The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal - US elections 2016: the october surprises

yeah, um, why is that?

One of these groups is not like the other...

i think bc most white evangelicals are christian as a catch-all term for a larger identity group of which christianity itself is only a small piece and therefore subordinate ideologically to other more important definitions of self - white, american particularly. in some ways christianity reinforces the most important tropes of this cultural group - fealty to authority, fear of secular centralization (which can oppress local rites + traditions), disdain for taboo + alternative practices. but generally overall it's just a feature of a hegemonic group - the flavor is christianity but it could just as easily be islamic or jewish or hindu etc. by contrast mormons are a minority group who in some ways share features w/ hegemonic america but the important bit is in the areas where they disagree. it's like when you're a construction worker among professors you feel your identity as a construction worker as more key to your self whereas the same person who is a man among only women feels their identity as a male more substantially. in america if you're a mormon you feel that identity as the most important one to your conception of self bc it's the area that distinguishes you from other [hegemonic] americans. but if you're a white christian maybe you feel fealty to right-wing politics are more key because everyone you know is a white christian. idk if this makes sense as a schemata but i think probably a total theory of evangelical right-wing christianity is not going to work (and as an interesting piece of evidence - women evangelicals have begun to come out against Trump possibly bc they feel their difference - being women - as key in this election cycle).

I really don't think it has much to do with mormons as a minority. mormon culture is ridiculously straight-laced / fundamentally opposed to crassness. mormons are simply horrified by everything donald trump represents and don't want their children to have a president who brags about his penis size in a debate.

i didn't mean to draw a direct correlation between being a minority and being anti-trump (tho i've heard that argument forwarded - that they sympathize with some of trump's targets bc they've been marginalized) - i meant more that their mormonism qua mormonism is more significant in their lives than evangelicals for whom the term carries less weight vis-a-vis self-conception.

yeah that makes sense

"He's going to lose and he knows that. He knows he's going to lose," Springsteen said. "And he's such a flagrant, toxic narcissist that he wants to take down the entire Democratic system with him if he goes."

"He simply has no sense of decency and no sense of responsibility about him," Springsteen said.

Bruce (on UK Channel 4) OTM.

Mormons know what it's like to have the government fucking your shit up because of religious beliefs

Mordy is also right. Mormons are in church or church related meetings and groups 3 days a week. Basically 6 days a week if you're in high school not to mention missions. They get deep into doctrine and their many tomes of religious texts.

And being a born again evangelical means you accepted Jesus into your heart one day then do whatever the fuck you want

In communities where Mormons are in the minority - ie everywhere but SLC and environs - they also learn what it's like to be weird and what it takes to be a somewhat misunderstood minority. They don't get shot in the street while unarmed, they don't have a vocal movement to exile them from the country, they don't get accused of being complicit with every terrorist attack that happens anywhere in the world, and they don't have to deal too much with being discriminated against in job interviews, but they are a minority and they are conscious of it.

I have had occasion to work with a shitload of Mormons because they're well represented in the intelligence community, because they get fluent at Provo and then immersed on their mission, and they are big on public service, including military, and despite the fucked up attitudes of LDS leadership on proselytizing to corpses and treating the LGBTQ community as subhumans, they are ubiquitously accepting and pluralistic folks, and they care about being nice at a level that a Canadian, a Southerner and a Lutheran put together would find impressive. My main issue with practicing Mormons is the same one I have with lots of other followers of popular religions around the world, which is that getting a beer with them ranges from awkward to impossible.

... Provo?

assume he means they learn to speak foreign languages in Provo before going on missions

I wonder, what *does* being a born again evangelical mean to people? Like, has it changed versus say the 80s-90s? I have the vague sense that it was once at least a somewhat more all-encompassing part of one's life/identity for a greater number of people. Tune into the televangelists, buy all their books, spread the word. Wayward boomer squares in their 40s, the forgotten people who always had crewcuts and stayed in their hometowns, now feeling somehow empty, getting or re-getting religion and their lives changed forever.

Not saying that sketchy stereotype from my imagination has entirely gone away but is it possible that it's declined as a percentage of people who carry this identity? Would regularity of church attendance be a more relevant factor than the specific denominational identity someone reports? I'm realizing that somewhere between irregular childhood sunday school and age 34 I lost almost all firsthand contact wth churchgoing America. At some point I should ask my Kasich-voting stepmom about all this, and Trumpism too.

There are two foreign language schools in the USA that produce the vast majority of our nation's intelligence transcription and translation backbone, in the form of young men and women who are fully fluent in difficult-to-learn languages other than English, who are dedicated to the defense of the Constitution, and who can pass a full top secret clearance background check. One is the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey, in California. The other is the Mormon missionary school in Provo, Utah.

The Provo kids go on mission, and then some of them choose to enlist; they then get orders to the aforementioned Presidio, and either learn a third language there or just test out and go on to their operational base.

And some of them go right to the CIA, or State Department, or FBI, you get the idea. My experience is with the ones who chose to wear pickle-colored pajamas on the weekdays, as I did.

my sister and her husband are those people

Enlisted Chinese linguists from Idaho?

this is really interesting, thanks for it.

The Simpsons are Christian; the Flandereseses are Evangelical

(Rev. Lovejoy oscillates between the two, depending on the season and if David Mirkin wrote that ep)

A Mormon introduced me to ilx in 2001!

