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Monday, August 22, 2016

What do you Have to Lose vs. a Republic, if you can Keep it

Scott Adams thinks this is Trump's part three again.

"Trump is using the issue of Muslim immigration to argue that Clinton is the candidate promoting bigotry against women and the LBGTQ community. By Trump’s framing, the Democrats might help you get a gay wedding cake but Trump will prevent you from being raped and killed. Fear is the strongest persuader, so Trump effectively owns this argument now. He took the highest of the high ground. Trump is literally risking his reputation and his own life to protect women and gays. Clinton is just trying to get elected. That’s the new frame. And it is persuasive."

"Trump is also making a direct appeal for African-American votes, and that’s smart. One of the biggest rules of sales is that you have to directly ask for what you want. Asking for votes is one thing, but asking the African-American community to “try something new” because Clinton hasn’t worked out for them is perfect framing."

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/149174780261/trumps-regrets

Who knew Dilbert was a fascist, much less had pretensions of being a super genius like Wylie Coyote? I'm guessing this is why Adams leaves his comments section disabled these days.
Trump is clearly trying to put a wedge between the LGBT and Muslim community but this is not new. He also tried it right after the Orlando shooting. It's not going to lead to a stampede of gay votes for Trump or gay activists for Trump.

As for 'trying something new'; does something have to work to be considered perfect framing? I don't get the idea that Adams knows many black people-but then, neither does Trump.

"@JamilSmith I love how he says Democrats are just using them, while his white campaign manager says his black outreach worked by moving her."

https://twitter.com/saletan/status/767444773250752512

Indeed. The problem with Trump's question: what do you have to lose, is there are so many things. But let's start with, the entire Republic going down in flames.

"A Republic, if you can keep it.” - Benjamin Franklin

https://twitter.com/JimPethokoukis/status/766746029395943425

I mean what do you have to lose? What would I have to lose by standing in the middle of the train tracks as the train approaches? A lot of things...

Tom Brown, you might want to give Scott Sumner this quote from Greg Mankiw: Trump will not be getting his vote. You know Sumner and I don't talk. But he'd probably be gratified to see this.

"This morning, John Harwood of CNBC and the New York Times asked for my view of Donald Trump, which John then summarized on his Twitter feed. Here is the full answer I gave him:

"He will not be getting my vote."

"I have Republican friends who think that things couldn't be worse than doubling down on Obama policies under Hillary Clinton. And, like them, I am no fan of the left's agenda of large government and high taxes. But they are wrong: Things could be worse. And I fear they would be under Mr. Trump."

"Mr. Trump has not laid out a coherent economic worldview, but one recurrent theme is hostility to a free and open system of international trade. From my perspective as an economics policy wonk, that by itself is disqualifying."

"And then there are issues of temperament. I am not a psychologist, so I cannot figure out what Mr. Trump's personal demons are. But he does not show the admirable disposition that I saw in previous presidents and presidential candidates I have had the honor to work for."

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2016/08/my-take-on-mr-trump.html

I don't agree with Mankiw on everything-to say the least-but I respect him on this.

It's unprecedented for Mankiw not to support the Republican nominee. It's similarly unprecedented for Wired to endorse a candidate for President. But as Jay Rosen says, this is not a normal election.

"Wired's endorsement of HRC — its first ever — is an acknowledgment by journalists that this election is different."
https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/767537484997820417

"Wired Endorses Optimism. Wired Has Never Been Neutral."

"For nearly a quarter of a century, this organization has championed a specific way of thinking about tomorrow. If it’s true, as the writer William Gibson once had it, that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed, then our task has been to locate the places where various futures break through to our present and identify which one we hope for."

"Our founders—Louis Rossetto, Jane Metcalfe, and Kevin Kelly—all supported a strain of optimistic libertarianism native to Silicon Valley. The future they endorsed was the one they saw manifested in the early Internet: one where self-organizing networks would replace old hierarchies. To them, the US government was one of those kludgy, inefficient legacy systems that mainly just get in the way."

