I doubt she’d be a good campaign manager for Bernie, and noone can help Hilary win if even running against an orange turd didn’t manage it. Frankly, Dorothy should just stick to legislation. Ironically, Becky indeed makes for a much better face of a campaign.
P.S. I wrote Betty at first. I blame your Dotty. It’s addictive.
Okay, can we put a moratorium on “Nothing could help Hilary win, look who she lost against”? You had the full weight of the Russian government putting their foot on the scale, let’s stop pretending that the 2016 election was anything less than an abortion of democracy.
DrunkenNordmann
Not to mention the utter mess that is the Electoral College. When you get the majority of the popular vote, but somehow still lose, something’s broken.
Roborat
Yup, the one time in 200 plus years that the exact situation the Electoral College was set up to prevent actually occurs, and it failed miserably. I don’t understand why it is still a thing, just go with the popular vote already.
thejeff
Because it’s set up to be hard to change. Because small states and swing states benefit by it and they’d have to sign on to any change.
Ethics Gradient
When the wealth of the US was vaulted in the agrarian states, the imbalance was at least logically justified.
That hasn’t been the case since the 1900s.
ischemgeek
This. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote despite Russian interference, and only lost the election because your system has the electoral college, which is specifically designed to privilege rural areas over population centers.
Zaxares
It’s also worth noting that a lot of the Bernie supporters, after their candidate dropped out of the race, DIDN’T transfer their votes to Hillary. They simply stayed at home and didn’t vote. In hindsight, given the global trend of people voting for unconventional or even extremist leaders as a protest vote against the status quo, I think the Democrat party would have been wise to throw their support behind Bernie instead of Hillary.
DrunkenNordmann
Except that in the primaries Clinton also won the popular vote, if I recall correctly.
WeirderThanWeird
I mean, the primaries are a clusterfuck in some states. Nevada’s voice vote was arguably in favor of Bernie and should have went to a more definitive voting system and other states seemed to be pulling the same shenanigans against Bernie that the Republicans pull against Dems. Also, Sanders was a no one that the DNC tried to undermine for entire campaign and he still came close to winning. And polls showed him doing better than Clinton against Trump.
thejeff
Some of the primaries are a clusterfuck. But they’ve long been that way and candidates need to adapt. Bernie did well in most caucus states and those are at least as messed up as anything.
Nor would I trust polls for the general during the primary – particularly for a non-frontrunner who hadn’t been seriously attacked by the GOP at that point.
Jesper
More Bernie supporters came out for Hillary in 2016 than Hillary voters came out for Obama in 2008.
ǝ snow ʍousɐ
now that IS surprising
thejeff
Not really. That primary was nasty.
It just blew over because Obama won, so there was nothing to blame on the “PUMAs”.
Plus, there weren’t Russian troll farms dedicated to keeping the anger going back then. Mostly the first though.
Jon Rich
PUMAs?
thejeff
A group of Clinton supporters after she lost the 2008 primary. With the usual accusations that Obama was selected by the party leadership, not the voters and of various underhanded primary shenanigans.
Officially registered as “People United Means Action”, but originally
“Party Unity My Ass” – which could easily have been adopted by the Bernie holdouts. There is nothing new under the sun.
Sunny
I think it would’ve been enough if the upper echelons of the party hadn’t actively worked against Sanders, lost votes for him or declared them void, and given Clinton unfair advantages like letting her team know what questions would be asked beforehand. I can definitely understand why many people who preferred Sanders stayed home then, I wouldn’t have voted for “my” party’s chosen candidate under those circumstances either. The democrat party leadership fucked up on so many levels and displayed such a lack of awareness they were almost on par with Trump. And in a contest of stupidity, experience trumps everything.
Russian interference or not (and personally I think that if there was any such interference it had a marginal effect at worst and is most probably negligible), the democrat party leadership chose one of their least popular candidates and managed to alienate a large part of its base with their blatant display of favouritism during the primaries. That alone would be enough to lose an election pretty much anywhere, but doubly so in the USA where elections on the national level tend to be quite close and there’s a weird electoral college in place. I see the fact that she even won the popular vote as more of a testament to how deeply unpopular Trump was even before being elected. Had she gone up against a more typical republican candidate I think she would’ve lost that one as well.
thejeff
Contrafactual speculation is hard, but I suspect Sanders would have lost as well. It would have been a very different campaign obviously and we don’t know what would have been thrown at him, but it would have been messy. Sanders never really faced any serious negative campaign attacks, so it’s hard to know how he would have handled it. We’d still have Russian interference driving up conflicts among Democrats.
I’ve speculated before that if Sanders had won the nomination, we’d be sitting here today wishing we’d run the sensible moderate who could have peeled away Republican leaners who were turned off by Trump, but voted for him anyway because of the scary socialist.
Matthew Davis
It depends. I think Sanders would have campaigned in the “firewall” states that Clinton lost, but I also think we would have had some veiled antisemitism rather than open misogyny from the Trump camp. So I guess it would be a matter of whether Sanders’ populist message would have turned the votes in those states more than crypto-fascists would have stumbled over each other to make ZOG memes.
