Perhaps the people who oppose Trump do so because they have studied the evidence and made the rational conclusion that Trump is a poor choice. And the topic is staying fresh because new evidence to support this conclusion keeps getting added to the pile.
The Sunk Cost fallacy may be in play among Trump voters who keep defending their choice rather than concede they screwed up.
Just to add to the many excellent replies so far, that’s a rather odd statement. Why would you think Pinker is “a liberal”? Because he’s educated and is an academic? That certainly fits with typical conservative prejudices, but in reality it’s just strangely incongruous. It’s like calling my dog “a liberal” – there may be some trait matches, but it completely misses the point of much more important traits, such as a world-view dominated by a love of beef bones.
Pinker’s Canadian heritage probably puts him on the left of typical American politics, but virtually every industrialized democracy on earth is far to the left of American politics. And his opinion is more aligned with pushing the same optimistic but controversial world-view he’s expressed in his books and articles, which are not necessarily justifiable and, moreover, typify an intellectually contrarian inclination on a range of subjects that can be generally expressed as “why I’m right and everyone else is wrong”. This may indeed be so on many matters of linguistics – Pinker is indisputably a world-class linguist – but even then, not always: Pinker is sometimes prone to unjustifiable flights of fancy, and his doctoral studies under Stephen Kosslyn suggest (just for one example) a predisposition to the myopically one-sided and controversial view of mental imagery that Kosslyn holds.
In short, there is no evidence that Pinker is “liberal” in any meaningful sense (except maybe in the sense of “rational and didn’t vote for Trump”) and his opinionated views on a wide range of issues can be controversial and debatable. In this case, a statement like “The world continues to improve in just about every way. Extreme poverty, child mortality, illiteracy, and global inequality are at historic lows” is certainly arguable. Thomas Piketty, for one example, argues with great authority in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century that economic inequality in society is increasing in the major economies, not decreasing, with the rich growing ever richer and more powerful at the expense of everyone else, and we can see this in the rising GINI coefficients in the largest economies like the US and China. And the Brexit vote appears to be just the barest hint of the rising extremism in the UK, France, Germany, Austria, and elsewhere in Europe.
However, none of this is the main point that I think the OP is attempting to address, which is the election results. The reasons for pessimism have already been widely discussed in many threads in Elections and GD and there’s little point in rehashing them again here. Suffice to say that the extraordinary incompetence and personal pathology of the incoming chief executive combined with the appalling unsuitability of almost every single one of his senior appointments cannot possibly suggest anything but a dismal outlook, not just for liberals but for everyone, except perhaps for anarchists who cheer for a completely dysfunctional and counterproductive government.
So in your opinion it’s been liberals who have been bellyaching about the need to make America great again? It’s liberals who have bemoaned how the nation has been descending into third world status? Conservatives have been all sunshine and lollipops, while liberals have been nothing but doom and gloom?
:dubious:
Don’t give up on the pollsters just yet!
Clearly they failed in the last election. They applied their corrections and tests to detect a bias in their results and the tests failed to detect the problem. Ooops.
I suspect that none of their testing accounted for the idea that pollsters were viewed as part of the problem, not just disinterested technicians doing a job. Trump votes simply didn’t pick up the phone when the pollsters called because they thought the pollsters were part of the “liberal conspiracy” or part of the elite east coast. There are tests and corrections applied to detect and correct that bias. Those tests didn’t work this time. But there will be fixes applied and fixes tested over time. Polling is too important to American business and politics to give up.
The majority did not go another way.
I feel your explanation of their failure this cycle is overly simplistic. Yes, your point concerning non participation is one element, but is not by any stretch the entirety of pertinent factors. (Conversely, I refused to pick up the phone… and I’m a Liberal who voted for Clinton.)
I disagree with the import you place upon polls (as we know them) for the successful continuation of business and politics… And your hope for said polls to self correct after such incredible failure, far exceed my tolerance for any such blind faith.
So you’re saying there are four good things offsetting one terrifying existential threat to humanity?
Must it be said? Politics by poll equate to what we have recently experienced. And has… many times before. The so called “technology” was, and, is flawed.
Who the fuck is Steven Pinker and why should anybody give a fuck what he writes?
OP, if your point is that Trump can’t *completely *destroy *all *the advances we’ve made, well, remember what kind of person he is and that he has his finger on the button. Please also remember the encouragement he’s given to so many people to act deplorably, after all these years of their staying largely controlled.
Please don’t congratulate yourself on your “realism” :rolleyes: unless you also congratulate progressives for the progress you take such comfort from.
Four tangible quantifiable things offsetting something that is highly speculative and largely the specious fabrication of a manipulative indoctrination distributed mainly by facebook news and forwarded emails… Can you be more specific about what that threat to humanity is? At this point I’m not sure if you mean ISIS or Trump or something else. This threat to humanity has failed to terrify me, for one.
I think he must have meant “Artificial intelligence keeps advancing.”
An interesting person.
Some find his thoughts insightful…
You display neither of these characteristics.
That doesn’t mean that they’re right, or that those who voted for Trump are wrong. Different people have different perspectives and different priorities.
As ever, time will tell.
:smack: Yeah, nobody ever needs to drive to the mall, because food and clothes and stuff spontaneously generates in the refrigerator and the closet and the shelves. Or you can have it delivered, in which case the delivery vehicle will be powered by magical elves instead of nasty old gasoline.
Did that make it harder or easier for him to get his head so far up his ass?
I disagree. It’s not simply an issue of different perspectives and priorities. It’s an issue of rationality.
I had the same argument with Sanders supporters. It’s not just an issue of what a candidate promises; if that’s all it was, we’d just pick the candidate who promised the most. You have to also weigh the likelihood of the candidate being able (and willing) to deliver on those promises.
You couldn’t look at Trump’s record and statements and rationally believe he would deliver on all the promises he made. It’s impossible. And even Trump has acknowledged that and backed off on many of those promises since he was elected.
So anyone who voted for Trump because they believed the things he was saying was making an irrational choice.
He is, in fact, the author of The Blank Slate (or was that a woosh?). More relevant to this discussion is his more recent book, The Better Angels of our Nature.
The assumption that Trump voters possess your ability for rational thought is unrealistic. Clinton voters weren’t generally very “deep” either.
Come to terms with it. Many irrational votes are cast in every election.
I have yet to meet anyone who voted for Trump who believed the things he was saying. Have you?