Posted November 09, 2016
DaCostaBR: It's official now: Hillary won the popular vote, yet Trump won the election.
This is the second time in less than 20 years that the candidate with the fewer votes is elected. Counting 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016, the electoral college has a failure rate of more than 11%.
That is important to state, because one depressing aspect is how the USA shattered any bit of international credibility it had (who will take Trump as a serious state representative, except the Putin-like dictators who will pretend to ?), and how it will fuel a certain brand of imbecile anti-americanism that is the perfect symetry of Trump-like racisms. This is the second time in less than 20 years that the candidate with the fewer votes is elected. Counting 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016, the electoral college has a failure rate of more than 11%.
That's why I don't like at all the anti-american jokes of Jamyskis (or others elsewhere). These represent exactly the mentality and worldview that I detest about the right wing, and it shocks me to see it represented by "progressives". Besides full-fledged openly proud racists, xenophobes, islamophobes, homophobes, the GOG forums are also full of self-proclaimed antiracists with terrifying double standards, ready to essentialize whole countries (Greece, the USA, Turkey, whatever) with no more reflexivity than the nationalist creeps that they chastize when convenient.
The reality is that essentialist culturalism, the racialization of nations, with curses and insults directed at groups of people who only share skin/passport colours, vague religious identities, or income ranges (and not : opinions, moralities or sensitivities) is precisely the assholery that makes the distinction between decent humans and disgusting morons. That is where the true divide is. Some people feel shielded because they carry a little left/progressive/whatever flag, with its implicit "whatever I say I am not the racist because I am the one who designates them", and who have zero understanding of the cognitive issue at stake, are no better than those who routinely spit at everything that isn't their own country/religion/skin colour. They function the same way, with the same consequences, in arbitrarily allowed contexts.
So yes. Most US citizens are -and voted- against Trump. And even if they had been marginally less (or even significantly less) than half the population : Trump is not the USA, neither is Obama, nor was Bush.
Only the Trump mentality can justify global statements on the owners of US passports. But expect this Trump mentality to show up quite often where it gets usually denounced.
Post edited November 09, 2016 by Telika