That's one way to look at it. Another way (and I'm trying hard not to endorse one viewpoint or the other, I've heard both) is:
Liberals are tired of the Clintons. They're tired of nominating people just left of center who fail to inspire them, while candidates who speak their mind and call for change (Bernie) are ignored by both the DNC and the mass media. They perceive, rightly or wrongly, that Republicans have been fighting a battle while Democrats make concessions to people who are unwilling to compromise. And now that the most outspoken, uncompromising candidate has won the election, they're being told to compromise again, to swallow their emotions and have a conversation with people who aren't interested in talking with them.
The media told them this was Hillary's turn. They were told to vote against Trump, but nothing about what they were voting for. They were told that feelings don't matter and to vote for the greater good, even while candidates within the party and without inspired based on emotion. Is it any wonder that turnout was down?
I don't think Trump was the only one running such a campaign. How else would you describe the resounding message from the Clinton campaign that a vote for Trump is a vote for "racism, sexism, homophobia", etc..?
Both Trump and Clinton's campaigns seem successful - there was less voter turnout than in 2012. However, the angles they took seem to have reshuffled support in a way that ended up with Trump winning.
> Both Trump and Clinton's campaigns seem successful - there was less voter turnout than in 2012.
Turnout this election was 2% higher than 2012. It just doesn't look that way because everyone is focused on Clinton's and Trump's totals. This election saw the most votes cast for alternate candidates (a hair over 5% according to Wikipedia) since Ross Perot's run in 1996.
Haven't read in detail your citation, although I'll note claiming a Republican operative said "We have three major voter suppression operations underway" is ludicrous on its face, "suppression" is not a word you're going to use when talking to hostile MSM reporters, but lower turnout was baked into the cake if for no other reason than Obama was not on the ticket.
For that matter, compare Democratic votes in all three elections, looks to me like you can draw a fairly straight line 2008 to 2016.
But if you drop the loaded word suppression, yes, of course part of the game is to discourage the people who might vote for your opponent, the biggest change is that the language used today is by comparison quite tame.
It's so embedded in our Constitutional order, the great compromise that made it possible in the first place, the 2 Senators per state, and the 2 extra Electoral College votes each state gets, that it's not really "a huge complaint for ages", unless, of course, it's your side that lost. It's happened, what, 4 times now?
Note also that at least in this election the unofficial margin (at least per the AP, which hasn't called Michigan and New Hampshire yet) is rather small, and one also has to count 3rd parties.
Putting the shoe on the other foot, what do you have to say about both of Bill Clinton's elections, where Perot resulted in more people voting against than for him. For that matter, just checking now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...), every third party candidate but the Constitutional party's, and independent Evan McMullin, earned more votes than the margin between Hillary and Trump. So it's really hard when you look at those non-major party vote total to say that in any way she won the popular vote, especially if you claim this didn't matter for her husband in the '90s.
"A huge complaint for ages" was a reference to what I saw people talking about after the 2000 election. If you say that it's wrong based on how the Constitution came about in the 18th century, then you've completely misunderstood what I was saying there. I'm not saying that people have been complaining about it for hundreds of years, I'm saying that people were complaining about it for months (or years?) following the 2000 election.
2000 was the first presidential election I was old enough to vote in. I have voted in every presidential election (and every midterm and local one except when I was living overseas) since. Of the presidential elections I've voted in, the electoral college has flipped 40% of them. So don't try to dismiss my complaint on the basis that it's rare. Maybe it is throughout history, but it has become distressingly common lately.
And don't assume I'm complaining just because "my side" lost. I didn't vote for Gore in 2000. I did vote for Clinton in 2016, but I do not identify as a Democrat, and only voted for her because I believe Trump is a terrifying and dangerous choice. I was too young to vote for Bill Clinton in the 90s, and while I think he did a decent job, I think HW Bush and Dole would have too.