TachyonCode
I just want to make a simple correction in terminology here because the baffling alt-right conspiracy theory that it’s called the “Democrat” party exists.
The name of the left-ish party in the US is the Democratic party, not the Democrat party. There is no Democrat party.
Tom
Both party names are horrible. Calling it the Democratic party makes it sound like voting against them means that you do not want a democratic government. “Take away my right to vote please!” Likewise if you don’t vote for the Republican party does it not sound like you don’t want a republic? “All hail the emperor!”
Marketing is evil.
Reps and Dems will do just fine.
BBCC
Not being a republic doesn’t necessarily mean an emperor. For instance, direct democracies wouldn’t be republics. They’d be fictional but 😛
thejeff
But at least “Democratic Party” is the actual name of the party, not a deliberate tactic by the other party.
Paradox
Also, “republic” and “emperor” are not mutually exclusive
Just look ancient Rome
Sunny
I thought the left-ish party in the USA was the green party?
begbert2
It’s left as compared to Nazis, which in the US that’s all it takes to be a pinko commie.
thejeff
Given that the Nazis support the Republican party, I’m happy to back what is by world terms a centrist party without fussing to much.
We’re a two party system by design. As much as I like much of the Green platform, in recent decades they’ve mostly been played by Republicans to draw off leftist voters from Democrats to allow Republican victories. In some cases getting funding from Republican donors so they can compete.
TachyonCode
The Green Party took the money it raised last election cycle and ran, last I checked. They’re money-grubbing spoilers.
thejeff
Even more terrifying to me, the orange dumpster fire wasn’t as bad a candidate as we all thought he was. He ran a classic demagogue “scare the hell out of people, pose as a strong man, throw them scapegoats and promise easy fixes” campaign and that resonated with a lot of Americans. Enough to make it close enough to steal. It made him horribly unpopular with those it didn’t work on, but I don’t think the things we see as drawbacks actually cost him many votes. They just further divided the country.
This is the model the GOP’s been nodding and winking to for decades, but now they’ve learned it works when done openly. We’ll see more of it, assuming we survive Trump.
Solenoid
The Russians wouldn’t have had enough of an opening to do that if a better politician had been run. “Oh, sure, let’s run the person who’s been subject to a many decades-long smear campaign, who uses the phrase ‘AmErIcA iS aLrEaDy GrEaT’ when people are pissed as fuuuuuuck about their living situation. That’ll go over well.”
TachyonCode
Changing the candidate the DNC backed at the last minute like that, in the primary, when no other candidates with recent high levels of name recognition had been running, would have probably fed speculation that there was a concrete institutional cause to think Hillary unelectable and that the party was looking to cover its own arse and distance itself from her – and would have inevitably occurred without anyone explaining why.
The opposition’s conspiracy theories would have then gained fertile ground to take root even deeper in the mainstream, harming all future candidates fielded by the party for several elections.
It’s a pretty simple calculus.
thejeff
So you’re suggesting that the Democratic Party should have stepped in and blocked Clinton from running? Yeah, that would have gone well.
My strong suspicion is that there was little if any more shenanigans going on in the DNC’s support of Clinton than there has been in previous primaries – including in 2008 where Clinton ran as the establishment favorite and lost to Obama anyway in a closer race than the 2016 primary.
The real difference is that this time Russian hackers exposed some of the internal discussion and a lot of idealistic Sanders supporters saw the dirty process of politics for the first time.
I’m an old cynic. I didn’t see anything in those revelations that struck me as outside the normal. Some favoritism. Some suggestions that apparently weren’t used. No serious ratfucking.
jmsr7
I think that the Democratic party pushed for a hilary candidacy and against a bernie candidacy because they had already set up a ton of political relationships behind the scenes (‘you scratch my back and i’ll scratch yours,’ you know), which is why it appeared to be ‘structured’ to give her the nomination. Because it was.
“Electability” or “what the voters want” is only one factor in deciding who gets the nomination, and it appears that in 2016 it wasn’t a very important one. When i saw Howard Dean say in a TV interview “Hillary Clinton’s going to be our next president” like it was a given, i got a sinking feeling that Trump was going to win. Partly because that sort of arrogance goes over poorly with americans, but also because he (they) clearly thought they had the election in the bag already. Meaning that they didn’t think that pushing for democratic voters to get out and vote wasn’t a big deal. Which is terryifyingly idiotic.
Of course, the really important election is the 2020 one because whoever controls congress will control redistricting. If the republicans get it, they’ll be able to lock in minority control for a decade.
thejeff
Note that redistricting is not controlled by Congress, but by the various state legislatures and governors.
So vote in your state elections! They matter.
