theophiles.org - Post Election Latter-day Silver Lining?

Written by laika

Sunday, 11 November 2012 11:25

At The LA Times:

Sitting cross-legged on a lawn with two other students, Whitney Call, a 23-year-old creative writing major at Brigham Young University, took satisfaction in at least one aspect of the outcome of the 2012 presidential election:
Mitt Romney might not have won, but he demonstrated that being a Mormon, like her, was no barrier to winning the nation's highest office.
"His faith was not a factor in the election at all. Maybe that means that people are beginning to realize that Mormons are more mainstream than they thought," she said.

Comments

SteveGus

|2012-11-21 17:38:59

Certainly wasn't an issue for me. Romney and his party already gave me enough reasons not to vote for him that I never felt a need to consider his lack of judgment that comes with public commitment to a religion based on bad fantasy fiction. Let's face it: the Book of Mormon would have been improved beyond measure if it had elves, dwarves, and orcs in it.

emperorbma - would you like a socialism with your Big Brother?

|2012-11-22 01:11:09

SteveGus wrote:

Certainly wasn't an issue for me. Romney and his party already gave me enough reasons not to vote for him

FWIW, I had enough reasons not to want anything to do with either the Republicans or the Democrats. The pick has been, for the past few elections, whether the coming "police state" is going to be of the corporate or the socialist brand. It looks like the people picked the socialist police state again this time...

laika

|2012-11-23 20:32:18

SteveGus wrote:

Romney and his party already gave me enough reasons not to vote for him that I never felt a need to consider his lack of judgment that comes with public commitment to a religion based on bad fantasy fiction.

I wouldn't be too troubled by the goofy homemade religion part if it's adherents didn't go to such pains to pass it off as Christianity. That bothers me enough to be pleased that its desperate flippity-floppity poster-child didn't get a chance to show us that "Mormons are more mainstream than [we] thought."

emperorbma wrote:

The pick has been, for the past few elections, whether the coming "police state" is going to be of the corporate or the socialist brand. It looks like the people picked the socialist police state again this time...

If those are our choices, I'm more comfortable with the idea of a socialist police state. That belligerent corporate stuff is just too destructive for my tastes. The latter is probably exactly what we deserve more of, but it didn't hurt my feelings that we dodged it for another little while.

emperorbma - I am the 1%

|2012-11-24 00:07:40

laika wrote:

Neither party is good. On the one side you have corporate Military-industrial cronyism. We've all already seen what that ilk does. What people do not realize is that this is something that is opposed, not by more regulations, but by getting rid of all the unfair loopholes. The best way to get rid of those is to get rid of the government's meddling. Unfortunately, people see "free market" and mistakenly assume that corporate cronyism is the same thing. If the market is truly free, then the corporate crony loses the steam that drives its corrupt engines: protection from liability. (BTW, Fun fact, the Republicans practically ostracized their libertarian contingent by muzzling Ron Paul during the Primaries. Stay classy, Republicans)

On the other hand, you have our current socialist overlord. For his record, I can count things like the NDAA, the expansion of wiretapping and the Presidential Kill List and the indefinite detention and killing of American citizens, the continuance and expansion of the wars in [everywhere] as his legacy. So, instead of "belligerent corporate stuff" we have "belligerent quasi-socialist stuff." Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Furthermore, socialism is bad in general. It masks the problems with inefficient solutions that would better be handled with letting the market fix the problems itself.

Neither the red nor blue police state is free. Both want to take away your rights at gunpoint and demand your soul's total obidence. I'd just as soon take the "not totalitarian" but nobody else wants that it seems. To paraphrase Jay Leno, our response to a looming fiscal cliff is, apparently, "Forward!"

(FWIW, the 1% thing is a reference to the fact that we Libertarians got 1% of the popular vote this election.)

laika - re: I am the 1%

|2012-11-29 16:14:38

emperorbma wrote:

Neither party is good. On the one side you have corporate Military-industrial cronyism.

For the entertainment value, because we probably deserve it, because it would be interesting and challenging to face going back to more of what got us here, I was sorely tempted to go with the Military-Industrial complex. But I felt I had to struggle against my own interests and to think instead about future Americans and what that legacy might mean for them in a changing world, so I bit the bullet, so to speak, and went with what I felt to be a considerably lesser evil.

I'm sorry that your interests weren't better represented in the election. I've voted third party before and know the sting of futility in the face of an overwhelming lack of seriousness. But once bitten, twice shy in my case, so in close elections I go with the lesser evil.

emperorbma

|2012-11-29 21:39:15

laika wrote:

I bit the bullet, so to speak, and went with what I felt to be a considerably lesser evil.

I can understand taking the choice of "lesser evil" in lieu of "not evil, but no chance to avoid one of the evils anyway." FWIW, it is my sincerest prayer that our he turns out far better than what my projected scenario (link=YouTube) predicts. The vector of both sides towards control and disempowering the people, however, scares me a bit.

laika wrote:

I'm sorry that your interests weren't better represented in the election.

That's OK. I actually resolved myself to vote this way many years ago and have continued to maintain this resolve. I don't believe I could have done otherwise in good conscience. At the very least 1% result is not a joke and, while we don't get into the 5% threshold for getting Federal funding like the other two syndicates get we still made a serious impact, I think.