I don't really see how Bill Clinton is "putting the shoe on the other foot." My ideal system wouldn't be a simple first-past-the-post arrangement. I would like to have runoff elections or ranked-choice voting or something like that.
You seem to be imagining a whole slew of arguments on my behalf that I didn't make and don't believe. If you want to reply to me, please reply to what I'm saying, not whatever you imagine I must think.
OK, I suppose if I'm dismissing it because it's rare, it's due to our disparate histories, I'm much older, the first election I watched closely having come of political age intellectually was Nixon v. McGovern in 1972, and first voted in 1980 (Reagan v. Carter). So I personally have experienced it as much rarer an issue, and of course one in my favor (maybe, was W in office in 2001-4 a good thing? If the numbers hold true, will Trump be? ^_^).
But my bigger point are things that I think you must address, if you're to address my concerns, like how it will make half of the the Great Compromise non-operative, and change the election to a focus on 8-10 metro areas, none of which I or my family live in, even those in the Kansas City metro area (30th).
You feel disenfranchised in 2 out of your 5 presidential elections; do you think I want my family and myself to be disenfranchised in them forever?
I don't care about the Great Compromise. I understand why it was necessary. The United States in the 18th century was a loose collection of mostly sovereign colonies, and there was the real possibility that the smaller ones would decide not to join up if they didn't get disproportionate power in the new nation.
It's a different country now. We have many more states, and the role of states has greatly diminished. Most Americans think of themselves as Americans first, and citizens of their state a distant second. Many aspects of our electoral system have changed. The idea of allowing an 18-year-old black woman who owns no property to vote would be as bizarre to the founders as the idea of directly electing the president.
I don't actually feel disenfranchised. I've always lived in swing states, so my vote counts for far more than most. My dislike of the electoral college is not rooted in the fact that I feel like I don't have a voice.
I don't understand this notion that you and your family would be disenfranchised in a system where the president is chosen directly. Your vote would count exactly as much as the vote of someone living in New York City. Sure, there are more people living in NYC than there are where you are, but there are far more Americans not living in NYC than living in NYC. A quick look at the popular vote totals will show you that the 10 biggest metro areas don't overwhelm everyone else.
Sure, a lot of attention would be given to big cities. I don't see what's wrong with that. A lot of people live there! But other places wouldn't be ignored, since every vote in every location would be just as important. Wyoming probably wouldn't get many visits from candidates, but how many do they get now?
As it stands, the swing states get all of the attention. Neither candidate cares much about what voters in California or Texas think, because their attention won't change anything. Democrats just need to not totally piss off California, and Republicans just need to not totally piss off Texas. If Californians have some important issue they'd like to see action on, nobody is going to care about it. That's 65 million people disenfranchised right there, just in those two states.
Why is it better to have the candidates care almost exclusively about the needs and desires of ~60 million Americans living in swing states, and completely ignore the other 260 million of us? You say that people in Kansas City would be disenfranchised with a direct vote. I say that they're disenfranchised now, because neither Kansas nor Missouri have the slightest chance of choosing Democratic electors. In a popular vote system, the candidates might care more about New Yorkers than Kansans, but at least they'd care some.
And one response I have to that, developed from this conversation, is that this election is a turnout anomaly because the GOPe sabotaged the GOTV effort for Trump (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12932865 for a bit more on that).
And are you really sure about that? The AP, the "definitive" source I've been following through Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=election+results+2016+usa#eo...), says California reporting is 100%, and the nationwide margin is still about the same as it's been for some time, medium 6 figures.
Maybe that's a high estimate, I don't know. We'll know in a few weeks in any case.
Am I sure the demographic trend towards cities will continue? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. They may not continue to vote the way they do now, but they are going to decide presidential elections.
It's a huge complaint when it confronts people who didn't learn how the system works in civics class, I guess, but it's been the way that presidential voting has worked since before we were all born, so the outcry is sort of annoying at best.
Also, as the only groups legally able to propose a change to this system are right now benefiting from it, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Embrace the power of "and", both can be true, except I'd quibble with disposable099 and say many of us, I would not be surprised if most, believed Trump could win.