There’s little evidence that 2016 was any more “structured” to give Clinton the nomination than any other recent primary. Clinton was an insider and she’d played the game well, winning a lot of support from establishment politicians. She’d done the same in 2008, though not quite as well. In 2008 that support evaporated as she started losing primary contests to some young upstart named Obama.
In 2016, if she’d started losing to Sanders, the party would have fallen in behind him. But she didn’t.
I live in a country where some candidates ACTUALLY have the full weight of the Russian government behind them. Like, journalists have managed to trace the tens of millions in campaign funds back to Putin.
The campaign amounted to around 200 000 votes, 10-15% of all. Russia can’t successfully buy the elections in a country with less population than the city of New York, so you certainly overstate their importance for the US elections.
Anyway, it’s really funny to watch this. I thought I’d read some insights on Dotty in the comments, yet it’s meltdown over 2016.
Deathjavu
Peeling away 10-15% of another candidate’s vote is massive and a really easy/cheap way to win what would otherwise be a mostly 2 way race, if you’re really backing someone else. And it’s not like Russian candidates don’t win in many, many other countries. Belarus is a classic Soviet-era puppet dictatorship in a “Union State” with Russia, right now, in 2019. Need I go on?
Elections are pretty hackable now, especially with a bad system and the right datasets, both of which are readily available in the US. As proven by redistricting, and literal court transcripts about redistricting, from the mapmakers.
Peeling away 200 000 votes is nothing, however.
I think you are conflating Russia buying votes and votes being swayed because of legitimate issues that get brought up by Russian-paid influencers. The first can’t really be combated unless you just pay more. The second is easy to overcome as long as YOU address these legitimate issues too.
Belarus is a dictatorship. We can’t talk about buying votes there. They don’t need to buy votes when they can just lie about the results and arrest the dissenters. Same in Russia.
To be fair, if I were him, I wouldn’t like her either. She must be the worst to work with.
Shane Wegner
Liking someone and working with them don’t need to correlate all that highly in upper echelon politics. If it were a dealbreaker, nothing would get done. College probably gets a LOT of government funding that gets reapproved ebery budget cycle.
BBCC
It’s not Robin solely who reapproves things. And yes, he’s capable of working with her, but that doesn’t translate necessarily to special, personal favours.
JBento
OTOH, fast-tracking the enrollment DOES prevent headlines like “Teenager shot at in University campus struggles to get enrolled for being a lesbian.” which is technically true, even if I played with the parsing a bit to make it more outrageous.
I’m pretty sure the process is way faster in community/ city colleges. the dean connection mentioned helps but ultimately i guess it would be easier for the narrative to not hinge on becky’s enrollment status
Matthew Davis
Except I think it’s implied Becky is enrolling at IU, not the local JC.
I’m guessing that she just got the process fast-tracked. Poking the bureaucracy on the behalf of constituents to get it unjammed is something good representatives do. …. and also Robin, apparently.
Dorothy needs to take a serious chill pill. Has she even volunteered to work at any campaign offices? Or is she one of those “theory trumps doing” people?
She’s got a really rigid idea of what her path forward will be, so she probably hasn’t volunteered to do any of that stuff yet, not that she currently even has time to with her schoolwork and journalism.
She’s a Slytherin, desperately trying to convince herself and the world she’s Hufflepuff
J
I wanna say she’s a Ravenclaw because she’s been really going for that whole ‘intelligence and knowledge trumps all’ thing. (Which isn’t bad, but for this situation it won’t give her the edge.) Also, I think if she were Slytherin she’d probably be better at manipulating folks and might’ve actually gotten that RA position.
Annika
I can see her being placed as either a Ravenclaw or a Slytherin, but I’d argue that she’s more of a Slytherin because of how ambitious she is.
Nah. Ravenclaw. The idea that ambition is an essential slytherin trait is set up in the first book, but it’s never really carried through–and it’s demolished completely when we run into our first Hufflepuff villain.
Anyone can be ambitious. Or not.
Ambitious Slytherins use ruthlessness and hard-to-catch cheating.
Ambitious Ravenclaws try to learn everything and just outplay people.
Ambitious Hufflepuffs network and outwork everyone.
Ambitious Gryffindors try to do the right thing and just plow through opposition to their goals (in many ways, they act a lot like Slytherins but with different flavor).
Dorothy is a huffleclaw. She thinks that knowledge is the way to power — and that hard work is the way to knowledge.
Becky is a gryfferin. She thinks the most important thing is to do the right thing–but is entirely willing to do below-board, sneaky methods to accomplish them.
This probably doesn’t entirely match Sorting Hat Chat’s system (which expressly does primary=how you define your goals; secondary=how you accomplish them), but I wasn’t focusing on that model so much as conceptualizing the characters.
BBCC
People don’t really think when they’re sorting characters about the fact it’s not what traits a person has, it’s what traits they value. Crabbe and Goyle are followers without a shred of cunning. BUT they value blood purity (a value Salazar Slytherin had), cunning, and disregard for rules, so Slytherin they went.
