It's a true measure of what a dismal campaign it has been on both sides, that so little has been discussed about foreign policy, and so little is known about where they stand and what they have done. But then I gather Hillary made the call to focus on Trump's personality, rather than the political issues.Quote:
Originally Posted by World's End Stella
The points about Trump's policies on Russia and Saudi Arabia could be found, amongst other places, on the BBC website yesterday.
Given that, in your own words, "voting for Trump may well be insane", discussion about the relative merits of both candidates' foreign policies seems rather besides the point.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ash
The reason many intelligent people held their noses and voted for Clinton is because they, very understandably, felt that it was the least worst option when the only other choice would be "insane"
Where would your vote have gone, by the way?
For me, foreign policy is never beside the point. Wars kill, and a poppy is for life, not just for November.Quote:
Originally Posted by Monty92
The problem with Trump is that you don't know what you're going to get. The problem with Clinton is that you do know what you're going to get. I would have voted for neither.
Trump on ISIS: we should 'take their oil' and we should 'bomb the **** out of them'.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ash
I'm struggling to reconcile these statements with your view of his foreign policy, if I'm honest, Ash.
Domestic policy kills too - welfare policy, for example. But we are more sentient to deaths caused by war because we see the consequences on the news every night. That doesn't necessarily make it rational.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ash
Obama is considered to the left of Clinton, foreign policyistically, but he loves killing brown people with drones. Clinton takes money from the Saudis, we sell arms to them. That's just politics, surely.
But you are wrong in one sense to paint Trump as an unknown quantity, as if he' some kind of enigmatic maverick figure. But this isn't why we don't know what he'll do. The reason we don't know what he'll do is because his stupidity is unprecedented for someone in high office. And that was enough to convince many people to vote for the other candidate.
What would have stopped you choosing between two terrible options? Principle? Surely you just choose the least worst one?
But how do you choose the least worst one when the choice seems to be being poked in the eye with a fork, or stabbed in the leg with a rusty knife.Quote:
Originally Posted by Monty92
One seems a loose cannon (on the face of it), the other seems corrupt and in it for her rather than the country
Perhaps organisations such as Isis will no longer exist with Trump in charge. Not because he is going to wipe them out.Quote:
Originally Posted by World's End Stella
But maybe they will stop being funded/created.
I thought his foreign policy was whatever Putin tells him it is?Quote:
Originally Posted by World's End Stella
I think Ash is offended by the calculated nature of Clinton's evil foreign policy decisions. He doesn't take Trump seriously because his pronouncements are full of machismo and it's very easy to almost laugh them off.Quote:
Originally Posted by World's End Stella
Except now he has to take him seriously.
If the calculation is between two people who might **** up the world (or continue ****ing up the world, in Clinton's case), and after reasoned analysis you decide that one of the two people is likely to **** up the world in a lesser way than the other, then it seems reasonable to vote for the one that you believe is likely to do the less damage.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pokster
This decision does not have to be made - CANNOT be made - with absolute certainty. But then that applies to most decisions in life.
ISIS are attacking the West and subjecting the areas they control to barbarism, so bombing them is fair game imo, as the Russians are in Syria. Clinton wanted to threaten Russia to chase them out and leave Syria to ISIS & Al Nusra/Al Quaeda.Quote:
Originally Posted by World's End Stella
something along the lines of holding your children a little bit closer :hehe:
I would have thought that in this scenario most sensible people would choose the lesser of two evils. It's hard for me to understand how someone could see Hillary as the greater evil. You may not like her, or agree with her, but are you really telling me she's more likely to do something insanely stupid than Trump?Quote:
Originally Posted by Monty92
I struggle with that view.
That's missing the point. The US is already very actively engaged in the fight against ISIS and the current situation is improving.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ash
Trump's uttering are what you would expect from an 8 year old or an illiterate imbecile. They don't really tell you anything other than that the person uttering them has no sensible view of the issue. So how could anyone vote for him?
Yes, I think there's a pretty good argument to say that Clinton was the sensible choice for those who are risk-averse when it comes to the future security of the world.Quote:
Originally Posted by World's End Stella
But then again, it's also true that the world never changed because people hedged their bets. It changes by shaking things up. And in this respect, Trump was the obvious choice. And probably would have been for me were he not mentally ill and monumentally stupid.
The hugely respected historian Dan Carlin, who is quite liberal in many ways, pretty much endorsed voting for Trump (though said he was not voting himself).
Perhaps because HC is a corrupt serial liar who has bent the truth to create a wealth for her and her husband, she is part of the establishment that has failed the USA at home and abroad... so perhaps people had just had enough of herQuote:
Originally Posted by World's End Stella
Something as insanely stupid as starting a war against a nuclear power?Quote:
Originally Posted by World's End Stella
Point of order: I like Dan Carlin very much, but he is always at pains to point out that he is NOT a historian, but a 'fan of history'.Quote:
Originally Posted by Monty92
Yes, exactly that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ash
The thing is, though, that a more competent, sane and suitable candidate than the Donald wouldn't have been as appealing. His very unsuitability was rather the point.Quote:
Originally Posted by Monty92
I don't think that's necessarily true. I think any number of sane, competent right-leaning, straight-talking, anti-PC, non-establishment populists would have had the same appeal.Quote:
Originally Posted by Burney
Don't think so, actually. Thing Trump was, the more grotesquely he behaved and spoke, the more people were determined to vote for him. Why? Precisely because he appalled and horrified the people his supporters hate. The very fact that he he appeared to have no filter - lying outrageously, saying appalling things and mocked sacred cows like the disabled and POWs - gave him his edge because they made the bien pensant liberals clutch their pearls. A more polished candidate wouldn't have been able to achieve that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Monty92
I think that his ability to upset liberals may have persuaded the likes of you and I to vote for him. But it wasn't the likes of you and I that got him elected. For the demographic that won it for him, phrases like "identity politics" mean absolutely nothing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Burney
I think anyone who rocked up and gave it tough talk about immigration, terrorism and smashing the corrupt elites had a good chance of winning against Clinton. And they didn't necessarily need to be a dribbling, gratuitously offensive cretin who ridicules disabled journalists in public and admits to sexually assaulting women.