For me, that was through a combination of his refusing to play the game by the other side's rules (a restatement of disposable099's point) and how terribly awful a politician Hillary is. In fact, I go so far as to say she's an almost total failure in life, aside from graduating from the good schools she went to, the one good decision she made in life was to accept Bill's outstanding offer of marriage, everything successful in her life after law school flows from that.
To give you a hint of that, it's pretty obvious the reason she accepted and self-exiled to Arkansas in the 1970s was that between failing the D.C. Bar Exam and being terminated with extreme prejudice from the Watergate Investigating Committee, she had completely burned her potential future career in D.C./East Coast politics. There's lots more if you want more details, but, I can close with the obvious facts that she twice reached for the highest brass ring in US politics with serious campaigns and failed both times, to rather different sorts of people (weasel words since, for example, both Obama and Trump are master level trolls).
Echoing my point at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930056 when you cite a totally biased when it comes to politics site like Snopes, our response is a simple "We Don't Care."
But, tell me, why did she exile herself to 1970s Arkansas? As someone who grew up 3 counties north of the state, I can assure you back then it was considered to be a massively worse place than my native Missouri, and the very close states of Kansas and Oklahoma. There was something qualitatively different about it, in a bad way.
Note that she went from working on the Watergate Committee, which was the highest pinnacle of the Left in the '70s aside from perhaps the Carter Administration years later, to being a partner at a politically well connected law firm in Arkansas, one no one ever heard of outside the state before the '90s.
What's your explanation for her move? Surely she could have tried again to pass the D.C. bar exam.
I'm confused - what about the Snopes article is "nothing of the sort"? They cite sources, quote those sources, and provide good evidence that she wasn't fired. Do you have evidence to the contrary other than Zeifman's (self-contradictory) claims?
I'm confused... isn't saying "Hillary was fired with extreme prejudice from the WIC" a political issue? You're trying to make a political point by using a mistruth as evidence of the fact?
The claim that Hillary was fired with extreme prejudice from the WIC is political.
My claim that citing Snopes claim to the contrary---it being a political issue---does not make it a mistruth to me, rather, you might say it's an example of the maxim that "nothing is confirmed until officially denied".
That, in fact, is pretty much how we on the Alt Right† nowadays treat anything political on Snopes.
†For the purposes of this discussion, the Alt Right are those on the right who's response to being called racist is "We Don't Care".
Again, apologies for not grasping your point directly, but I'm not quite following you.
Are you saying you dismiss Snopes as being left-biased, therefore the matter over whether "Hillary Clinton was fired with prejudice" is still not resolved?
And until Hillary Clinton (or presumably the WIC) come out and directly either confirm or deny that statement, then repeating the statement is "fair game"?
But doesn't that put the onus on the subject to confirm or deny every single tinpot, falsehood statement out there, otherwise its safe to consider it the truth?
Is it similar to the example you gave of being called a racist and responding with "We don't care"? Should Hillary Clinton respond to the statement with "I don't care if you think I was fired with prejudice from the WIC"? Is that what you are saying? How would that stop the "mistruth" from being repeated?
(apologies, I'm from the UK so this isn't a line of thought I've come across)
Are you saying you dismiss Snopes as being left-biased, therefore the matter over whether "Hillary Clinton was fired with prejudice" is still not resolved?
Yes.
As for the rest, I believe the evidence I've seen that this was true is sufficient to support my opinion, especially when combined with my own analysis of "Why the hell did she self-exile to Arkansas?!?!??!!!", the latter admittedly using data most Americans, let alone people in the world don't and can't have, and therefore we don't need to get into epistemological weeds.
So you think Hillary was fired with prejudice from the WIC, even though there is no evidence that this statement is true, you are willing to accept it as gospel and further, bind that into strengthen your opinion of her?
Is that not the textbook definition of bias?