Annika
That’s true to a certain extent, because as far as I can tell, the sorting hat will put you into whichever house you want if you demand it (like Harry asking not to be put into Slytherin). So you’ll end up in whichever house you value most. But I still maintain that Hermione is a textbook Ravenclaw, and that she would’ve fit in much more with that house.
BBCC
But she didn’t want Ravenclaw. She believes friendship and bravery are more important than cleverness or learning. She also said Gryffindor sounded by far the best on the train. She wanted Gryffindor because it matched her values more. Yes, looking at personal traits, she fits more with Ravenclaw, but looking at what she values, Gryffindor is pretty clear imo.
Sunny
I think Rowling is a hack who just came up with the sorting hat as a neat idea and didn’t put much thought into it at all. “Alright, I’ll have one house where all the protagonists are, and one house where all the bad guys are, and then maybe two others to balance it out. But how can I go about that? Hmm… I know! I’ll just pick some random traits people might have and then some magical doohickey decides where these 11-year old children go! What’s a good trait to have? Bravery! Yes, the good guys are all brave. Bad traits… cowardice? ruthlessness? Noo, it has to at least sound a little positive. Ambition… yeah, that works, the bad house gets ambition as its trait. Ok, other two houses… all the nerds go in one house and the final one gets everything else.” And then she promptly decided to not care about any of that while actually writing the books. She needed the hat for one thing only: To get her characters into the right house for whatever plot she could think of. She had absolutely no concerns about keeping the larger picture internally consistent once the hat had fulfilled that purpose.
thejeff
Mostly I think that last – though I wouldn’t describe her as a hack. The criteria it’s said the Hat uses don’t match the way characters are actually sorted.
BBCC
Only, again, if you’re looking at whether the characters have inherent traits from those houses vs whether or not the characters actually value those traits. Also, that ignores there’s a variety of traits for each house. The trait that sticks so many bad guys in Slytherin isn’t because they value ambition, it’s because they value blood purity, just like their bigoted founder.
Sunny
“Blood purity”, or how much you value it, is not something the hat sorts for, though. There are confirmed mudbloods in Slytherin, and the Slytherin trait the hat looks for is stated to be ambition.
The reason all of Slytherin is obsessed with lineage or “blood purity” is because racism is a bad thing, Slytherin is the house for bad things, therefor, every racist character has to be in Slytherin.
I don’t think Rowling would have known how to write anything nuanced when she started the series, she was showing signs of learning by book 6 but it never got better than that. She definitely wouldn’t have considered putting some of those blood purists in any other house than Slytherin.
BBCC
That’s not true at all. The hat doesn’t only sort for one value. That’s vastly oversimplifying each house. Each house has a variety of values, which is why muggle borns (not mud bloods) end up in Slytherin. The hat is explicitly a stand in for the founders. He takes the kids the founders would have wanted. Salazar Slytherin was a bigoted prick who only wanted to teach purebloods and halfbloods. Yes, he was apparently willing to make rare exceptions for occasional muggle borns, but he was still a bigot and the Hat is looking for how closely a student’s values match the founders to see who the founders would have wanted. Even just looking at the Sorting Hat’s songs will show you more than just ambition for Slytherin. Cunning, a certain disregard for rules, resourcefulness, and yes, blood purity are all other values associated with Slytherin in canon.
There’s more than one value the hat looks for. Others mentioned for Slytherin include cunning, resourcefulness, disregard for rules, and, yes, blood purity, among other things. The Hat is also explicitly there as a stand in for the founders. He picks kids the founders would have picked. Salazar Slytherin was a bigoted prick who only wanted purebloods around, so that’s what Slytherin gets. Yes, he apparently was willing to make rare exceptions for muggle borns, but bigots do that all the time for people they like or are useful to them.
Slytherins are the kids in every school story – the rich kids who think some trait or value makes them better than everyone else. It’s also based a lot in Britain’s own house system. There’s a good post about it here -https://heartofaquamarine.tumblr.com/post/165186336433/slytherin-and-eton-a-primer-on-the-british-school
Inahc
well, that just sparked an epiphany. 🙂 I’d always thought hermione belonged in ravenclaw, but I made the exact same choice in high school myself – friendship before studying.
223 thoughts on “Pointers”
Ana Chronistic
I mean come on, Dotty, you’d be a MUCH better campaign manager for like Hillary or Bernie, why you even mad
erejnion
I doubt she’d be a good campaign manager for Bernie, and noone can help Hilary win if even running against an orange turd didn’t manage it. Frankly, Dorothy should just stick to legislation. Ironically, Becky indeed makes for a much better face of a campaign.
P.S. I wrote Betty at first. I blame your Dotty. It’s addictive.
Schpoonman
Okay, can we put a moratorium on “Nothing could help Hilary win, look who she lost against”? You had the full weight of the Russian government putting their foot on the scale, let’s stop pretending that the 2016 election was anything less than an abortion of democracy.
DrunkenNordmann
Not to mention the utter mess that is the Electoral College. When you get the majority of the popular vote, but somehow still lose, something’s broken.
