Vainamoinen: As Peter Thiel's actually pro-Trump speech has demonstrated, Trump votes show a disappointment in the established political apparatus. They're protest votes. But protest votes are stupid. They don't mean you refuse to participate in the system any more, they mean you're actively trying to eat the largest festering piece of shit on the table instead of the smallest, like you usually do in democracy. Protest voting is about making things much worse for yourself so you can blame the people not in power any more afterwards: Completely nonsensical.
Yeah Thiel seems to represent that narrow fraction of Trump supporters that actually is capable of making an argument for why they support him. Heh, but of course it's a pretty pathetic "argument", as a true "protest vote" should be a non-vote. Instead of voting for the biggest sack of shit we can find, who will do the most possible damage. That's just being an asshole, going "ok I'm fed up with the system, so let's feed it a mouthful of poison and see if it dies as a result or not". And it figures that attitude comes from some super rich fuck who knows that his billions will insulate him from most of the negative shit that comes down on the rest of us as a result of all this.
The irony here is that it's guys like Thiel (maybe not him so much personally because his wealth is relatively new, but others like him) who are most responsible for creating the conditions in this country that have made the Trump phenomenon possible in the first place, as a result of the influence they've had on our system over the last 30ish years. I mean the reason we have this whole class of pissed off working class/middle class-ish white guys who are his "base", is because rich guys and rich corporations have over the years been using their financial influence over government policy to gradually change the rules over time, to benefit themselves financially more and more at the expense of everybody else. Which of course has more or less destroyed the middle class in this country and drastically lowered the standard living of working people, creating this massive crowd of desperate and angry people, who are then all set up for an angry-yet-shallow-as-a-puddle message like Trump's. All the problems that these guys are so pissed off about are the result of the super-wealthy rewriting the rules over a long time.
So the surprisingly simple solution here isn't to destroy the whole thing and start over, which is sort of where Thiel's argument leads. Rather let's just destroy that one thing that has been the root cause of so many problems.- the campaign finance system. Turn *that* thing on its head, not the whole system (which at times in our history has worked very well, to be fair). Make all campaign finance funds come from tax dollars *only*, and give every candidate who has a minimum level of support from voters the same amount to work with. That would quickly put the real power in our system back in the hands of all these pissed off people, and before long their standard of living would start to creep back up and there'd be a whole lot less to be pissed about.
I'll tell you what, if we had been financing our political campaigns the way I suggest all along, we'd have never come to this point. Not now anyways. That is the true root cause of these people's legitimate anger, which then turns into racism and all these other nasty hate things when the people can't quite understand who or what has screwed them.
So the funny thing is that if the average Trump supporter knew his head from his ass, he should be supporting Hillary. Because Sanders and Warren and the progressives have pushed her to commit 100% to campaign finance reform. Whereas I'm not sure Trump knows what "campaign finance reform" even means.
Ah America, ever the land of ultimate irony.....
tinyE: This whole thing is getting way too depressing to even think about.
Pangaea666: ... But if recent polls is anything to go by, it's actually quite close.
Ahh don't get too "gloom n doom" guys, the simulations I've just seen this morning still show a 91% chance of a Clinton win. Data-driven simulations are such better predictors these days than polls. It's more or less impossible these days to do any polling that doesn't contain some kind of bias, intentional or not. The simulations that aggregate the polls and factor in demographics and all that have been way more reliable in recent years. And those don't look good for Trump. Aww, what's poor wittle Donnie gonna do on 11/9? Might I suggest a long walk off a short pier? :)