And as I further gather, your response to this is "I don't care", as in "I don't care that I am biased"; not that "I acknowledge my biases as a weakness in my rational thought processes".
Do you see bias as a strength? Do you believe that adjusting your mental model of the world to adapt to new information as a hindrance? Have I mistaken your point?
(Please please please do not mistake my questions as judgements; I genuinely am interested in your opinion and argument!)
> I believe the evidence I've seen that this was true is sufficient to support my opinion
I assume you're not talking about the "fired with prejudice" claim here because you'd be directly contradicting Zeifman's own words. But if you are, can you show us this evidence?
> But, tell me, why did she exile herself to 1970s Arkansas? As someone who grew up 3 counties north of the state, I can assure you back then it was considered to be a massively worse place than my native Missouri, and the very close states of Kansas and Oklahoma. There was something qualitatively different about it, in a bad way.
Fayetteville, AR was a cute, hippie college town in the mountains. Going to high school there in the early 90s, we thought Missouri and Oklahoma were holes, and the only place we related to in Kansas was Lawrence.
Yeah, but Fayetteville, which I have the most familiarity with (my father did his first year or two of college there, and it's close to Joplin) is not Little Rock, and we're also talking about the early-mid '70s, not the early '90s, which I can't speak to as to what Arkansas was like, since I'd moved to the Boston area for college in 1979.
And neither are D.C., a center of international power. Hillary was nothing if not ambitious.
Good item, including most especially citing the single person who turned this part of Snopes into a sad joke, and linked it to her clear expressions of Left/Democratic political biases.
This really hasn't been a good year for Establishment Authorities, has it?
What does "Establishment" really mean here, other than "left wing"? I mean, a lot of people would say that a billionaire property developer was pretty "establishment".
What do you make of the rumour (I think it's still a rumour rather than confirmed?) that Steven Mnuchin will be Treasury secretary? Would you call him "establishment"?
"Establishment Authorities", and I should emphasize I'm talking about "Authorities", not, for example, the ever more loathed GOPe(stablishment), on the Right who haven't exactly covered themselves in glory this year include:
National Review (NR/NRO)
Erik Erickson and his Redstate website (a leading article the day after the election was "Is Trump [an] Antichrist?")
Hugh Hewitt
Pajamas Media but only in general, dissent was allowed, then again, if they'd purged co-founder Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds...
The Weekly Standard and very notably its founder William Kristol, who has the true neo-con pedigree as the son of Irving Kristol
I think the latter's Commentary, except they pay-walled themselves out of relevance....
Oh, what about NRO's Kevin Williamson telling the Rust Belt people who provided the margin that elected Trump that:
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible.
That's from http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432876/donald-trump-wh... and deserves a particularly special place in the Decline and Fall of most of the US Right's "Establishment Authorities" in 2016, especially when he and his organization doubled down on it.
Possible exception, who's part of NRO, Pajamas Media, and the Hoover Institution (which means it's much harder to purge him), Victor Davis Hansen, but he's an odd duck in so many ways.
This answers zimpenfish below as well: whatever you believe, to the Alt Right, Snopes is dead to us for all things political.
And what isn't political nowadays? Although the demarcation is pretty clear, falls along the line of a particular person who does their explicitly political stuff. But who trusts the rot to stay there?
And it sounds like you don't believe in, or have never heard of Robert Conquest's Second Law of Politics: "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." See Fox over the last few years, first the top dog explicitly said they were moving to the left, now he's been ousted in a coup and the writing is on the wall for the remaining figures on the right who are still under contract.
> "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing."
So you're defining centrism as impossible? No wonder everyone ends up in bubbles.
And you're calling Fox News, the prototypical right-wing TV news station, left-wing? What? Why? How? I just did a quick scan of foxnews.com and had a hard time finding a single story that wasn't obviously pro-Trump. The best I could do was http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/11/obamacare-enrollm...
Hired an explicitly politically biased person to do their political "debunking", see the item mdpopescu linked to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930881 With of course the predicable results.