Roborat
Yup, the one time in 200 plus years that the exact situation the Electoral College was set up to prevent actually occurs, and it failed miserably. I don’t understand why it is still a thing, just go with the popular vote already.
thejeff
Because it’s set up to be hard to change. Because small states and swing states benefit by it and they’d have to sign on to any change.
Ethics Gradient
When the wealth of the US was vaulted in the agrarian states, the imbalance was at least logically justified.
That hasn’t been the case since the 1900s.
ischemgeek
This. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote despite Russian interference, and only lost the election because your system has the electoral college, which is specifically designed to privilege rural areas over population centers.
Zaxares
It’s also worth noting that a lot of the Bernie supporters, after their candidate dropped out of the race, DIDN’T transfer their votes to Hillary. They simply stayed at home and didn’t vote. In hindsight, given the global trend of people voting for unconventional or even extremist leaders as a protest vote against the status quo, I think the Democrat party would have been wise to throw their support behind Bernie instead of Hillary.
DrunkenNordmann
Except that in the primaries Clinton also won the popular vote, if I recall correctly.
WeirderThanWeird
I mean, the primaries are a clusterfuck in some states. Nevada’s voice vote was arguably in favor of Bernie and should have went to a more definitive voting system and other states seemed to be pulling the same shenanigans against Bernie that the Republicans pull against Dems. Also, Sanders was a no one that the DNC tried to undermine for entire campaign and he still came close to winning. And polls showed him doing better than Clinton against Trump.
thejeff
Some of the primaries are a clusterfuck. But they’ve long been that way and candidates need to adapt. Bernie did well in most caucus states and those are at least as messed up as anything.
Nor would I trust polls for the general during the primary – particularly for a non-frontrunner who hadn’t been seriously attacked by the GOP at that point.
Jesper
More Bernie supporters came out for Hillary in 2016 than Hillary voters came out for Obama in 2008.
ǝ snow ʍousɐ
now that IS surprising
thejeff
Not really. That primary was nasty.
It just blew over because Obama won, so there was nothing to blame on the “PUMAs”.
Plus, there weren’t Russian troll farms dedicated to keeping the anger going back then. Mostly the first though.
Jon Rich
PUMAs?
thejeff
A group of Clinton supporters after she lost the 2008 primary. With the usual accusations that Obama was selected by the party leadership, not the voters and of various underhanded primary shenanigans.
Officially registered as “People United Means Action”, but originally
“Party Unity My Ass” – which could easily have been adopted by the Bernie holdouts. There is nothing new under the sun.
Sunny
I think it would’ve been enough if the upper echelons of the party hadn’t actively worked against Sanders, lost votes for him or declared them void, and given Clinton unfair advantages like letting her team know what questions would be asked beforehand. I can definitely understand why many people who preferred Sanders stayed home then, I wouldn’t have voted for “my” party’s chosen candidate under those circumstances either. The democrat party leadership fucked up on so many levels and displayed such a lack of awareness they were almost on par with Trump. And in a contest of stupidity, experience trumps everything.
Russian interference or not (and personally I think that if there was any such interference it had a marginal effect at worst and is most probably negligible), the democrat party leadership chose one of their least popular candidates and managed to alienate a large part of its base with their blatant display of favouritism during the primaries. That alone would be enough to lose an election pretty much anywhere, but doubly so in the USA where elections on the national level tend to be quite close and there’s a weird electoral college in place. I see the fact that she even won the popular vote as more of a testament to how deeply unpopular Trump was even before being elected. Had she gone up against a more typical republican candidate I think she would’ve lost that one as well.
thejeff
Contrafactual speculation is hard, but I suspect Sanders would have lost as well. It would have been a very different campaign obviously and we don’t know what would have been thrown at him, but it would have been messy. Sanders never really faced any serious negative campaign attacks, so it’s hard to know how he would have handled it. We’d still have Russian interference driving up conflicts among Democrats.
I’ve speculated before that if Sanders had won the nomination, we’d be sitting here today wishing we’d run the sensible moderate who could have peeled away Republican leaners who were turned off by Trump, but voted for him anyway because of the scary socialist.
Matthew Davis
It depends. I think Sanders would have campaigned in the “firewall” states that Clinton lost, but I also think we would have had some veiled antisemitism rather than open misogyny from the Trump camp. So I guess it would be a matter of whether Sanders’ populist message would have turned the votes in those states more than crypto-fascists would have stumbled over each other to make ZOG memes.
TachyonCode
I just want to make a simple correction in terminology here because the baffling alt-right conspiracy theory that it’s called the “Democrat” party exists.
The name of the left-ish party in the US is the Democratic party, not the Democrat party. There is no Democrat party.
Tom
Both party names are horrible. Calling it the Democratic party makes it sound like voting against them means that you do not want a democratic government. “Take away my right to vote please!” Likewise if you don’t vote for the Republican party does it not sound like you don’t want a republic? “All hail the emperor!”
