Potential consequences of Trump's victory

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by mtf, Aug 1, 2016.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    So are we to believe that Trump would be biased more in the direction of informed and reflective prudence?
    I agree that Clinton seems to possess mediocre, at best, foresight in these matters, but the notion that Clinton was "gloating" in that interview is without basis in reality, and the exclamation point pure wingnut raving - a true example of the kind of brainless reaction that Clinton seems to inspire in so many people.

    The vote against Trump (or any Republican of the modern Party) is not brainless, or unaware of the nature of Clinton's record and abilities.
     
    Last edited: Aug 3, 2016
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  3. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    And if Trump becomes president, and his ignorance, hatred of foreigners and propensity towards violence launches a war that kills millions, that will be on your head.
     
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  5. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Depends if you think Trump would be worse.
     
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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    One of the penalties of running Clinton is that all good humor possibilities are undermined by the prospect of a Clinton Presidency, but when stuff as happens keeps happening around Trump - - - a Trump spokesman just blamed Obama and Hillary for the rules of engagement that led to the death of that soldier, Khan, whose father was articulate in slamming Trump.

    He was killed in 2004.
     
  8. The God Valued Senior Member

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    Trump is

    1. Not ignorant in the sense you are pushing. He may be a political outsider, but he is not ignorant. Presidential decisions are never based on ignorance. The Team is what matters.

    2. A businessman of his magnitude in open economy cannot hate foreigners, he knows it very well. He has just taken a political stand.

    3. He has no propensity towards war or violence. For a businessman war is too big a distraction, so he could not have any propensity for war. Yes, there should be a war like scenario or efforst to eliminate terrorism. Thats a cause any powerful man who can contribute should get into.

    I see no problem with Trump, except an opportunistic pre-election stand.
     
  9. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Trump doesn't have much of a team, and it has made a lot of ignorant mistakes - as has he. So far, they don't really count.
    He has a propensity towards anger and acting without information. It's difficult enough to avoid war when you don't know what you're doing - a habit of acting in anger and ignorance lowers your odds yet some more.
     
  10. The God Valued Senior Member

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    Presidential Team....
     
  11. mtf Banned Banned

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    Yes ...
     
  12. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    The question is exceedingly cryptic. What does "humanists" mean? Why would Trump being elected be a life-or-death test for these humanists, whatever they are?

    Why? I don't understand the unstated presuppositions of the question.

    I'm not sure whether I'm a 'humanist' or not. That would depend on how the word is defined. Nor am I sure what challenges for that 'humanism' you imagine lying ahead.

    Perhaps you need to clarify your own ideas so that I can either agree or argue with them.
     
  13. mtf Banned Banned

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    As discovered in the meantime, esp. in the context of this forum, the issue is so delicate that I'm thinking of dropping it altogether. I knew from the beginning that it was delicate, so I left it scarcely formulated, leaving it to potential responders to either intuitively understand it or leave it.

    I'll just summarize that the OP was insipired by a discussion in another thread where we were discussing the possibility and especially feasibility of holding to basic standards of decency in a time of social and material hardship.
     
  14. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Notes on Prophecy

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    I think we ought to start a thread documenting all the gloom and brimstone people promise from Hillary Clinton.

    By the time pundits realized they should be keeping track of similar hyperbole about Barack Obama―even by twentieth-century Republican standards for the sleaziness of sleaze, the sheer volume is incredible―it was too late to catch up.

    Take the Watergate line; Steve Benen↱ recently noted, "The last time I conted, there were at least ten separate 'controversies' that President Obama's critics eagerly labeled as 'Obama's Watergate,' each of which turned out to be meaningless, further diluting an already overused cliché".

    And that's one bloggers, pundits, and analysts have been able to track.

    Naturally, Benen used the opportunity to acknowledge Franklin Foer↱ at Slate, whose headline leaves no room for question: "The DNC Hack Is Watergate, but Worse".