So you're defining centrism as impossible?
Post-French Revolution, yes, by and large. Something we on the Right in the US have been saying prior to, say, this election, is that we think the Left is wrong, they think we're evil. Well, it's now polarizing as we decide they're not just wrong, but definitely evil.
And you're calling Fox News, the prototypical right-wing TV news station, left-wing? What? Why? How?
Maybe from your end of the pond they're "prototypically right-wing", and you might just be right about "prototypical", but they've always carried themselves as being "Fair and Balanced", i.e. allowing both sides a fair hearing. You can certainly look at their lineup of Leftists prior to the explicit shift to the Left that started a couple or so years ago as confirmation of this. Would a true "right-wing" (as defined in the US!) station give e.g. Juan Williams an honored seat at the table?
And I guess you missed Megyn Kelly's feud with Trump, and her leading role in the coup that ousted the founder and head of the channel?
I'm not telling you as someone across the pond that it's worth investigating, just like I haven't put any effort to speak of in discovering the causes of the Decline and Fall of the Torygraph, which I avidly read as a right of center 5 hours early for me news source back in the '90s, but, seriously, Fox has changed, and it's still a work in progress as two of Murdoch's more liberal sons run the place.
If someone isn't going to accept a source, responding only that they should accept your the source because it's trustworthy isn't likely to convince them. Unfortunately I don't have a better suggestion for supporting the reliability of a source.
I think this issue of mutually acceptable information sources is really problematic. How do we rebuild this? How do we get people to start trusting each other again?
How do we get people to start trusting each other again?
When I get approvingly labeled "irredeemable", the answer is, that will never happen.
The best outcome is that we'll live and let live, although Ian Fleming's famous "Live and Let Die" formulation is of course much more accurate.
Going back to your starting point, this is indeed a total rhetorical fail, which I thank you for pointing out. I'm going to assume that pjc50, who as I recall has a good head on his shoulders, hasn't noticed how institutions can change.
To give an example on my side with about as much amazement as he's expressing about Snopes, I no longer dismiss out of hand everything Alex Jones and Infowars have to say (!!!).
> pjc50, who as I recall has a good head on his shoulders, hasn't noticed how institutions can change
Thanks for the compliment! A little civility can go a long way in these things.
Institutions and people certainly can change. I've lost a lot of respect for various media institutions over the years. e.g. the Telegraph, not just for having a climate change denial column but for the reasons Peter Oborne resigned (influence by advertiser HSBC to prevent adverse coverage). The BBC's political coverage is increasingly just bad, apart from Paxman - Question Time is the two sides shouting across each other, not an informative or useful programme. Their Scottish coverage in English is poor (weirdly, their Gaelic news programme is excellent despite, or possibly because of, its tiny budget).
I do wonder how much of this is just popularity effects. Do people actually want slower, more careful, less angry partisan news? Or do they want a team they can cheer for? The BBC hide all their insightful, analytical programming on BBC4.
Edit: you may be surprised to know that I used to read ZeroHedge, although not seriously. For sane capitalism-skeptic news coverage I'm fond of FT Alphaville.
Heh, you're very welcome, and note that with an anodyne user ID like yours it took more for me to notice you, and, yeah, civility helps, and the lack of it is a key to understanding the changes in the US, which go back ... 100 years, maybe, the original Progressives?
I'm sure that just like the US examples just listed in my "loss of respect" list, I don't really follow at all the ones you list, except for adding the Torygraph to my list and no longer reading them.
"absurdly localist" ... well, that's like Obama referring to Sarah Palin, sitting Governor of a US state, as a mayor of a small town in that state. Except, of course, he was a Presidential candidate and that was more than a little disrespectful and polarizing. In fact, we could label pretty much 99% of the Establishment Feminists as "Feminist Deniers" based on their treatment of her, simply because she wasn't on their political team.
