continues to push the Trump = violence theme. In a country of 325 million he found six crimes that could be called “hate crimes” and in which Trump was somehow referenced by the criminal. Thus if Trump is elected there will be a tidal wave of hate crimes in the U.S. I asked “Wouldn’t it be equally valid to conjecture that Trump’s election would be associated with a reduction in hate crimes? If we assume that you are correct that people who support Trump are haters then wouldn’t they be less motivated to take personal action if they think that the government is acting in their interest instead of against their interest? Wouldn’t it be just as likely that Trump supporters would be calmed by a Trump victory as it is to say that Trump supporters would be calmed by a Hillary victory?” (The answer to these question is a resounding “no”. Nothing would be more likely to get the KKK and other racists to see the error of their ways than a slight majority of Americans voting for Hillary.)
On the “allow more charter schools” question (2) in Massachusetts: an ad to “Join Our Revolution, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Attorney General Maura Healey in the fight to save our public schools. Vote NO on Question 2 this Nov. 8th.” (i.e., continuing to have just one school choice and for that school to be operated by unionized teachers is “a revolution”)
From a Miami-born friend:
The perennial humor of people posting ‘si se puede’ or #SiSePuede.
PSA: that means ‘if we can’. Chavez’s rallying cry was ‘Sí se puede’. Not quite the rousing assertion intended.
Might seem minor to non-Hispanophones, but it’s an error comparable to that other favorite ‘feliz ano nuevo’ which means ‘happy new anus’, rather than happy new year. … it underscores how much of this liberal ‘Latino’ stuff from the left is a bullshit veneer, not much better than American tourists wearing berets in Paris.
My free-market-oriented friends are keeping quiet (lest they be defriended!), for the most part. One hater, though, tried to throw some cold water over the “feminist revolution” angle with
Today, the United States has a unique chance to join the ranks of such progressive countries as Central African Republic, Transnistria, Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Turkey, Burundi, Rwanda, Haiti, Guyana, Mongolia, Senegal, Mali, Peru, and last, but not least the United Kingdom and Germany to show them what a difference female political leadership makes if it is done right. (Wikipedia page of female elected or appointed heads of state)
He was quickly shouted down by a Hillary-supporting man: “What you wrote is not even offensive, it is plain stupid.” (As he should have been, for forgetting to highlight Argentina, which has twice been led by the wife of the former leader.)
Hillary supporters responding to questions regarding their logic or factual basis for a statement:
Your arguments are flawed and logic is weak. If you want a course in ethics, i’ll recommend you to some professors. I haven’t the time to school you on facebook.
This is some A+ trolling.
Stop posting fallacies.
Just stop.
The fact that Trump has promoted racist, violent, and misogynist views is what is at issue here – that he has been in no way what most US citizens in the past would have called “presidential” in his bearing, his thinking, or his manner of speaking.
What I’ve shared was my most sincere concern for people who don’t look a certain way, believe in a particular God, or choose to love someone of the same gender. Hate, violence, building walls, misogyny, racism, and the persecution of people is wildly concerning, not political
(Hard to find these as it seems that my Facebook friends don’t have any friends willing to go on record as supporting Trump, so there were no Hillary-Trump exchanges, only Hillary-lovers-versus-Hillary-lukewarms or Hillary-lovers-versus-libertarians.)
Nobody was posting about a local story: “Past Harvard Men’s Cross Country Teams Wrote ‘Sexually Explicit’ Comments About Women’s Team”. These guys voluntarily released their spreadsheets and I am wondering if they timed it for just before the election when it would be drowned out by Hillary euphoria or Trumpenfuhrer paranoia? (the article surprised me mostly because it reveals the existence of people younger than 30 who know how to use a spreadsheet application)
[Amidst all of this, something else interesting in today’s feed: “If you’re a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system,” he explained. “It costs too much.” (nytimes article on Peter Thiel and why he bankrolled Hulk Hogan).]
Readers; What’s the most interesting stuff you’ve seen on Facebook today?
I wonder how pervasive the damage to Facebook’s social network structure due to the campaign was. (I suspect one reason you see no Trump/Hillary exchanges is that many of those relationships were broken or filtered in the last year) It’s interesting that many of my friends see their support for Hillary as an important part of their identity “Who we are”, as opposed to just “A politician that will probably do things that I’ll approve of”. I’m not a Trump supporter, but I thought it might have been fun to pretend for a while (I’m a Libertarian) as a way to call attention to people’s narrow-mindedness. I realized pretty quickly that it might make social life in California untenable.
>“Wouldn’t it be equally valid to conjecture that Trump’s
>election would be associated with a reduction in hate crimes?
>If we assume that you are correct that people who support
>Trump are haters then wouldn’t they be less motivated to take personal
>action if they think that the government is acting in their interest instead
>of against their interest? Wouldn’t it be just as likely that Trump
>supporters would be calmed by a Trump victory as it is to say that
>Trump supporters would be calmed by a Hillary victory?”
Were you suggesting people should vote for a candidate who gives the appearance of supporting racists in the hope that it will appease those among their supporters who are racists?
I don’t think so. I think the point you were trying to make is that selecting a President based on how one thinks the small number of committed American racists will react or based on which candidate that small fraction of people seem to be supporting doesn’t make much sense. Fair enough; although only someone who has been reading your blog for years would understand that from what was actually said.
On the other hand, one candidate in this election really does seem to have activated the relatively small number of committed American racists in a way that’s fairly unusual. It is worth pondering why that is.