    What's galling about the WikiLeaks dump is the way in which the organization has blurred the distinction between leaks and hacks. Leaks are an important tool of journalism and accountability. When an insider uncovers malfeasance, he brings information to the public in order to stop the wrongdoing. That's not what happened here. The better analogy for these hacks is Watergate. To help win an election, the Russians broke into the virtual headquarters of the Democratic Party. The hackers installed the cyber-version of the bugging equipment that Nixon's goons used—sitting on the DNC computers for a year, eavesdropping on everything, collecting as many scraps as possible. This is trespassing, it's thievery, it's a breathtaking transgression of privacy. It falls into that classic genre, the dirty trick. Yet that term feels too innocent to describe the offense. Nixon's dirty tricksters didn't mindlessly expose the private data of low-level staff.

    Or, as Benen put it: "If Russia broke into the DNC’s virtual headquarters and stole materials to help a Republican win a presidential race, everyone waiting for the next Watergate just might get their wish.

    Nor did Mr. Trump help the situation at all in calling on Russia to meddle further↱, but I digress.

    And, you know, it's how many years later and I still have yet to hear an explanation of how what Bill Maher describes as a giant blowjob for the insurance industry equals a socialist takeover of anything.

    Something about how Republicans use the word unprecedented―(they keep using that word; I do not think it means what they think it means)―goes here.

    Barack Obama has hardly played the role of flaming liberal, yet he's been the best president of my lifetime and one of the best in American history. I don't expect to be any more thrilled with Hillary Clinton's overt foreign policy, but we also need to remember the rather powerful surprises President Obama has offered Americans; nuclear material, chemical weapons, and, you know, while bombing the shit out of someone or something generally brings catastrophe regardless of success or failure, it would, in fact, actually appear that bombing the shit out of Daa'ish↗ is, indeed, having some useful effect. It is hardly the most inspiring of potential futures. Meanwhile, on the domestic front we will have a civil rights president who requires serious pressure from her left flank in order to buck the middle road on financial and political reforms in order to seek more functional solutions. The tens of thousands will die generally in the Middle East, with possible expansion in Africa because the continent, already out of hand, verges on exponential eruption. On the home front, the largest numbers of such casualties will come from crime both mundane and spectacular. In other words, America will look largely like business as usual, including the everyday hope that things will get a little better. We can expect certain upticks in particular crimes, but these will only highlight the ongoing holocausts of our domestic endeavors.

    Let's put it this way: The biggest danger of your prediction coming true will come from sectors in our society that will create such problems in order to complain that they are happening. You know, kind of like we've been seeing from hardline conservatives shepherding rising nationalism through the Obama years presently culminating in the nomination of Donald J. Trump as the Republican presidential candidate.

    I wonder if the would-be prophets will remember their own dire predictions in a few years?
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Benen, Steve. "A Watergate comparison that finally makes sense". msnbc. 26 July 2016. msnbc.com. 2 August 2016. http://on.msnbc.com/2acHHEh

    —————. "Donald Trump calls for Russia to help elect him president". msnbc. 27 July 2016. msnbc.com. 2 August 2016. http://on.msnbc.com/2adZ9Vz

    Foer, Franklin. "The DNC Hack Is Watergate, but Worse". Slate. 26 July 2016. Slate.com. 2 August 2016. http://slate.me/2aORgLT
     
  15. geordief Valued Senior Member

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    2,118
    So does anyone think Trump has articulated a coherent approach to foreign policy ?( whatever about its merits)

    This supposed ability to "work with a team" may also just be good way to paper over cracks (fissures?) in his own inadequacy in this particular regard.
     
  16. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    I think there's a possibility that, intentional or not, Trump's campaign has outed the dark side of the US political spectrum, for a reason (!). The Republican party is in "disarray", but post-election after Trump has lost and badly, it will recover after regrouping but without the tea-party faction.

    Already the "sane" politicians are deserting the cause of electing a Republican candidate no matter what. Trump isn't a Republican, and they seem to be waking up to that. He's just hijacked, without too much of a fuss (for him) a major US political party (yikes!).

    So after the dust settles, those actual Republicans who still have a political career, will try to reinvigorate what's left.

    Maybe, just maybe, the whole show is a vast collusion between the two main parties that gives both some kind of plausible deniability, about a conspiracy to rid the Republicans of the loonies.