'this is not a place of honor'

Enlisted Chinese linguists from Idaho?

― El Tomboto, Wednesday, October 19, 2016 4:10 AM (thirty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

arabic, utah.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/windows-server-2003-in-2016-trumps-mail-servers-are-old-and-insecure/

Lol at the statement. Even his it support talks like that

Felt sorta guilty lolling at this, but I still hold Presidential deadpan is a skill that explicitly needs to be written into the office charter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRQLU3IwNYs

He looked so young 8 years ago
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Obama_portrait_crop.jpg

Heh:

Hillary Clinton needs Florida’s largest county to deliver big for her come Election Day — and Miami-Dade seems poised to do so.

Clinton wallops Trump by 30 percentage points, according to a new WLRN-Univision 23 poll released Tuesday that shows her ahead by 58-28 percent. That margin is 6 points wider than President Barack Obama’s over Mitt Romney in 2012, when Obama won Miami-Dade by 62-38 percent. Obama went on to victory in Florida by a single point.

Clinton’s spread over Trump is “the most that any Democrat has ever gotten, dating back to the 2000 election,” in Miami-Dade, said Fernand Amandi, the Democratic pollster who conducted the survey with his firm, Bendixen & Amandi International. Obama bested John McCain in Miami-Dade by 16 points in 2008. John Kerry defeated George W. Bush by only 6 points in 2004, as Al Gore did against Bush in 2000. Kerry and Gore lost.

In the poll, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein drew a combined 5 percent support. Clinton leads Trump by about 4 percentage points statewide, a Real Clear Politics polling average shows.

Blue Miami-Dade is no bellwether. But a Democrat could amass so many votes in Miami-Dade — and neighboring Broward and Palm Beach — to make it impossible for a Republican to match them in redder, less populated Florida counties.

“That’s why I think it’s a potential indicator that she’s likely to win the state,” Amandi said. (Broward is bluer, but Miami-Dade has more voters.)

Mike Murphy on Morning Joe: "Winning the Republican primary has become merely the first step in blowing the general election."

hahaha what a good first line

http://i.imgur.com/7CGYSrL.png

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe got there first iirc:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7SZ8naFjDQ

haha otm

TENNANT: It was the worst television appearance we ever did in our entire life. It was The Euro Tube. We opened the whole show with 'West End girls' and I had to sing live, and it was fine. We then had to wait two hours, during which time I drank four pints of beer, then I had to sing 'Tonight is forever'. You have never heard anything worse in your entire life. You know when someone sings on the television and you say, 'Wow, she really can't sing'. This was my, 'Wow, he really really can't sing'. And during the drum break in the middle I couldn't think of anything to do, so I just turned my back on the camera. I thought they could film Chris."

So Trump can learn something.

Disappointed to find out that the Internet is not blowing up with what is, for me, the highlight of this campaign: the sign being held up in the live audience of Anderson Cooper's 24-hour countdown to the final debate, which read: PUNISH ARE VERY INTERESTING

"Intersting" having been misspelled, of course.

PUNISH WHY CUZ SHE LOOK INTERSTING

so... why exactly trump is planning to bring obama's half-brother to the debate? is this just racist birther dogwhistling or is there some other nefarious significance known only to AM radio listeners

"Hillary is Black and was born in Kenya!"

lol a poll just came out today showing Clinton up 5% in Arizona

4% MOE so take with a grain of salt, but this was the first major one released post "grab em by the pussy"

"Malik Obama said he was voting for Trump in part because he blamed the death of Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi on Hillary Clinton. Malik Obama claims that Qaddafi was a friend of his."

... oh.

http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/10/19/13310016/jill-stein-millennial-voter

I face a lot of stigma for my choice to vote third party. People tell me I’m wasting my vote, or that I’m just trying to be different. But they are completely missing the point of why I’m choosing to do this. To me, my vote represents a moral choice. It reflects who I am as a person.

vomitemoji

you might say it's a part of his personal brand

I would never vote for any of these third party candidates. Even so, Johnson and Stein are complete nitwits. So fuck your moral choice, millennial, what about using your eyes, ears and brain?

I don't begrudge anyone's right to vote for whomever they want. My issue is when the person says "I want to vote for a total garbage clown because that is who I am"

It is a moral, not a pragmatic, act.

Weird distinction. A lesser-of-two-evils vote is a moral calculation too.

Voting literally isn't a moral act, I find myself wanting to yell yet again

oh man i was figuring trump would just end up devoting the debate to ramblings and insinuations about the GOP local headquarters attack in a vain attempt to get that to stick to clinton, but i underestimated his tactical instincts. indeed who could have imagined he would reach out to the president's half-brother, mourning his close personal dictator. that's it, clinton's done, it's over. although you'd think if trump was so opposed to people revealing their strategic choices ahead of time, he would have kept his surprise audience member an...actual surprise. "Each more surprising than the last!"

also, i suspect in trump's mind, being aligned with a kenyan proves birtherism isn't racist.

Black Lives Matter emphasizes intersectionality, which is the idea that one’s social identities are inseparable and all significant when considering how marginalized groups are oppressed. I see Clinton as a person who does not have an intersectional mindset. How can she say she supports the black community in our country but then continue to support Israel as it violently occupies Gaza, where black Palestinians live? She lacks the globally progressive view that I want in a candidate.