My problem is that just when I think that maybe I should give him a chance, he does something like select an anti-Semite like Steve Bannon. I'm TRYING to be positive here, but Trump's actions and statements are making it impossible.
I can't tell if it scares me more or less if Pence is really in charge. I think my "Scare Meter" has maxed out and shattered. It now joins my sarcasm meter and irony meter as casualties of this election.
Coming from someone who voted against Trump (didn't like Hillary but voted for her because Trump was much worse) and who is legitimately scared about the Trump administration (I'm Jewish and he's appointing an anti-Semite to a top post), First Amendment doesn't protect all speech. Yes, it protects a lot and it does protect speech that we'd rather see go away (for example, the Westboro Baptist Church). But when the speech becomes threats of violence or egging others on to commit acts of violence, a line has been crossed. You do not have the First Amendment right to threaten people. And making a threat against the President of the United States (or the President-Elect) is doubly stupid.
That's my personal rule. No matter what I'm posting, e-mailing, private messaging, etc. If I wouldn't want my mother, wife, co-workers, boss, neighbors, etc reading it, I won't post it. (Sometimes I include my kids in the listing, but there are some topics I'll post about that aren't really kid-appropriate.) After all, nothing is really private these days. Now many instances of someone's embarrassing "totally private" message being spread across the Internet will it take before people realize that.
Radical Islamic Terror in the US is very rare - even if we include the outlier of 9-11.
Meanwhile, an anti-Semite has been appointed to Chief Strategist and hate crimes are on the rise. As a Jew, do you really think I should be more afraid of Muslims than of someone who hates Jews whispering in the President's ear?
This is what I don't get. A lot of people voted for Trump because "he says it like it is" or because "I'm sick of politicians lying", but then they say that Trump doesn't mean the literal things he says he'll do? So, essentially, Trump wasn't "saying it like it is" - he was saying what needed to be said to rile up his base and he was lying about what he'd do so that he could win the election.
Do you think your ISP can't see what you're posting? Do you think that the government doesn't work with ISPs to get access to what you're posting?
And before you mention that you use SSL and it's secure - no it's not It's not 100% secure. And even if it was, Trump has indicated that he'd want to "work with computer experts" to let the government get into encrypted communications the keep everyone safe. (Well, that's the reason they always give so that, if you oppose it, they can question why you don't want to keep people safe and thus so they can make YOU look like the bad guy.)
Yeah this campaign has been more bumper stickers and slogans than specific policy proposals, so we really don't know yet.
Having studied Trump as a businessman, I strongly suspect he doesn't know which policies he'll propose - that will depend on what he hears from the experts he hires.
Given that Trump has now named Steve Bannon - a white supremacist and anti-Semite - as his Chief Strategist, and given that I myself am Jewish, I don't think I'm going to like what his "experts" advises that he does.
I blame the people. It is not republican ideas or democrat ideas that are destroying the country. Both have good points at times and take things too far at times. No the true issues is the culture of anti-intellectualism. A great many people are actually proud of being fairly uninformed and easily duped.
How do you fix that? Seriously, how do you fix that? We tend to downplay the importance of liberal arts and history. Hell when I was in high school I thought I'd never need that.
I don't know how you can fix that. Usually the fix to ignorance is education. If someone says that the world was created 6,000 years ago, you present evidence that it wasn't. But if that person shrugs off any evidence as being "liberal lies" or "a test from god" or something, then there's nothing you can do. They not only reject the only fix available to us, but claim that the fix itself is bad because it counters their incorrect world view.
My next go-to was always "just cut off those people from your life and ignore them," but what do we do when that person is President and is putting other anti-intellectual people in positions of power? Ignoring doesn't work then.
The only thing I can think of is that we need to make our voices heard. Write to your congressmen/women. Attend rallies (but keep it peaceful - turning rallies into riots undermines your message). Use your First Amendment rights to the fullest to get the message out there and hope that enough people listen.
I'm wondering if science funding in general will be slashed. This is the candidate that said autism is caused by vaccines. As the parent of a child on the autism spectrum (and someone who is autistic as well), it scares me that the leader of the free world might say "vaccines are bad, autistic people are 'vaccine damaged', we're discontinuing all vaccines."
In his long business career, he hired really smart people and trusted their judgement, rather than micro-managing, thinking he knew everything betterv than everyone else.