"Over the past couple of decades, we’ve gotten to watch their future play out: We’ve seen the creative energies of countless previously invisible communities unleashed—and, well, we’ve watched networks become just as good at concentrating wealth and influence in the hands of a few people as the old hierarchies were. We’ve seen geeks become billionaires, autocrats become hackers, and our readers (people curious about how technology is shaping the world) become the American mainstream. Like any sane group of thinkers, we’ve calibrated our judgments along the way. But much of our worldview hasn’t changed. We value freedom: open systems, open markets, free people, free information, free inquiry. We’ve become even more dedicated to scientific rigor, good data, and evidence-driven thinking. And we’ve never lost our optimism."

"I bring all this up because, for all of its opinions and enthu­siasms, WIRED has never made a practice of endorsing candidates for president of the United States. Through five election cycles we’ve written about politics and politicians and held them up against our ideals. But we’ve avoided telling you, our readers, who WIRED viewed as the best choice."

"Today we will. WIRED sees only one person running for president who can do the job: Hillary Clinton."

"RIGHT NOW WE see two possible futures welling up in the present. In one, society’s every decision is dominated byscarcity. Except for a few oligarchs, nobody has enough of anything. In that future, we build literal and figurative walls to keep out those who hope to acquire our stuff, while through guile or violence we try to acquire theirs."

"In the other future, the one WIRED is rooting for, new rounds of innovation allow people to do more with less work—in a way that translates into abundance, broadly enjoyed. Governments and markets and entrepreneurs create the conditions that allow us to take effective collective action against climate change. The flashlight beam of science keeps turning up cool stuff in the corners of the universe. The grand social experiments of the 20th and early 21st centuries—the mass entry of women into the workforce, civil rights, LGBTQ rights—continue and give way to new ones that are just as necessary and unsettling and empowering to people who got left out of previous rounds. And the sustainably manufactured, genetically modified fake meat tastes really good too."

"Our sights might not be perfectly aligned, but it’s pretty clear Hillary Clinton has her eye on a similar trajectory. She intends to uphold the Paris Agreement on climate change and reduce carbon emissions by up to 30 percent in 2025. She hopes to produce enough renewable energy to power every American home by the end of her first term. She wants to increase the budgets of the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, two major drivers of research and innovation via government funding. And she wants to do the same for Darpa, the defense research agency—without which, let’s face it, WIRED probably wouldn’t exist, because no one would have invented the things we cover."

"Clinton also has ideas that clear away stumbling blocks for entrepreneurs and strivers. She proposes linking entre­preneurship to forgiveness of student loans, as a way to help young people start businesses. Clinton favors net neutrality—giving every packet of data on the Internet the same priority, regardless of whether they originate from a media corporation or from you and me. She has proposed easier paths to legal immigration for people with science, technology, and engineering degrees. And she has spent my entire adult life trying to work out how to give the maximum number of Americans access to health care; she will con­tinue to strengthen the Affordable Care Act, which among other things has helped people walk away from crappy, dead-end jobs by alleviating the fear that they’ll lose their insurance."

"We don’t always agree with Clinton. As secretary of state, her inclination toward military solutions had disastrous consequences in the Middle East, and the US still has an alarming tendency to try to solve complex foreign policy problems with flying killer robots. Her specific position on encryption is tough to pin down, but she seems to favor encryption weak enough for law enforcement to penetrate. That violates basic privacy."

"But having met Clinton and talked about all these issues with her, I can tell you that her mastery of issues and detail is unlike that of any politician I’ve met. She comes to every policy conversation steeped in its history and implications, and with opinions from a diverse set of viewpoints. She is a technician, and we like technicians."

http://www.wired.com/2016/08/wired-endorses-hillary-clinton/

I like that: Wired has never been neutral. In this election how can you possibly be neutral between keeping the Republic and American Caesarism?

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