    I'll now remove my tinfoil hat. Thankyou, it's been great, really great. Believe me.
     
    Last edited: Aug 3, 2016
  17. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    I can't tell if you're overestimating Republicans or underestimating the importance of the range between "unmoderate" and "hardline".

    In any circumstance by which the GOP can actually excise its Tea Party and wingnut assemblies, it will take at least to the midterm, but more likely be seen in a collapse of year-six midterm conventional wisdom. That is, the full evidence probably won't be seen until Hillary Clinton's second midterm, when history says she gets trounced. And maybe this time the president's party doesn't get trounced, and that will be significant.

    Or not. Outliers and statistical deviations are still real potentials.

    But there was a point where the weekly identification survey saw Republican numbers drop to twenty-one percent. Usually the numbers are in the middle thirties for the parties, and neither ever achieves fifty percent; forty is a pretty good number if you can manage it. But twenty-one? One in five, plus pocket change? That's rough. And it occurs to wonder just who is left at that point; the answer, of course, is the tinfoils and wingnuts, supremacists and paranoiacs.

    And they're the ones influencing the rebuilding of the Party.

    Lopping out what the GOP needs to remove in order to control its problematic factions means critically damaging the core. Anyone is welcome to look me in the eye and say, with a straight face, that the GOP is capable of figuring out how to replace that bloc in the base core over the course of two to six years.

    Two years ain't happening, but six is possible if we have faith in Republican leaders to figure it out and communicate the necessary information to the rank and file.

    So, yeah: Six is a joke, too.

    In my lifetime, Republican leaders have followed votes the way a bad stereotype follows money. They might finally be comprehending not only that one of their most reliable sources is running dry for salable ideas but also is absolutely toxically polluted at the wellspring, but they have no idea what to do about the problem. This is a Party of angry individualists shaken awake after decades of complacency fumbling around for their coffee and not yet even getting to the point where they have to figure out how to work together.

    More than likely, they'll try to find a way to keep drinking from this filthy stream.
     
  18. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    The Tea Party works like a Democracy, without any organized leadership. It does not need organized leadership to think for it, since they are not a group of mindless twits. A group of mindless twits will need centralized leadership. The de-centralized Tea Party had enough influence to help the Republican win two midterm elections, where they gained the House and Senate.

    The problem was the Republican party was all talk, and did not use this power, given by the Tea Party, to do what they claim they were going to do. They and the Democrats are part of the same rigged system, with the public conflict between left and right, mostly show for the masses. The last Budget had the Republicans give Obama everything he wanted including more national debt. The Republicans could have stood tall but they are part of the rigged system. Neither party likes the Tea Party since they are not part of the rigged system.

    The reason the Tea Party can exist as a democracy, without any distinct leadership or chain of command, is it is composed of middle class, self reliant, small business owners. This demographics are self sufficient, by its very nature. These people are not under big government or big business, like the two political parties. The Tea Party can function very well without centralized leadership, since that is what they do for a living. But if you are on the public dole, need big government to rig the system, or work for a big company, you need leadership to think for you.

    Groups like black lives matter are funded by agents of the Democratic party. They are not self sufficient. This media driven choreographed model may be more what people are used to seeing. When large groups operate like a democracy, it appears alien to dependent people. The Tea Party is similar to the original America; hard work, self reliance and pioneers who are an island onto themselves.

    Trump comes from the same mold as the Tea Party; self reliant. From the POV of a billionaire, he was able to take this to the next step. Trump learned to take advantage of the rigged system, since it is lawful to do so, according to the law makers. He knows this is cheating, based on traditional moral laws, but it is lawful to cheat based on the rules of the rigged system; relative morality.

    Trump would prefer make government more honest and more free market driven; lower costs and increase efficiency. This is resisted by both parties who are more parasitic, than democratic.
     
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  19. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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    Last edited: Aug 3, 2016
  20. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    He's really, really ignorant. Shockingly so.
    You can if you pretend not to.
    He's petty and vindictive. Even if he doesn't think he's warlike, that kind of thing can get us into a war in 2 seconds.
     