I hope you're right. I really do, but Candidate Trump often would say that he knew better than the experts and that only he could solve the problems. This might have been campaign bluster meant to fire people up, but it could also have been an indication that he'll do what he thinks is the best thing to do despite what the experts think.
What does the Trump win mean for tech? Not a clue.
And I seriously doubt anyone else has a clue either.
I think this is the worst part - not knowing what he'll do. He's been in favor of so many conflicting policies during his candidacy - and we all know that most campaign promises evaporate come election day - that I really have no clue what he'll do. Will he become a centrist President and all of that "build a wall/Mexicans are rapists" stuff was campaign bluster? Or will he push what his alt-right base wants regardless of how it'll affect other people? Nobody knows - maybe not even Donald Trump and this uncertainty is paralyzing.
And even if the Republicans fight back against Trump's more extreme policy proposals, will the alt-right become Tea Party 2.0? With the Tea Party, anyone who didn't toe the Tea Party line was kicked out and replaced by someone more in line with their views. Will Republicans basically be told "let us pass extreme anti-Muslim, racist, sexist, etc laws or lose your seats"?
Thanks for the correction. That's 38 years. I wonder how many people could hold up under the pressure of being a group's punching bag for that long. Even if you don't care about their opinion, the daily strain of new conspiracy theories, allegations, and outright cries of your guilt would wear on most folks.
I routinely use a freeware text search tool that can search through thousands of files for certain keywords in a matter of minutes - and it's likely not even the fastest one out there. If I pointed it at 650,000 text files and told it to search for "Hillary Clinton", I'd probably have my results in a day or two. Assuming that the FBI has more powerful text search tools (a fair assumption, I'd wager), they could have easily done a series of text searches through the e-mails over a few days to get their results. (Which, of course, ignores them narrowing down based on date, recipient, or duplicate of already-checked e-mails. Something that they likely did before breaking out any text search tool.)
It's not 650,000 - 55,000. It's the 650K Weiner e-mails minus the ones completely unrelated to Hillary (from when she wasn't Secretary of State or e-mail chains her and her staff weren't part of) minus any duplicates of the already reviewed e-mails. Any resulting new e-mails could be manually reviewed by a team to see if any brought new evidence. None did.
It would be like getting a dump of all of my e-mails because you were interested in the workings of Amazon.com. Yes, I have e-mails from/about Amazon.com, but every single one of my e-mails doesn't involve them. Simple programs could whittle the e-mail dump to just the relevant e-mails and then go from there.
The 650K e-mails were all of Anthony Weiner's e-mails. Not all of those were related to Hillary Clinton. He had his own activities (legal and otherwise) that were unrelated to her. They would likely first filter on e-mails dated when Hillary wasn't Secretary of State. Weiner was in Congress from 1999 to 2011. Hillary was Secretary of State from 2009 - 2013. This only leaves three years of Weiner e-mails that might be relevant. If his e-mails were uniformly distributed in date, this would cut them down to 150K.
Then, they would look through the e-mails to see which involved Hillary or her staff. Even if Weiner e-mailed someone in 2010, it had a good chance of being completely unrelated to Hillary Clinton.
Next, they would see which of the remaining e-mails were duplicates of what they had already found.
Finally, they would take this group of e-mails - by now much smaller than 650K - and split them up among a group of people to manually look through. They could also run some keyword searches to further narrow things down, but even if they didn't do this, splitting the remaining e-mails up would mean that they could easily handle them in the time that they did.
The point is that Trump's supporters have no solid evidence that there was not enough time to review the emails.
What's worse is that Trump supporters are claiming that there wasn't enough time for Comey to look through the e-mails. As if he doesn't have a staff that he would tell to look through them and report back to him with their findings. They just don't see how it's possible for one person to look through all those e-mails in that amount of time. To be fair, it would likely be very hard if not impossible for one person to do this, but that's why you split those man-hours up among many people.
IIRC, the 80,000 before were e-mails directly from Hillary/her team. Thus, all of the e-mails were potentially important.
These e-mails came from Anthony Weiner's e-mail account. Most of them were likely unrelated to Hillary. Simply weeding out e-mails not involving Hillary/her team or e-mails sent when Hillary wasn't Secretary of State would narrow down the list quite a bit. Excluding duplicates from what they had examined before would take out more e-mails. All of this would likely take an afternoon's worth of work. They could then split the relatively few remaining emails among a group of staff members and hammer through them to determine what, if anything, applied to the Hillary investigation. This is totally doable in a matter of days.
