j reacts to tim kaine as vp and the efficacy of right-wing propaganda against clinton

tim kaine is pro-life.

that is a potential checkmate for hillary clinton. if you think that has nothing to do with it...

y'all should have listened to what she's said about abortion a little more closely. the existing law is judicial, which means it depends on what the constitution states. you get around that by changing the constitution.

what has hillary said about the constitution and abortion? well, like i say - you probably should have taken the time to look that up.

trump is extremely vulnerable with catholics. clinton's coalition requires a strong turnout from hispanics.

listen - i don't like any of this. don't shoot the messenger. i'm just telling you what is tactical. and, picking a pro-life vp is just about the most tactical thing that hillary clinton could possibly do.

one of the arguments that the clinton people have been pushing for a while - and you see it show up here and there - is this idea that hillary really isn't any of the things that the left says about her, that it's just all a lot of right-wing propaganda that's been put in silly leftists' heads. every time anybody says anything critical of hillary, then, it's just right-wing propaganda. typical tactic of restricting options.

right-wing propaganda or not, it's pretty obvious that hillary is "open to influence". and, unusually so. that's usually what the argument is about and it absolutely falls apart when you're talking about corruption or most of the other mean things that leftists say about hillary. that's resolvable by appeal to evidence, and usually even with minimal real controversy.

but, i think the argument does hold very well for the things the right says about hillary. if all you've ever heard about hillary came from right-wing talk radio, you'd think she's an anti-war hippie that wants to take away your guns and put an abortion clinic in the corner of every convenience store.

the truth is that hillary has always been right-leaning on abortion. what was it? "safe, legal and rare", i think? she has been on record for opposing late-trimester abortions forever. she's really always been about reaching a kind of compromise position that respects the safety of the woman, but not necessarily her right to choose.

this is, of course, why the right goes out of it's way to skewer her on it. the result is that if you think hillary is a closet social liberal, you really have been fed the line from the right. and, the number of people that think this is not trivial.

it's not just a question of going after a demographic that is probably up for grabs, then. a substantial percentage of trump support is really voting against hillary. but, a lot of what they're voting against is really an elaborate straw man. if she just lets that run wild, and the party gets trump to shut up, then trump is going to be able to mobilize voters against her that otherwise don't really support him. that could be fatal. she must find a way to at least disarm this propaganda by attacking years of straw men arguments against her. and, one of those things is going to be setting the record straight on her views on abortion, what kind of judges she would appoint, whether she would propose such a constitutional amendment and etc.

like it or not, this is actually one of the things that she has to do to win - if not to sway pro-life voters then at least to convince them to stay home.

vlogs are shutting down for a few weeks. i'll be vlogging, just not uploading. i've done this before several times, with good reason. it could be until august before anything else gets uploaded, although vlogs will continue up until the 29th, too (which will be published on the 7th).

in the mean time, i may rant a little here. but i will be mostly focusing on the music journal, and most new posts here will be musically related.

http://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.ca/

the party has spent years rallying around this woman. how could they vet her so poorly?

it's something else every other day, it seems.

i'm almost tempted to start a campaign to write-in satan and see if the dark one can get more votes than clinton or trump.

1. clinton.
2. trump.
3. satan.

hrmmn.

not an easy choice, y'know?

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/07/01/clinton-sought-secret-info-on-eu-bailout-plans-as-son-in-laws-doomed-hedge-fund-gambled-on-greece.html

y'all know that social assistance in canada is paid for by property taxes, right? not income taxes. that goes to pay for stuff like war.

so, if you don't pay property taxes, you can promptly shut the fuck up.

...and if you do pay property taxes, you have a social obligation to contribute to redistribution.

it's a pretty good system, all and all. not perfect. but pretty good. if you can navigate it...

those right wing pundits, though? they're just wrong.

it was the c'mon that convinced me. i was a little uncertain. but, that always works.

see, this is what the republican ticket really ought to look like. i'll grant them that. the policies are far more identifiable with what i would define as a conservative candidacy.

as it happens to be i'm not a conservative. at all. so, no thanks.

but the way this is shaping up, conservatives may end up being one of the more important voting blocs. i don't think either of the major candidates have a real advantage amongst small-c conservatives, right now. a three-way split may end up deciding the election.

if you want a historical precedent, you may want to consult the canadian election of 1993. i know you want to go to ross perot, but this may be a more violent break in the tent than that. the situation was very different, but the end result left the conservative movement split in half for a very long time.