Marketing is evil.
Reps and Dems will do just fine.
BBCC
Not being a republic doesn’t necessarily mean an emperor. For instance, direct democracies wouldn’t be republics. They’d be fictional but 😛
thejeff
But at least “Democratic Party” is the actual name of the party, not a deliberate tactic by the other party.
Paradox
Also, “republic” and “emperor” are not mutually exclusive
Just look ancient Rome
Sunny
I thought the left-ish party in the USA was the green party?
begbert2
It’s left as compared to Nazis, which in the US that’s all it takes to be a pinko commie.
thejeff
Given that the Nazis support the Republican party, I’m happy to back what is by world terms a centrist party without fussing to much.
We’re a two party system by design. As much as I like much of the Green platform, in recent decades they’ve mostly been played by Republicans to draw off leftist voters from Democrats to allow Republican victories. In some cases getting funding from Republican donors so they can compete.
TachyonCode
The Green Party took the money it raised last election cycle and ran, last I checked. They’re money-grubbing spoilers.
thejeff
Even more terrifying to me, the orange dumpster fire wasn’t as bad a candidate as we all thought he was. He ran a classic demagogue “scare the hell out of people, pose as a strong man, throw them scapegoats and promise easy fixes” campaign and that resonated with a lot of Americans. Enough to make it close enough to steal. It made him horribly unpopular with those it didn’t work on, but I don’t think the things we see as drawbacks actually cost him many votes. They just further divided the country.
This is the model the GOP’s been nodding and winking to for decades, but now they’ve learned it works when done openly. We’ll see more of it, assuming we survive Trump.
Solenoid
The Russians wouldn’t have had enough of an opening to do that if a better politician had been run. “Oh, sure, let’s run the person who’s been subject to a many decades-long smear campaign, who uses the phrase ‘AmErIcA iS aLrEaDy GrEaT’ when people are pissed as fuuuuuuck about their living situation. That’ll go over well.”
TachyonCode
Changing the candidate the DNC backed at the last minute like that, in the primary, when no other candidates with recent high levels of name recognition had been running, would have probably fed speculation that there was a concrete institutional cause to think Hillary unelectable and that the party was looking to cover its own arse and distance itself from her – and would have inevitably occurred without anyone explaining why.
The opposition’s conspiracy theories would have then gained fertile ground to take root even deeper in the mainstream, harming all future candidates fielded by the party for several elections.
It’s a pretty simple calculus.
thejeff
So you’re suggesting that the Democratic Party should have stepped in and blocked Clinton from running? Yeah, that would have gone well.
My strong suspicion is that there was little if any more shenanigans going on in the DNC’s support of Clinton than there has been in previous primaries – including in 2008 where Clinton ran as the establishment favorite and lost to Obama anyway in a closer race than the 2016 primary.
The real difference is that this time Russian hackers exposed some of the internal discussion and a lot of idealistic Sanders supporters saw the dirty process of politics for the first time.
I’m an old cynic. I didn’t see anything in those revelations that struck me as outside the normal. Some favoritism. Some suggestions that apparently weren’t used. No serious ratfucking.
jmsr7
I think that the Democratic party pushed for a hilary candidacy and against a bernie candidacy because they had already set up a ton of political relationships behind the scenes (‘you scratch my back and i’ll scratch yours,’ you know), which is why it appeared to be ‘structured’ to give her the nomination. Because it was.
“Electability” or “what the voters want” is only one factor in deciding who gets the nomination, and it appears that in 2016 it wasn’t a very important one. When i saw Howard Dean say in a TV interview “Hillary Clinton’s going to be our next president” like it was a given, i got a sinking feeling that Trump was going to win. Partly because that sort of arrogance goes over poorly with americans, but also because he (they) clearly thought they had the election in the bag already. Meaning that they didn’t think that pushing for democratic voters to get out and vote wasn’t a big deal. Which is terryifyingly idiotic.
Of course, the really important election is the 2020 one because whoever controls congress will control redistricting. If the republicans get it, they’ll be able to lock in minority control for a decade.
thejeff
Note that redistricting is not controlled by Congress, but by the various state legislatures and governors.
So vote in your state elections! They matter.
There’s little evidence that 2016 was any more “structured” to give Clinton the nomination than any other recent primary. Clinton was an insider and she’d played the game well, winning a lot of support from establishment politicians. She’d done the same in 2008, though not quite as well. In 2008 that support evaporated as she started losing primary contests to some young upstart named Obama.
In 2016, if she’d started losing to Sanders, the party would have fallen in behind him. But she didn’t.
erejnion
I live in a country where some candidates ACTUALLY have the full weight of the Russian government behind them. Like, journalists have managed to trace the tens of millions in campaign funds back to Putin.
The campaign amounted to around 200 000 votes, 10-15% of all. Russia can’t successfully buy the elections in a country with less population than the city of New York, so you certainly overstate their importance for the US elections.