I actually thought that Occupy/1% had a good initial idea - the rich too often pay too little in taxes while the middle class gets the huge tax bill - but they were scattershot in how they protested this and tried to raise awareness. Their message got muddled and lost. It's not enough to identify an injustice that you want to rail against, you need to be organized in how you will protest this to get the maximum bang for the time/effort/money spent protesting.
Even if all of those weren't true: He has a horrible temper. During the first debate, Hillary brought up Alicia Machado. It was an obvious trap. If this were a Roadrunner cartoon, it would be a road painted on a rock with a big neon sign saying "This is fake! It's a trap! Do NOT try to run into it!!!" And still, Trump ran into the wall at 3am in a series of tweets which, among other things, told people to check out her sex tape. (Which she doesn't have. IIRC, it was someone with a similar name but was obviously not her, but even if it was her wouldn't have refuted the charges she made against him.)
He can't let even the smallest slights go which is a horrible quality for a President. Presidents can be the targets of daily verbal abuse by everyone from US citizens to foreign dignitaries. If the President decides to launch a missile strike because some Prime Minister called him/her a bad name, it will have serious repercussions. How would Donald Trump handle being insulted by a foreign dignitary that he needs to enter into negotiations with? I don't see that ending well at all.
Hillary, on the other hand, has been the target of slings and arrows since her husband was first elected President. She knows how to take the verbal punch, ignore it, and keep doing what needs to be done.
A Trump supporter on a forum I manage replied to a comment i made about how Comey could handle all of those e-mails with a "meme image" saying that Comey only said there was nothing there because he found his suicide note in Hillary's e-mails. (Implying that somehow Hillary knew Comey would be looking through those e-mails and planted the note there, I guess.) It's totally ridiculous, but that one image would likely have a lot of people nodding their heads and believing that Comey said there wasn't anything to indict Hillary on because Hillary threatened his life.
It's the same logic that enables the moon landing hoax conspiracy keep the secret from everyone except for the few super-smart conspiracy theorists who see the truth. Hillary and Bill just take the place of the Uber-Conspiracy and they become super-stealthy assassins or mob bosses - depending on which conspiracy you subscribe to - keeping the truth hidden by having a knife to the throat of anyone who could otherwise take them down or even release evidence showing their guilt. Well, everyone except for the plucky conspiracy theorist who sees past the lies, does what big law enforcement can't do, and posts a scathing blog post about how Hillary killed Vince Foster with her bare hands.
Slashdot Mirror
My problem is that just when I think that maybe I should give him a chance, he does something like select an anti-Semite like Steve Bannon. I'm TRYING to be positive here, but Trump's actions and statements are making it impossible.
I can't tell if it scares me more or less if Pence is really in charge. I think my "Scare Meter" has maxed out and shattered. It now joins my sarcasm meter and irony meter as casualties of this election.
Coming from someone who voted against Trump (didn't like Hillary but voted for her because Trump was much worse) and who is legitimately scared about the Trump administration (I'm Jewish and he's appointing an anti-Semite to a top post), First Amendment doesn't protect all speech. Yes, it protects a lot and it does protect speech that we'd rather see go away (for example, the Westboro Baptist Church). But when the speech becomes threats of violence or egging others on to commit acts of violence, a line has been crossed. You do not have the First Amendment right to threaten people. And making a threat against the President of the United States (or the President-Elect) is doubly stupid.
That's my personal rule. No matter what I'm posting, e-mailing, private messaging, etc. If I wouldn't want my mother, wife, co-workers, boss, neighbors, etc reading it, I won't post it. (Sometimes I include my kids in the listing, but there are some topics I'll post about that aren't really kid-appropriate.) After all, nothing is really private these days. Now many instances of someone's embarrassing "totally private" message being spread across the Internet will it take before people realize that.
Radical Islamic Terror in the US is very rare - even if we include the outlier of 9-11.
Meanwhile, an anti-Semite has been appointed to Chief Strategist and hate crimes are on the rise. As a Jew, do you really think I should be more afraid of Muslims than of someone who hates Jews whispering in the President's ear?
*replies all*
Hey everyone, stop replying all! This is very annoying.
This is what I don't get. A lot of people voted for Trump because "he says it like it is" or because "I'm sick of politicians lying", but then they say that Trump doesn't mean the literal things he says he'll do? So, essentially, Trump wasn't "saying it like it is" - he was saying what needed to be said to rile up his base and he was lying about what he'd do so that he could win the election.