ISTR RickyG ticking a few of these boxes.Quote:
Originally Posted by Monty92
We don't need his money and we don't like his sort, as dear old "Sir" Peter might've said.Quote:
Originally Posted by Burney
But his crassness, vulgarity, and crude offensiveness and the outrage they caused are what cut through the noise of the primaries and got him the nomination. Without them, he'd have been just another punter with some weird views. And while much of his demographic may not recognise the phrase 'identity politics', they know what it is and they hate it and its advocates.Quote:
Originally Posted by Monty92
Not last year though, not when he began his campaign. Remember he had absolutely "no chance" to even get through the Primaries.Quote:
Originally Posted by Monty92
In the end, between The Feeb, Wikileaks and simply being Hillary, she was mortally wounded anyway, not least amongst her own supporters. Trump's methods made sure he was the last opponent standing when it came time to take advantage and he otherwise ran a great, ballsy campaign.
I don't agree that it was his crassness, vulgarity or offensiveness that got him the nomination. I think it was the fact that he wasn't a politician. Any highly successful businessman who rejected 'the establishment' would have sufficed, I think.Quote:
Originally Posted by Burney
The fact that he's utterly vulgar held him back although, ultimately, not enough.
Told you so, didn't I. The America what won it for him isn't interested in a' that ****e, except to say that it *is* ****e and the main reason they're in this ****e.Quote:
Originally Posted by Burney
That was the banter of the thing though. The fact that he's a millionaire playboy business celebrity going back decades means he most certainly *is* establishment, so his behaviour was crucial in ensuring he alone avoided that charge.Quote:
Originally Posted by World's End Stella
I should have said 'political establishment', as Trump is, ironically, about as 'establishment' as it gets.Quote:
Originally Posted by redgunamo
Trump's America is sick of foreign policy by this time. Much of it has no money and no future and kids to feed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ash
Again, that wouldn't be enough; this election has proved once and for all that they're all in it together. Politics, business, media, academia. Even government itself. And none of them give a damn about Trump's Forgotten People, who needed them to reject him as conformation that he was with *them*. If you follow me.Quote:
Originally Posted by redgunamo
Anyway, you're forgetting that it's really only the *progressive* esatablishment that's been scattered to the four winds. The Republican party elite is in better and more powerful shape than it's been in a century.Quote:
Originally Posted by Monty92
I doubt that that's the case. The republicans do have a head of steam, and success breeds success. I think some sort of quasi-Apartheid system is what we'll get. It's a white minority looking to hold on to their ancient privileges. Kind of like South Africa. They'll set up some sort of Byzantine legal instrument for keeping minorities (now or else soon the majority of the population) in check. Thus will American sacrifice whatever moral equity it had banked in the 20th century. These things happen. Sh!t sucks. But yes, in response to your earlier post, Hillary did blow it. Somewhere -- in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, these sorts of places, they allowed the canker to grow, unchecked.Quote:
Originally Posted by redgunamo
I know South Africa, some of my people are from down there. They've always made good money, done alright. A quasi-Apartheid system is what America's had for decades anyway. It's just that nobody cares to notice it, unless the pay is decent.Quote:
Originally Posted by eastgermanautos
Real difference is, you guys are rich whereas South Africa is dirt poor. Trump's Americans never minded other people having money but they refused to tolerate being bantered off by so-called Elites trying to drown them while pretending to give them a bath, as the man said.
In a normal election they wouldn't have bothered, I think. Trump gave them a tangible reason to bother.
It's all a bit like Leicester City winning the league because their rivals underperform.
This "we were already living in squalor, yet did not acknowledge it" argument is not really accurate. There's a huge divide in this country between the coasts and the flyovers. If you've been living on the coasts the past few years it's been fvcking great. Duddn't matter if you're white. brown, or yellow. The lumpens out there in the middle have been sucking on fumes all right. I thought we could keep them down for another four years, but apparently not...Quote:
Originally Posted by redgunamo
South Africa is lovely, only the parts they show on television could be called squalid. My teenage son's posh Paris apartment is far more seedy and unsalubrious. Call it a "huge divide", if you like.Quote:
Originally Posted by eastgermanautos
The whole point about living in a civilised country like yours is no-one has to care who their government is (everybody can make their own way regardless), so most people you see don't actually mind one way or the other.
The wife and I spent part of the Summer in West Texas. Then up through Chicago and Detroit and back home through Maine. Meeting people, you know. Holidays. As the lady said, what difference, at this point, does it make. Well, now you know, it makes no difference at all, until a Donald Trump comes along.