Anyway, it’s really funny to watch this. I thought I’d read some insights on Dotty in the comments, yet it’s meltdown over 2016.
Deathjavu
Peeling away 10-15% of another candidate’s vote is massive and a really easy/cheap way to win what would otherwise be a mostly 2 way race, if you’re really backing someone else. And it’s not like Russian candidates don’t win in many, many other countries. Belarus is a classic Soviet-era puppet dictatorship in a “Union State” with Russia, right now, in 2019. Need I go on?
Elections are pretty hackable now, especially with a bad system and the right datasets, both of which are readily available in the US. As proven by redistricting, and literal court transcripts about redistricting, from the mapmakers.
erejnion
Peeling away 200 000 votes is nothing, however.
I think you are conflating Russia buying votes and votes being swayed because of legitimate issues that get brought up by Russian-paid influencers. The first can’t really be combated unless you just pay more. The second is easy to overcome as long as YOU address these legitimate issues too.
Belarus is a dictatorship. We can’t talk about buying votes there. They don’t need to buy votes when they can just lie about the results and arrest the dissenters. Same in Russia.
Yumi
That enrollment process went FAST.
BBCC
That makes me wonder if she was accepted beforehand and is just getting money now or if Robin’s just that good.
Kinoko
Robin knows the dean. He introduced her into the comic itself. 😉
BBCC
Yes, but he doesn’t like her. 😉
Kinoko
Mm. This is true.
BBCC
To be fair, if I were him, I wouldn’t like her either. She must be the worst to work with.
Shane Wegner
Liking someone and working with them don’t need to correlate all that highly in upper echelon politics. If it were a dealbreaker, nothing would get done. College probably gets a LOT of government funding that gets reapproved ebery budget cycle.
BBCC
It’s not Robin solely who reapproves things. And yes, he’s capable of working with her, but that doesn’t translate necessarily to special, personal favours.
JBento
OTOH, fast-tracking the enrollment DOES prevent headlines like “Teenager shot at in University campus struggles to get enrolled for being a lesbian.” which is technically true, even if I played with the parsing a bit to make it more outrageous.
AndieStardust
I’m pretty sure the process is way faster in community/ city colleges. the dean connection mentioned helps but ultimately i guess it would be easier for the narrative to not hinge on becky’s enrollment status
Matthew Davis
Except I think it’s implied Becky is enrolling at IU, not the local JC.
Bagge
Which shows that Becky knows who she’s dealing with. Get what she want in writing. Get it through official channels. Get it NOW.
That’s the only way to be sure.
Marsh Maryrose
Truly a Willis Ex Machina!
Reltzik
I’m guessing that she just got the process fast-tracked. Poking the bureaucracy on the behalf of constituents to get it unjammed is something good representatives do. …. and also Robin, apparently.
Well_Played
Please don’t go out and grab some electrical wires dorothy!!
Well_Played
*Crazy
Danielle
how long before she cries blood?
Bagge
About two to three panels, if I’m any judge.
sunflowerofice
You can do both Dorothy. you can do both.
Bagge
Narrator: She will do both.
JBento
At the same time. Sierra can give her pointers.
AntJ
looks like someone’s about to have an Elder Price moment
Cholma
Dorothy needs to take a serious chill pill. Has she even volunteered to work at any campaign offices? Or is she one of those “theory trumps doing” people?
DailyBrad
She’s got a really rigid idea of what her path forward will be, so she probably hasn’t volunteered to do any of that stuff yet, not that she currently even has time to with her schoolwork and journalism.
AntJ
She’s a Slytherin, desperately trying to convince herself and the world she’s Hufflepuff
J
I wanna say she’s a Ravenclaw because she’s been really going for that whole ‘intelligence and knowledge trumps all’ thing. (Which isn’t bad, but for this situation it won’t give her the edge.) Also, I think if she were Slytherin she’d probably be better at manipulating folks and might’ve actually gotten that RA position.
Annika
I can see her being placed as either a Ravenclaw or a Slytherin, but I’d argue that she’s more of a Slytherin because of how ambitious she is.
Joshua Kronengold
Nah. Ravenclaw. The idea that ambition is an essential slytherin trait is set up in the first book, but it’s never really carried through–and it’s demolished completely when we run into our first Hufflepuff villain.
Anyone can be ambitious. Or not.
Ambitious Slytherins use ruthlessness and hard-to-catch cheating.
Ambitious Ravenclaws try to learn everything and just outplay people.
Ambitious Hufflepuffs network and outwork everyone.
Ambitious Gryffindors try to do the right thing and just plow through opposition to their goals (in many ways, they act a lot like Slytherins but with different flavor).
Dorothy is a huffleclaw. She thinks that knowledge is the way to power — and that hard work is the way to knowledge.
Becky is a gryfferin. She thinks the most important thing is to do the right thing–but is entirely willing to do below-board, sneaky methods to accomplish them.