jessica
you need to pull the rug out. the idea that you can say she has an x% chance of winning is incoherent. what that actually means is "if these thirty assumptions hold, she has an 80% chance of winning". but, here's the thing: that was always true. it's not that he's lost his way. it's that what he was doing was always a kind of snake oil.

the primary prediction schedule is a completely different thing, because you're building a predictive model. you're using existing results to predict future results. i'll argue about specifics (i don't think race is a predictive variable, for example), but i don't deny the premise. and, then you can come up with these kinds of statements.

aggregating polling and demographics like this together and then thinking you can come up with a number is just ridiculous. it doesn't matter what you're tweaking, it doesn't matter what you're assuming, it doesn't matter how much data you have, and it doesn't matter how close you are to the date - it's ridiculous.

but, that said? one cannot deny that most of the arguments right now are clearly in clinton's favour. his argument may just be a lot of nonsense that he pulled out of his ass, and then made sound more "scientific" by using fancy words. but, it's basically right.

i also think you're kind of misunderstanding what he's saying. what he's saying is that "if these thirty assumptions hold, she has an 80% chance of winning right now.". it's not a declaration of permanence. that number itself will shift and change with the polls.

he is nowhere saying that because his calculations imply an 80% chance of winning right now, they will therefore still imply an 80% chance of winning the day before the election. that's kind of a straw man.

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hmm
I think Hillary will win by a 65-35% margin

jessica
actually, i think that 35% for trump is a reasonable prediction - but that the other 65% won't go entirely to hillary.

there's obviously too many variables to make hard predictions, right now. but, if the party can't get a muzzle on trump, i think he's going to be stuck in the low 30s.

Lynn Reed
No muzzle can fit him...lol

jessica
see, if they can find a way to shut him up, it's hard to see why he would poll lower than george w. bush. trump is fundamentally the same candidate. it's just that even dubya had some sense of when to shut up. you also need to factor in where hillary ultimately runs. if she decides to go after conservatives, she could beat him soundly on the right. but, if she runs on the left, you could get a lot of conservatives vote for trump out of fear of hillary.

i think there's a kind of breaking point where conservatives, en masse, just can't do it. this is independent of everything else, and that's the scenario where he polls around 30-35%.

Lynn Reed
Since Trump is anti trade alot of GOPers will never back him. Hillary needs to drop the TPP and he wont hav anything real to attack her on. Stay the course and she will be fine

jessica
i think that if you look at trump's position more carefully, you'll see it's mostly smoke and mirrors. it's empty populism, and it doesn't really differ that much from the party line.

on china, clinton & trump are hard to tell apart. clinton is not going to drop the tpp, she's going to accelerate the asia pivot.

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Xavier Thorn
I haven't heard her say anything about going to war, I don't think that word has come out of her mouth.

Look! I get it, I was a Perot fan back in 92, I've got my Bernie 2016 bumper-sticker on my truck. I get it, but I know when to pick my battles. Trump poses a huge threat, not only to our domestic policies but also, and maybe more importantly, our foreign policies.

He would set us back to pre WWI (that's 1914) relations with some of our strongest allies. He could begin a downward spiral with China that would make the cold-war look like a playground spat.

I'm not an HRC fan, but at worst she's 4 more years of the last 8 years and I don't think that's too bad. With Trump? Who knows? We could be looking at World War 3. Is your frustration with not getting everything you want right f-ing now worth that risk? I hope not.

jessica
you're obviously a paid poster and not worth debating with.

for real people: the right response is that this person is not remotely informed about where hillary stands on the issues. you obviously can't actually convince somebody that's working for her. but, you can point out hillary's support for a chinese containment policy through the asia pivot and the tpp (and that china doesn't like this), her support for continued war in ukraine and general belligerence against russia, her calls for "no-fly zones" and occupation forces in syria, her orchestration of the kony kerfuffle to increase us involvement in africa, etc.

you need to talk past the bots. call them bots. call them bots to their face. do it with contempt. ignore them when they protest. but, always correct them. don't let their warping of the facts stand up. that's the important part of this: that passive readers are not just able to see the exchange for what it is, but don't walk away with bad information.

it's very important that people understand what hillary actual represents (she works for the war industry) before they vote for her, thinking she will be different than trump. we're on the same side in wanting an alternative to trump. we're not on the same side in thinking that clinton is that alternative.

hillary clinton will not be different than donald trump in any discernible way.

30-06-2016: start/end of the month things

tracks worked on in this vlog:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-1