I have no idea about "popularity effects", and I don't follow any of the MSM over here besides my local paper, but I don't think that's it, I think the start of a better explanation over here, from Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds is:
Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Except it's wider than that, as we saw when almost all of the GOPe, as well as much if not most if not almost all of the Right's Establishment Authorities (press), went all in against Trump. Who, if nothing else, we can thank for putting two particular political dynasties into the ash heap of history this year.
Anger has been shown to drive engagement stronger than reasoned opinion, or even good news. (I recall seeing research on this, but don't have it at hand.) So getting people riled up can unfortunately be profitable. This is similar to clickbait, sensationalist journalism when you have ad-supported news in comparison to subscription-supported. Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying includes a very insightful section on this topic. I think it's less what people want than what they react to. O fabled homo economicus.
Again, I cite Hillary labeling me and mine as "irredeemable"; absolutely nothing has made me more "angry"† than that in all the Presidential elections since I came of political age in time for the 1972 Nixon vs. McGovern one.
†"angry" is an entirely insufficient word for this.
I can completely understand that. While we're having a useful discussion on how to rebuild trust, is it useful to bring up an emotional and tangential (albeit related) topic like this? I'm afraid it can potentially derail the conversation. (I hesitate to even bring this up for the same reason). That's not to say that this shouldn't be discussed. A lot of the language used during the campaign was particularly vicious and should be addressed. I just don't know if this particular micro-discussion is the place for it. Figuring out solutions to the things we agree on is particularly important given the highly polarized environment we find ourselves in. And with that, I'll take my answer off the air :)
The problem is, it's anything but tangential. It flows directly from the French Revolution, and became a big thing in the US in the cultural '60s, which extended into the calendar '70s, the idea that the menu of solutions for your political problems includes outright liquidation of a subset of your opponents.
How can I consider this to be tangential when our current President started his political career in the home of two of the most notorious '70s figures advocating this, who made a wild guess that 10% of the population could not be reeducated and would have to be liquidated? You might say, people they thought to be "irredeemable". And these are people of Hillary's generation.
I bring this up not to attack Obama, but to show how well received such eliminationism is on the US Left (heck, in one of those things that makes you wonder if there's a God, the man had a feature article in The New York Times on 9/11 (written and printed before the attack, of course), with him standing on an American flag).
That this sort of thing, including Hillary's speech, is not completely out of bounds means I cannot for a second assume the political struggle in the US is not existential for me and my family.
And given that, I can't in the least see how trust can be rebuilt, at least prior to driving out of polite society all of these figures, instead of feating them.
So, yes, it is, and unfortunately has to be a complete derail of the conversation, given that to the best I can discern you're not taking this issue seriously.
Can I ask roughly how old are you? Did you grow up horrified at the mass murders by the tens of millions by the Left in the 20th Century, including by the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei AKA National Socialist German Workers' Party? How the Soviets were poised to kill > 100 million Americans in 30 minutes if they launched their misses and bombers? How Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge (Red Khmers, formally the Communist Party of Kampuchea per Wikipedia) killed off perhaps half their nation's people. How just having glasses was a death sentence, because it suggested to them that you might have a formal education?
What's your opinion on the US crusade for gun control? Is it really about "gun safety"? Has it become something more sinister than the explicit through the 1970s "Keep guns out of the hands of blacks" (and other minorities starting around the turn of the century, but blacks were the foremost target)?
> in the cultural '60s, which extended into the calendar '70s, the idea that the menu of solutions for your political problems includes outright liquidation of a subset of your opponents.
> I cannot for a second assume the political struggle in the US is not existential for me and my family.
So, I once asked my Romanian colleague what it was like in the revolution at the death of Ceaucescu. It was, obviously, horrifying and chaotic, with all sorts of self-appointed street violence squads. Since then I've generally cut him a bit more slack when he rants about leftists. That kind of thing sticks with a man. And so I also have some sympathy with the Cubans who've maintained that Cuba is some great commie threat to the US, etc. etc.