This probably doesn’t entirely match Sorting Hat Chat’s system (which expressly does primary=how you define your goals; secondary=how you accomplish them), but I wasn’t focusing on that model so much as conceptualizing the characters.
BBCC
People don’t really think when they’re sorting characters about the fact it’s not what traits a person has, it’s what traits they value. Crabbe and Goyle are followers without a shred of cunning. BUT they value blood purity (a value Salazar Slytherin had), cunning, and disregard for rules, so Slytherin they went.
Annika
That’s true to a certain extent, because as far as I can tell, the sorting hat will put you into whichever house you want if you demand it (like Harry asking not to be put into Slytherin). So you’ll end up in whichever house you value most. But I still maintain that Hermione is a textbook Ravenclaw, and that she would’ve fit in much more with that house.
BBCC
But she didn’t want Ravenclaw. She believes friendship and bravery are more important than cleverness or learning. She also said Gryffindor sounded by far the best on the train. She wanted Gryffindor because it matched her values more. Yes, looking at personal traits, she fits more with Ravenclaw, but looking at what she values, Gryffindor is pretty clear imo.
Sunny
I think Rowling is a hack who just came up with the sorting hat as a neat idea and didn’t put much thought into it at all. “Alright, I’ll have one house where all the protagonists are, and one house where all the bad guys are, and then maybe two others to balance it out. But how can I go about that? Hmm… I know! I’ll just pick some random traits people might have and then some magical doohickey decides where these 11-year old children go! What’s a good trait to have? Bravery! Yes, the good guys are all brave. Bad traits… cowardice? ruthlessness? Noo, it has to at least sound a little positive. Ambition… yeah, that works, the bad house gets ambition as its trait. Ok, other two houses… all the nerds go in one house and the final one gets everything else.” And then she promptly decided to not care about any of that while actually writing the books. She needed the hat for one thing only: To get her characters into the right house for whatever plot she could think of. She had absolutely no concerns about keeping the larger picture internally consistent once the hat had fulfilled that purpose.
thejeff
Mostly I think that last – though I wouldn’t describe her as a hack. The criteria it’s said the Hat uses don’t match the way characters are actually sorted.
BBCC
Only, again, if you’re looking at whether the characters have inherent traits from those houses vs whether or not the characters actually value those traits. Also, that ignores there’s a variety of traits for each house. The trait that sticks so many bad guys in Slytherin isn’t because they value ambition, it’s because they value blood purity, just like their bigoted founder.
Sunny
“Blood purity”, or how much you value it, is not something the hat sorts for, though. There are confirmed mudbloods in Slytherin, and the Slytherin trait the hat looks for is stated to be ambition.
The reason all of Slytherin is obsessed with lineage or “blood purity” is because racism is a bad thing, Slytherin is the house for bad things, therefor, every racist character has to be in Slytherin.
I don’t think Rowling would have known how to write anything nuanced when she started the series, she was showing signs of learning by book 6 but it never got better than that. She definitely wouldn’t have considered putting some of those blood purists in any other house than Slytherin.
BBCC
That’s not true at all. The hat doesn’t only sort for one value. That’s vastly oversimplifying each house. Each house has a variety of values, which is why muggle borns (not mud bloods) end up in Slytherin. The hat is explicitly a stand in for the founders. He takes the kids the founders would have wanted. Salazar Slytherin was a bigoted prick who only wanted to teach purebloods and halfbloods. Yes, he was apparently willing to make rare exceptions for occasional muggle borns, but he was still a bigot and the Hat is looking for how closely a student’s values match the founders to see who the founders would have wanted. Even just looking at the Sorting Hat’s songs will show you more than just ambition for Slytherin. Cunning, a certain disregard for rules, resourcefulness, and yes, blood purity are all other values associated with Slytherin in canon.
Slytherin house is also based off kids with too much money and privilege and thinking that makes them better than anyone else (and were, unsurprisingly, full of bigotry), which was a real problem in British schools in the 90s, particularly those with the house system. There’s a pretty good post about it here: https://heartofaquamarine.tumblr.com/post/165186336433/slytherin-and-eton-a-primer-on-the-british-school
BBCC
This is false.
There’s more than one value the hat looks for. Others mentioned for Slytherin include cunning, resourcefulness, disregard for rules, and, yes, blood purity, among other things. The Hat is also explicitly there as a stand in for the founders. He picks kids the founders would have picked. Salazar Slytherin was a bigoted prick who only wanted purebloods around, so that’s what Slytherin gets. Yes, he apparently was willing to make rare exceptions for muggle borns, but bigots do that all the time for people they like or are useful to them.
Slytherins are the kids in every school story – the rich kids who think some trait or value makes them better than everyone else. It’s also based a lot in Britain’s own house system. There’s a good post about it here -https://heartofaquamarine.tumblr.com/post/165186336433/slytherin-and-eton-a-primer-on-the-british-school
Inahc
well, that just sparked an epiphany. 🙂 I’d always thought hermione belonged in ravenclaw, but I made the exact same choice in high school myself – friendship before studying.