(Part 3) Top products from r/hillaryclinton

Another new book release that might interest some people here: a picture book called "The Answer", based on an episode of Steven Universe that told the backstory of how their main queer couple met and fell in love during a rebellion. The art is gorgeous, and so is the story it was based on, which you can definitely read without knowing much or anything about the cartoon. I'm excited to donate it to my local library for the kids. There are hardly any queer books for beginner readers, and the few I've seen are pretty low quality and/or focused more on neutral mommies and daddies.

Intermediate econ if you're up for it:

http://www.amazon.com/Macroeconomics-N-Gregory-Mankiw/dp/1464182892

http://www.amazon.com/Macroeconomics-Policy-Practice-Pearson-Economics/dp/0321436334

http://www.amazon.com/Intermediate-Microeconomics-Modern-Approach-Ninth/dp/0393123960

http://www.amazon.com/Money-Banking-Financial-System-2nd/dp/0132994917

EDIT: For intro econ, you can just get started with the books by Krugman and Wells. I'm sure we all love Krugman here yea?

As far as history goes, just FYI, Zinn's People's History has a very poor reputation among (even left leaning) academic historians. You can ask about it at /r/askhistorians if you want to know more. You can also check their excellent book list, organized by region and topic.

EDIT: For an overview of US history, The Oxford History of the US series is an excellent primer.

I know less about sociology, but I think a good intro would be Khan's Privilege in that it touches on a contemporary sociological issue in a lay friendly manner but also goes into some theoretical foundations in the tradition of Bourdieu.

Yeah, pretty much. Obviously, I only know about it historically, but yeah. Peace and love and all that, which I believe in, but they really took it to an extreme. One of the more horrific scenes I've ever seen was a documentary about the time, and this guy is interviewing these parents who had given their 3-5 year old child acid. The kid is freaking out, and the interviewer is asking them why they did it and the parents are just like "acid is beautiful" or something (I forget the details, sorry). The point is, there was something to the liberalization of society, but there were definitely people who took it way too far.

There's a book called 1968 - The Year that Rocked The World by Mark Kurlansky that goes into detail about the era. It's really well-done and both sympathetic and critical: https://www.amazon.com/1968-Year-That-Rocked-World/dp/0345455827

You still get the reflexively anti-war people at rallies all the time, who basically are against any military engagement regardless of the situation. Again, I'm not saying you can't make the case for pacifism, but I always point out that Ghandi was a medic in two wars, had a deep respect for soldiers because of their civic courage, and that non-violence as he practiced it is a step above conventional warfare in that it's basically a willingness to go to war without weapons, rather than a means to avoid conflict.

There was also real stuff happening, just like there is today. My understanding is that Vietnam really drove people nuts. From what I've read, it was kind of this underlying thing that really stirred the pot. As much as people might talk about Iraq and Bush 1) there were far, far fewer casualties, and 2) There was no draft.

Weren't there jokes, back in the day, about how the Bush Presidential Library was only going to contain two books and he's almost finished colouring the second one?

The Trump library will contain twelve copies of "The Art of the Deal", but if you pay VIP membership you can get access to the Gold Suite where there are also three copies of "The Best Golf Advice I Ever Received".

If you're actually trying to understand, George Packer had a big article in The New Yorker about it recently. I haven't finished it yet, but it's good so far, and Packer's a superb journalist who has been looking at this question since before the election (he wrote a book called The Unwinding).

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt

https://www.amazon.com/Unwinding-Inner-History-New-America/dp/0374534608

Yes.


William Julius Wilson would agree.

Great book and thinker on this topic:

http://www.amazon.com/More-than-Just-Race-Issues/dp/0393337634

The thing is that Trump is not completely wrong (although he would have been a bit more correct about the currency manipulation a few years ago). The Japanese, South Korea, Taiwanese... and now the Chinese got rich protecting their own markets/currencies and selling to markets in North American and Europe (they did it by applying variations on what's called the 'developmental state" model). You could buy a South Korea car in the US long before you could buy an American car in South Korea. Their explicit national policy was to prioritize their growth over and above any "free market" considerations. In other words, they ignored the rules of free trade when it suited them. This is in fact not free or fair, and the costs of these policies are often borne by a concentrated unlucky few (even though everyone else benefits).

There is a fairly established literature on the politics surrounding trade, if anyone is interested. (I always tell people to start here and here to get in the proper analytical mindset). Notice that that NYT article never really quoted political economists, but only economists? That because the math of economics pretends the political consequences of trade do not exist. Trade absolutely needs to be accompanied by a generous welfare state to compensate the losers and keep them invested in the process.

Don't dismiss the anger of working class democratic voters. It's not sourced in irrationality.

This weekend, I was shopping at Barnes and Noble for a gift for my nephew, and noticed a big display in the children's biography section of picture books about Hillary! (I believe this was one of them, featuring a nice illustration of luminaries of women's history and culture gathering around Hillary.) Not gonna lie, that display was exactly what I needed in the midst of the Saturday caucuses.

(Also had to look into the S section to see whether you-know-whose life has been documented for kids. There was no Sanders biography, though I did see one about the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. I guess history really does tend to judge achievements with an accurate eye.)

> Can you cite your sources for the electoral college facts you came up with?