At the very least, if Obama turns out to be a problem I can say I didn't vote for him... :P

SteveGus - re:

|2012-11-27 00:11:53

laika wrote:

Mormonism is as Christian as Christian Science. They believe that the death and resurrection of Jesus has something to do with saving humankind, though I'd be at a loss to explain either version. Mormonism is a branch of Christianity, if only in the cladistic sense, in the same way that a bird is a dinosaur.

Quote:

Rather, the people figured out that the people who most loudly proclaimed that they were "conservative" were in fact rather radicals, driven by paper ideologies, dogmatic and uncompromising.

They were proposing drastic changes to the American government based on plans and slogans they found on some website. One of their candidates wanted to abolish three Federal agencies, and couldn't remember what the third one was. Another wanted to go back to the gold standard. Another proposed a tax policy whose chief virtue was that it could be summed up in a three digit slogan. (An omen of the End Times? ;)

It's like these guys had never heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences. The wholesome natural conservatism of the American people kicked in. We voted for the guy who represented the least change.

holmegm - re: re:

|2012-11-29 13:00:51

SteveGus wrote:

Rather, the people figured out that the people who most loudly proclaimed that they were "conservative" were in fact rather radicals, driven by paper ideologies, dogmatic and uncompromising.

Rather than argue that idea in itself (I doubt we would get anywhere), I'll just ask - you think the average Obama voter was thinking anything even remotely that complex?

(That's a genuine question, BTW, not a snarky rhetorical one.)

laika

|2012-11-29 15:59:31

holmegm wrote:

...you think the average Obama voter was thinking anything even remotely that complex?

Some of the most conservative, hard-working, and most entrepenuerial voter/citizens among us (Latinos, Asians) overwhelmingly chose Mr. Obama (emperorbma excepted, of course), so I'm guessing that more complex consideration than you might imagine went into his victory. The "average" Obama voter seems to have been mostly anyone other than white men (Romney voters), so that average would likely be more diificult to stereo-type than the average Romney voter.

holmegm - re:

|2012-11-30 14:08:27

laika wrote:

I'll have to remember this new doctrine that a (small) majority of voters simply can't ever be wrong. I don't seem to remember hearing it during Republican presidencies :)

laika wrote:

The "average" Obama voter seems to have been mostly anyone other than white men (Romney voters), so that average would likely be more diificult to stereo-type than the average Romney voter.

That's an interesting way to look at it.

Since it is the Democrats who have been trying so hard to play racial block politics, one might think it is those who do vote in racial blocks who are being the racists, not those who don't.

If one must slice and dice things racially, it appears that white voters were the least likely to vote in some racial-block fashion.

laika

|2012-11-30 21:43:46

holmegm wrote:

Since it is the Democrats who have been trying so hard to play racial block politics, one might think it is those who do vote in racial blocks who are being the racists, not those who don't.

If one must slice and dice things racially, it appears that white voters were the least likely to vote in some racial-block fashion.

Sorry, I'm not following your logic here, seeing as how practically speaking, the only block that voted for the white guy were white guys. If that's not a "racial block," then maybe I don't understand the term.

But I didn't really mean to introduce race earlier. I pointed out Hispanic- and Asian-Americans only as an example of actual conservative groups who presumably did put some complex thought into their choice. I felt that you were implying that only lazy thinking folks voted for Mr. Obama and offered what I considered to be a couple of opposite examples. Mr. O appears to have a very broad spectrum of support, and reducing them to people incapable of complex thought is probably not at all accurate.

SteveGus - re: re: re:

|2012-11-30 00:32:17

holmegm wrote:

I don't know how complex anybody's thinking is, but I do think that the Republicans are starting to scare people.

emperorbma

|2012-11-30 09:46:30

SteveGus wrote:

Republicans are starting to scare people.

I suspect one of the biggest factors in this election were:

1: Alienation of the Libertarian contingent. Not 1 but 2 Republican candidates were deliberately marginalized and ousted due to libertarian sentiments. (One of whom became the LP candidate) This fact probably helped swing the vote in some places.
2: Obama's campaign pulling a guilt by association using the "He-Man-Woman-Haters guild" comments of the kooks.
3: Romney's campaign's doublespeak and outright pants on fire comments. Not the least of these being the stupid attempt to convince that he wasn't the pioneer inventor of the prototype of Obamacare and that somehow he actually opposed this change.
4: The "capitalism is evil" contingent that continues to grow because people falsely assume corporate cronyism=free market.
5: Obama's clearly better job of reaching-out to the social media. Both sides used scare tactics and phonecalls. Obama logged onto internet sites and mobilized this block to his cause. (FWIW, many of the 3rd party candidates did internet campaigns too, but Obama had the whole "don't throw away your vote" meme going for him.)
6: Sandy.

holmegm - re: re: re: re:

|2012-11-30 14:13:47

SteveGus wrote:

I don't know how complex anybody's thinking is, but I do think that the Republicans are starting to scare people.

I'd agree that a lot of Obama voters were effectively scared. By scare-tactics. Whether they were accurately scared is another matter.

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Our valuable member laika has been with us since Thursday, 03 April 2008.

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