What I cannot understand is the belief that there is going to be some kind of purge of white right-wing Americans. To me, the idea that "eliminationism" has any kind of base in the "left" (or at least the part that has the Democratic party in it) is just unrecognisable. To me, it is completely out of bounds already.
(Edit: I suppose the US does maintain an internment camp for political opponents, beyond the rule of law, and Obama has failed to close it. But Bush opened Guantanamo and put its inmates there. This is also why we campaign against the unaccountable drone murder programme)
I'm sorry I appear not to be taking it seriously, but I find it about as plausible as an alien invasion. Now, if you asked me who in the US was genuinely and plausibly afraid of eliminationism, I would have said the usual: ethnic minorities (not just black people and Native Americans, but bearing in mind the internment of Japanese people during the war), and non-straight people. And Jews.
I'm middle-aged enough to remember the Cold War. I also remember walking past a TV showing footage which I assumed was Beirut and turned out to be the LA Rodney King riots. And I know enough history to know that massacres extend a long way back before the French Revolution.
I'm baffled at the ascribing of the Nazis to the "left", given their explicitly murderous anti-Bolshevism and war with the USSR. The thing is, there are a lot of people on the left who believe that Trump is going to start exactly the same kind of eliminationist event. Aren't both sides afraid of the same thing? Has someone left their tu quoque mirror on upside down?
Obviously I disagree with the "out of bounds" analysis, and something has prompted Americans to buy arms at unprecedented rates, and for years with few breaks, more each month than the same month in the previous year. During a grinding recession.... And there's been no changes in concealed carry law for a full 5 years and 10 days; that's a factor, but it doesn't explain how the entire supply of rifles of military utility dried up....
Perhaps, with my being here, and you obviously not, we should agree to disagree on it?
As for the Nazis, you're confusing national with international socialists, and if we just view that as an internecine fight, we all know how nasty those can get. Plus Hitler hated the Weimar socialists with a burning passion, I'm told by one source more than the Jews, and come to think of it from my recent readings on the development of the atomic bomb (Rhodes especially), they were a higher priority target in the civil service, see e.g. Richard Courant.
As for your armed insurgency, from everything I'eve heard the AR-18 "Widowmakers" were more infamous (certianly a better rifle, Eugene Stoner atoning for the AR-10/15), and on that note, maybe the difference between subject and citizen also can't be bridged.
Not quite true. She was an outstanding commodities futures trader. She deposited $1,000 in cash into a trading account, and in ten months worked the account up to near $100,000.
So at least she has that skill to fall back on.
Or, maybe, just maybe, it was simply a bribe paid to the wife of the Governor of Arkansas.
As explained in a letter to the editor in The Wall Street Journal, a tax deductible bribe, the way the scam works is that someone at the trading firm violates the wall between the front and back offices. They place equal and opposite trades, and then prior to settlement, they assign their bribee the winning trade, and themselves the losing one, and the latter can be deducted against gains for the next few years.
And of course, if she wasn't the Governor's wife, but you of course implicitly acknowledge that. For that matter, it was also said that that sort of trading back then was dangerously leveraged for thinly capitalized neophytes, you could lose a lot more money than what you put into your trade. I seem to remember independently of this, that at worst case you could end up taking delivery of what you wagered on. Now, my family with 3 boys bought a half-side of beef at a time right at that time, but....
Liberals are tired of the Clintons. They're tired of nominating people just left of center who fail to inspire them, while candidates who speak their mind and call for change (Bernie) are ignored by both the DNC and the mass media. They perceive, rightly or wrongly, that Republicans have been fighting a battle while Democrats make concessions to people who are unwilling to compromise. And now that the most outspoken, uncompromising candidate has won the election, they're being told to compromise again, to swallow their emotions and have a conversation with people who aren't interested in talking with them.
The media told them this was Hillary's turn. They were told to vote against Trump, but nothing about what they were voting for. They were told that feelings don't matter and to vote for the greater good, even while candidates within the party and without inspired based on emotion. Is it any wonder that turnout was down?