Regarding electors using independent judgment, read Hamilton's Federalist No. 68. Regarding the electoral college's connection to slavery, read Professor Akhil Reed Amar's The Constitution Today, which explores the history of the Electoral College, among other things.

> You also fail to understand that if this were a popular vote election, the entire game would be changed.

We can make an informed guess. The Bush/Gore election was close enough to say Bush could've won a popular vote, but Clinton's likely lead is going to be pretty large, in the 1-1.5% range. With 126 million votes out of 218 million registered voters, that is a very large and representative sample with margins of error that are much lower than 1%. Moreover, given that the campaigns were generally focused on national issues, voting behaviors aren't likely to change that much.

> Absolutely not all absentee ballots are included in that. Especially not at this point in time.

Legally, they must all be counted. Aside from speculation and rumors, there is literally no evidence that absentee ballots are not counted at any large scale, or in a way that's favorable to any particular candidate. Your quotation is unsourced and unprovable, and assumes that absentee ballots are counted last (there's no rule on what order they're counted) and assumes the election officials are shirking their duties. Moreover, these things are done at many different counting facilities, and it's not possible for one location to know for sure that every single issue on the ballot has a larger margin of victory than the remaining absentee ballots across the relevant region (be it city, county or state elections).

> You didn't address this one at all. Strange.

I only wanted to address the inaccuracies in your post. But, yes, I would be for this change even if my candidate won the EC. I was for this change back when Bush won, and I voted for him.

> The state of California has passed legislation that will automatically register eligible voters when they obtain or renew a driver’s license. ... Napolitano explained that in California, when one signs up for a driver’s license, one does not have to prove that they are in America legally."

No. What's automatic is that the registrant's information is sent to the Secretary of State, where citizenship is then verified. It's the same as if a non-citizen had filled out the voter registration application and mailed it in. My wife is not a citizen (she's a permanent resident) but has a California driver's license, but she's not registered to vote.

With regard to illegal immigrants, they do not get the same driver's license as other California residents (whether US citizens or not). It's a provisional license, and obtaining one does not trigger the voter registration process, not least because the person doesn't provide the DMV with a social security number.

I agree. I've been reading a great deal about that period in the last year or so, both pre-1933 and post. This book, which I've read twice, shows how people didn't think Hitler would last long once he came to power.

The difference between Bevin and a head of state is that a state governor ultimately is limited in his or her power. However, when you put a fascistic narcissistic dissembler in the head of state chair, it's a very different story.

His autobiography has quite good reviews. It's all about his decisions of course.

>My issue is that I don't understand why or how things got so polarized on this side.


I highly recommend It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein. Two respected and moderate political scientists go into the specifics of why American politics have become so polarized. I think we're just seeing that polarization on an intra-party level on the Democrat side more recently, though.

Linky for anyone else who is interested: http://www.amazon.com/Nonzero-The-Logic-Human-Destiny/dp/0679758941

That's not true. He is more popular than ever in Bezerkistan.

On my reading list: The Woman Destroyed.
https://www.amazon.com/Woman-Destroyed-Pantheon-Modern-Writers/dp/0394711033

Maybe because in the years following the invasion, no evidence was found to support the administration's main justifications for the war: namely, Iraq was engaging in large-scale manufacture of biological/nuclear WMDs and Saddam Hussein had ties to Osama bin Laden and the 9-11 attacks?

Or maybe because of the numerous revelations in the years since that indicate Bush was determined to go to war with Iraq and was seeking an excuse to justify it?

This happened pretty recently - it was in all the papers. Maybe read a book or two and educate yourself?

I believe what you are describing is technically called bullshit. https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946

Salon remains full of absolute trash opining articles that do fuckall to actually inform on the issue and simply are poorly written, selectively cited hitjobs.

I'd highly recommend Islam and the Future of Tolerance which is effectively a transcript of a conversation between Sam Harris, a liberal atheist, and Maajid Nawaz a former recruiter for a radical islamist organization, discussing the make up of the Islamic world and the problems that need to be addressed by moderates and rational thinkers.

While Maher is running a comedy show and often doesn't devote the time or detail necessary to make the required political arguments / points on a litany of subjects, his fundamental perspective on Islam is not accurately described as 'Islamophobia' any more than his views on Christianity make him Christphobic. It's a lazy way to sidestep having an actual conversation about the subject and the Left really has dropped the ball as we have a responsibility to denounce radicalism while still protecting normal / moderate believers.

The entire conversation is very dependent on nuance; Muslims generally are different from Islamists, Islamists are different from Jihadists. Muslims are simply believers in Islam, Islamists are Muslims that want to create political laws and governments based on their Islamic theology. Jihadists take it one step farther and want to spread that Islamic theology via aggression.

There are then ways to break down these categories even further, but Islamists and Jihadists are both very real, political organizations that have agendas that run counter to Western Democratic ideals. Islamist countries are by definition theocracies, the concepts of pluralism and separation of church and state are fundamentally in conflict with Islamist ideology.

Legitimate studies have shown that Islamists and Jihadists only make up 15-20% of Muslims worldwide, but that minority still need to be seriously considered and addressed. Religious extremism of any sort, whether it's from Christians attacking Planned Parenthood or Jihadists attacking clubs and concerts - the religious motivations and implications cannot be ignored and the Left has done itself a great disservice by refusing to make a nuanced argument for rational thought in defense of Muslims generally while still decrying radicalism.