Some of those pivots led me to think that perhaps Trump's Administration would have a modicum of sanity...
And then he hired the anti-Semitic, white supremacist Steve Bannon to be his Chief Strategist.
You're pivoting in the wrong direction Trump! WRONG DIRECTION!
Do you think your ISP can't see what you're posting? Do you think that the government doesn't work with ISPs to get access to what you're posting?
And before you mention that you use SSL and it's secure - no it's not It's not 100% secure. And even if it was, Trump has indicated that he'd want to "work with computer experts" to let the government get into encrypted communications the keep everyone safe. (Well, that's the reason they always give so that, if you oppose it, they can question why you don't want to keep people safe and thus so they can make YOU look like the bad guy.)
Given that Trump has now named Steve Bannon - a white supremacist and anti-Semite - as his Chief Strategist, and given that I myself am Jewish, I don't think I'm going to like what his "experts" advises that he does.
I don't know how you can fix that. Usually the fix to ignorance is education. If someone says that the world was created 6,000 years ago, you present evidence that it wasn't. But if that person shrugs off any evidence as being "liberal lies" or "a test from god" or something, then there's nothing you can do. They not only reject the only fix available to us, but claim that the fix itself is bad because it counters their incorrect world view.
My next go-to was always "just cut off those people from your life and ignore them," but what do we do when that person is President and is putting other anti-intellectual people in positions of power? Ignoring doesn't work then.
The only thing I can think of is that we need to make our voices heard. Write to your congressmen/women. Attend rallies (but keep it peaceful - turning rallies into riots undermines your message). Use your First Amendment rights to the fullest to get the message out there and hope that enough people listen.
As far as the religious portion goes, I think Pence covered that for Trump.
I'm wondering if science funding in general will be slashed. This is the candidate that said autism is caused by vaccines. As the parent of a child on the autism spectrum (and someone who is autistic as well), it scares me that the leader of the free world might say "vaccines are bad, autistic people are 'vaccine damaged', we're discontinuing all vaccines."
I hope you're right. I really do, but Candidate Trump often would say that he knew better than the experts and that only he could solve the problems. This might have been campaign bluster meant to fire people up, but it could also have been an indication that he'll do what he thinks is the best thing to do despite what the experts think.
I think this is the worst part - not knowing what he'll do. He's been in favor of so many conflicting policies during his candidacy - and we all know that most campaign promises evaporate come election day - that I really have no clue what he'll do. Will he become a centrist President and all of that "build a wall/Mexicans are rapists" stuff was campaign bluster? Or will he push what his alt-right base wants regardless of how it'll affect other people? Nobody knows - maybe not even Donald Trump and this uncertainty is paralyzing.
And even if the Republicans fight back against Trump's more extreme policy proposals, will the alt-right become Tea Party 2.0? With the Tea Party, anyone who didn't toe the Tea Party line was kicked out and replaced by someone more in line with their views. Will Republicans basically be told "let us pass extreme anti-Muslim, racist, sexist, etc laws or lose your seats"?
Thanks for the correction. That's 38 years. I wonder how many people could hold up under the pressure of being a group's punching bag for that long. Even if you don't care about their opinion, the daily strain of new conspiracy theories, allegations, and outright cries of your guilt would wear on most folks.
I routinely use a freeware text search tool that can search through thousands of files for certain keywords in a matter of minutes - and it's likely not even the fastest one out there. If I pointed it at 650,000 text files and told it to search for "Hillary Clinton", I'd probably have my results in a day or two. Assuming that the FBI has more powerful text search tools (a fair assumption, I'd wager), they could have easily done a series of text searches through the e-mails over a few days to get their results. (Which, of course, ignores them narrowing down based on date, recipient, or duplicate of already-checked e-mails. Something that they likely did before breaking out any text search tool.)
It's not 650,000 - 55,000. It's the 650K Weiner e-mails minus the ones completely unrelated to Hillary (from when she wasn't Secretary of State or e-mail chains her and her staff weren't part of) minus any duplicates of the already reviewed e-mails. Any resulting new e-mails could be manually reviewed by a team to see if any brought new evidence. None did.
It would be like getting a dump of all of my e-mails because you were interested in the workings of Amazon.com. Yes, I have e-mails from/about Amazon.com, but every single one of my e-mails doesn't involve them. Simple programs could whittle the e-mail dump to just the relevant e-mails and then go from there.