  21. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    John Allen at the democratic national convention:
    Marching out on stage with dozens of military brass behind him, retired four-star Marine Gen. John Allen delivered a fiery speech Thursday night in support of Hillary Clinton, saying she is "exactly" the commander in chief the country military industrial complex needs.

    Obviously biased on 2 levels, He is a part of and product of the military industrial complex, and she is a hawk, and now he works for the liberal brookings institute that takes $ from foreign governments to influence american foreign policy. Qatar contributes millions to brookings, so, in effect John Allen works for the Qataris.
    Curious thing that, we give arms and ammunition to Qatar who then sends them to ISIS and other radical islamic terrorists.

    Meanwhile, the $ ain't going to schools nor infrastructure here in the USA.
     
    Last edited: Aug 3, 2016
  22. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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    This is a link on the site you posted:


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    Former U.S. presidents George H.W Bush and son George W. Bush don’t support the presumptive nominee, although they have previously endorsed the GOP’s general election candidate.

    Spokesmen for both former commanders in chief said they would not comment or participate in Mr. Trump’s campaign. Both had previously endorsed John McCain back in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.

    http://politics.lifeplunge.com/republicans-refuse-support-donald-trump/2/
     
  23. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    5,902
    Yes. He's never set it down as a set of abstract principles, a 'Trump Doctrine'. But his approach can easily be read off of the things he says about particular issues.

    Trump's defining characteristic is that he's an American nationalist. His thinking is in terms of 'what's in the interests of the United States and its people'. Not in terms of what's consistent with a set of abstract moral principles based on spreading enlightenment values, globalization and internationalization and so on.

    That's why he's skeptical of international trade agreements that hurt US workers, just because they represent 'free trade' and free trade is supposed to be good, right? He doesn't see the world through the lens of the big-business elites, in whose interest globalization is (it makes them much richer, even as thousands of factories are closed and millions of jobs are shipped off to Asia), which is why both the Republican and Democratic establishments hate him.

    It's why he's expressed doubt about the US' traditional Cold War role as Europe's military savior, when collectively Europe has a GDP equal to ours and there's no reason why they can't defend themselves against any military threat that they currently face if they actually spent what they should on defense and cooperated effectively. (They have hundreds of thousands of troops and hundreds of nuclear weapons.) There's no reason why they should continue to insult America and Americans as crude and less-sophisticated war mongers, then immediately squeal "Where are the Americans???" whenever they feel threatened. (Russia is the only credible threat they face, but it's less powerful militarily than Europe would be if it got it's shit even half-way together.) The media commentariat anguishes over Trump destroying the post-war world order, but given that the Cold War has been over for 25 years, maybe it's time that America's allies wean themselves off their child-like dependence on us.

    It's why Trump opposes more military adventures in the Middle East that leave dangerous power-vacuums in their wake (as in Bush's Iraq and Hillary's Libya). He doesn't believe that it's the US' job to spread democracy around the world, if the locals don't want it and have their own very different cultures that they like better. Having said that, he doesn't believe that all of the world's cultures should be imported here or have equal standing in the United States with American culture as 'multiculturalism' requires. Foreigners should only be allowed into the United States as immigrants if they don't represent a threat to us and want to assimilate into American culture. He doesn't want to Americanize the world, nor does he want America worldized.

    If foreigners want to form a good prediction of what policies Trump would favor as President, they only have to ask what's in the best interests of the US. Think of foreign affairs as a whole collection of business deals, and think of Trump as the American deal-maker. He's going to be thinking, 'Why should we sign this? What's in it for us'? He's less likely to be signing it just because it seems to represent some abstract principle that the international global elites insist is morally good, mainly because it's in their interest.

    I think that Trump is most comfortable with world leaders that think the same way. Putin does, he thinks in terms of Russian interests, which makes Putin reasonably predictable, makes it possible to negotiate with him and makes it possible to influence Russian policy with carrots and sticks. I don't think that Trump's as comfortable with leaders like Angela Merkel, since she seems to be driven primarily by emotion and by her own personal moral instincts. So German policy will reflect whatever Angela believes is moral and good, which is a lot harder to predict or influence.
     
    Last edited: Aug 3, 2016
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