Neal,
It’s no mystery. He’s the first serious immigration-restrictionist candidate in decades. If you were to say “We should model our immigration policy on that of New Zealand or Switzerland”, of course the racists are going to like it, for their own reasons. That doesn’t make you racist for having said it.
If you, a committed feminist, were to say “In an effort to avoid importing cultures of violence against women, let’s restrict immigration from any place where women enjoy a lesser degree of physical safety (or freedom from trafficking) than they do here” (see map http://www.womanstats.org/newmapspage.html), and the racists figured it out, they’d be totally on board. (This is exhibit A. that the racists are not terribly inventive)
and if you were to say “We should restrict immigration from Mexico because they are a bunch of rapists”?
Build the wall. PS Phil did you decide?
Skimming this discussion confirms my decision to ignore facebook.
J. Peterson and I are on the same page.
Relevant to the list of elected female leaders is South Korea’s current president, Park Geun-hye. Ms. Park is currently embroiled in a corruption scandal that CNBC notes” “has been compared to the uproar over U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private server for her government emails while she was secretary of state.”
Regarding Trump supporters and violence: Philip, with your liberal Facebook friends, you must surely have seen this montage?
“he ‘chose to take a stand’ by doing something (voting in Massachusetts) that cannot possibly have any effect”
I think of elections as being like a tug-of-war. Any one person’s participation is only going to make a tiny difference. But that doesn’t mean that it’s completely meaningless.
Oh, man. Mine is really blowing up
Attn peeps: spread this to all you Democrat friends:
http://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/
Phil,
Like a few other posters in this thread, I too have never been inclined to “Facebook” or whatever the term is called. It seems that maybe I just don’t have enough people in my life who would truly be interested in what I am saying, doing, believing in. Or possibly the opposite is also true.
So…maybe you could consider infuriating your fellow Facebookers by posting the line from the old Wizard of Oz song: “Ding dong, the witch is dead! Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead!!”
So what’s the feed like today?
>maybe you could consider infuriating your fellow Facebookers by
>posting the line from the old Wizard of Oz song:
>“Ding dong, the witch is dead!
or maybe you could point them to something which will help them deal with it:
http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/11/its-going-to-be-okay.html
“So what’s the feed like today?”
I imagine it’s something like the scene in A Game of Thrones where the protagonist is executed: shock and disbelief.
We always tell our kids that you can’t control the result, you can only control the effort you put in. Hillary Clinton obviously worked extremely hard to defeat Trump; she took him apart at the debates, she built up her fundraising and her field organization, she kept soldiering onward when attacked by the Russians and then the FBI. So I don’t think she has anything to be ashamed of: she did everything she could.
But if she has a fatal flaw, I suspect it may be her deep religious faith. She couldn’t imagine that God would hand victory to a clownish demagogue who brags about groping women, who feels no shame about attacking minorities, who’s deeply vindictive, and who’s obviously unprepared. That may be why she’s having such a hard time giving a public concession speech — it’s not just defeat, it’s a crisis of faith.
For the US and its allies, I think Trump’s victory is a disaster. (The markets certainly seem to think so.) Under Trump, we can expect erratic and uninformed leadership. US allies in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East can no longer rely on US protection against Russia, China, and Iran; we can expect to see insecurity, arms races (possibly including nuclear proliferation), and conflict. With unified Republican control of government, the Republican agenda of deep tax cuts and spending cuts will follow, as well as disruptions to US relationships with its trading partners. Unlike Philip, I expect this to lead to economic contraction, both within the US and for the world in general, aggravating tension and conflict.
Richard Rorty, writing in 1997, describes the likely domestic picture:
“(The markets certainly seem to think so.) ”
And yet Dow Jones index is up almost 1% today.
>With unified Republican control of government, the Republican
>agenda of deep tax cuts and spending cuts will follow
In the past, Republicans have delivered a lot of noise about what in actuality were modest symbolic cuts of Democratic priorities generally more than offset by increased spending on Republican priorities. It will actually be interesting to see if President Trump breaks the pattern. My bet is “no”, but I readily admit that could be wrong.
I agree with philg that cutting certain government spending has the potential to improve prospects for economic growth, but I also agree with Russil that if executed poorly spending cuts have the potential to cause short term and long term economic damage. If President Trump does actually significantly cut spending I’m not particularly optimistic about his execution.
Here’s a post-election Facebook post by a liberal political scientist female professor friend of mine (at a college where the tuition costs $50k/yr):
“I’m glad to be part of a professional community where people wear black today, applaud a lecture where a professor reminds people of kristallnacht and the importance of standing up to bigotry, where young women are wearing their I’m With Her buttons today too, and people are giving each other hugs (and chocolate) and asking if they are OK.”
It’s an all women’s liberal arts college – so it’s like being stuck in an echo chamber wrapped around a bubble.
One of the more unexpectedly interesting threads in my post-election feed: a cousin (litigator in large southern city) quoting Nietzche in honor of Trump’s victory. His advice to horrified commenters? “Be strong. Don’t unfriend.”
My first day at the gym since THE election and I thought I would hear all the guys in the locker room talking about grabbing women by the crotch and bragging about their sexual prowess in regards to ladies, but no! Aren’t these and other behaviors like not paying tax and giving the finger to climate change ok now that they’ve been condoned by, arguably, the greatest living role model on the planet?
Here’s an interesting take on how Trump got to the White House:
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/11/10/trump-may-best-thing-happened-us-democracy-decades/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IM-cleantechnica+%28CleanTechnica%29
Excuse my dysexlia: #himwhiter