The 650K e-mails were all of Anthony Weiner's e-mails. Not all of those were related to Hillary Clinton. He had his own activities (legal and otherwise) that were unrelated to her. They would likely first filter on e-mails dated when Hillary wasn't Secretary of State. Weiner was in Congress from 1999 to 2011. Hillary was Secretary of State from 2009 - 2013. This only leaves three years of Weiner e-mails that might be relevant. If his e-mails were uniformly distributed in date, this would cut them down to 150K.
Then, they would look through the e-mails to see which involved Hillary or her staff. Even if Weiner e-mailed someone in 2010, it had a good chance of being completely unrelated to Hillary Clinton.
Next, they would see which of the remaining e-mails were duplicates of what they had already found.
Finally, they would take this group of e-mails - by now much smaller than 650K - and split them up among a group of people to manually look through. They could also run some keyword searches to further narrow things down, but even if they didn't do this, splitting the remaining e-mails up would mean that they could easily handle them in the time that they did.
What's worse is that Trump supporters are claiming that there wasn't enough time for Comey to look through the e-mails. As if he doesn't have a staff that he would tell to look through them and report back to him with their findings. They just don't see how it's possible for one person to look through all those e-mails in that amount of time. To be fair, it would likely be very hard if not impossible for one person to do this, but that's why you split those man-hours up among many people.
IIRC, the 80,000 before were e-mails directly from Hillary/her team. Thus, all of the e-mails were potentially important.
These e-mails came from Anthony Weiner's e-mail account. Most of them were likely unrelated to Hillary. Simply weeding out e-mails not involving Hillary/her team or e-mails sent when Hillary wasn't Secretary of State would narrow down the list quite a bit. Excluding duplicates from what they had examined before would take out more e-mails. All of this would likely take an afternoon's worth of work. They could then split the relatively few remaining emails among a group of staff members and hammer through them to determine what, if anything, applied to the Hillary investigation. This is totally doable in a matter of days.
I actually thought that Occupy/1% had a good initial idea - the rich too often pay too little in taxes while the middle class gets the huge tax bill - but they were scattershot in how they protested this and tried to raise awareness. Their message got muddled and lost. It's not enough to identify an injustice that you want to rail against, you need to be organized in how you will protest this to get the maximum bang for the time/effort/money spent protesting.
Even if all of those weren't true: He has a horrible temper. During the first debate, Hillary brought up Alicia Machado. It was an obvious trap. If this were a Roadrunner cartoon, it would be a road painted on a rock with a big neon sign saying "This is fake! It's a trap! Do NOT try to run into it!!!" And still, Trump ran into the wall at 3am in a series of tweets which, among other things, told people to check out her sex tape. (Which she doesn't have. IIRC, it was someone with a similar name but was obviously not her, but even if it was her wouldn't have refuted the charges she made against him.)
He can't let even the smallest slights go which is a horrible quality for a President. Presidents can be the targets of daily verbal abuse by everyone from US citizens to foreign dignitaries. If the President decides to launch a missile strike because some Prime Minister called him/her a bad name, it will have serious repercussions. How would Donald Trump handle being insulted by a foreign dignitary that he needs to enter into negotiations with? I don't see that ending well at all.
Hillary, on the other hand, has been the target of slings and arrows since her husband was first elected President. She knows how to take the verbal punch, ignore it, and keep doing what needs to be done.
A Trump supporter on a forum I manage replied to a comment i made about how Comey could handle all of those e-mails with a "meme image" saying that Comey only said there was nothing there because he found his suicide note in Hillary's e-mails. (Implying that somehow Hillary knew Comey would be looking through those e-mails and planted the note there, I guess.) It's totally ridiculous, but that one image would likely have a lot of people nodding their heads and believing that Comey said there wasn't anything to indict Hillary on because Hillary threatened his life.
It's the same logic that enables the moon landing hoax conspiracy keep the secret from everyone except for the few super-smart conspiracy theorists who see the truth. Hillary and Bill just take the place of the Uber-Conspiracy and they become super-stealthy assassins or mob bosses - depending on which conspiracy you subscribe to - keeping the truth hidden by having a knife to the throat of anyone who could otherwise take them down or even release evidence showing their guilt. Well, everyone except for the plucky conspiracy theorist who sees past the lies, does what big law enforcement can't do, and posts a scathing blog post about how Hillary killed Vince Foster with her bare hands.