Avery always said that arguing with people on the internet is like competing in the Special Olympics. At the end, he concluded, quite non-politically-correctly, you're all still disabled.
So this person is a Sanders supporter, and posted a hate video about Hillary Clinton and bashed her for a bit and bashed her supporters for being tricked by her ongoing witcheries and dishonesty.
And of course, I thought that was quite ridiculous. He was posting things by Breitbart and the New York Times, in support of his position of engaging in the ongoing and current distemper, of which those publications have, individually, long been convicted of taking potshots at Hillary and attempting to flay her alive every chance they devised.
So, after a few responsory jabs, in which I pointed out the hypocrisy of his actions, I finally posted, to his question, "how do you rationalize all these things about Hillary Clinton?" the following response.
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Okay. This is a long answer. Allow me to attempt to point you in a different direction.
So, you continue to ask how people rationalize your laundry list of Hillary's faults as, clearly, an avatar of the Elder God Cthulhu.
The correct answer, which you should have already understood, is "we don't".
This is not to say that we are denying she has any faults. But we are not required to rationalize, that is, make acceptable, ANY of the smear issues, true and false, that have arisen about her, to fully comprehend her raw capacity combined with decades of practical, high-level, and pertinent experience in politics, governance, and foreign relations, and determine she would be best to be President.
The reason I am bothering to explain any of this to you at this point is that you seem to think that people who support Hillary do not understand that she is flawed. I do not believe I could fully express to you what a severely naive and warped viewpoint that is.
The difference is, my dear padawan, people who support Hillary Clinton are in no way blinded by the false notion of her perfection. Hillary Clinton is a human, therefore, QED, she is not perfect.
That is one of the main, sustaining differences between Hillary supporters and Bernie supporters. We are in no way disillusioned by her because we have never been illusioned by her. We know her very well.
Yet the large majority of Sanders supporters seem to take any criticism of him or his ideas as blasphemy. LITERALLY. This is why the rest of us on the outside look upon Sanders followers as like a cult.
Bernie Sanders is a human, therefore, QED, he is not perfect. BUT HIS SUPPORTERS DO NOT WANT TO HEAR ANY OF THAT.
Let me discourage you from making an essential, novice mistake of assuming there is any one candidate who might ever be perfect. Because you believe that there may be the Chosen One waiting, undiscovered, to release humanity from the falsehoods of the Matrix, you believe that you will eventually find a person like that.
You will not.
I love Elizabeth Warren. Love her intelligent, laser-like focus at once illuminating and tearing through the misdeeds of Wall Street. But if I dig long and hard enough, I am quite sure I will eventually find some article somewhere which, oh, say, has produced an allegedly real police report indicating that she was cited for kicking a dog when she was 14 years old. Or some such ridiculous thing. Some misstep, some fault, some error in judgment. Because nobody is perfect.
Many, many little Sanders lambs have been so disillusioned and frustrated with the US government, state government, local government, police forces, etc. They have been doused with reality one too many times and they are steaming mad about it. About the failure, about the seeming uselessness of ever expecting anything to change.
But this disillusionment and frustration turn very quickly, and are thwarted into incensed righteousness and self-righteousness, which is a cardinal sin of politics. It is a cardinal sin of the intarwebs, as well, but ESPECIALLY of politics. And it is also a laughable, noobish mistake.
There IS NO Neo. Just as there IS NO spoon.
If you all are looking to Bernie Sanders and attaching that Messiah status to him, or at least, considering him as a Moses who might lead the country out from beneath the plagues of current oppressive and dysfunctional government and into the promised land of milk and honey which we all hold in our hearts that 'Murica can actually be like some day, you have been seriously misled. Moreover, you have, quite amateurishly, and also somewhat intentionally, misled yourselves.
You are, moreover, using your voice to publicly disparage one of the most powerful women on the planet. You might want to ask yourself why this is helpful to anyone. Is it an exercise in coercion, trying to turn people against her to vote for Sanders instead? Trying to pull people's negative feelings and resentment and fears of the Clintons to the surface?
And in that case, are you any - even a hair - better than Trump and his supporters?
Arguably, perhaps, THE most powerful woman in the world right now is Angela Merkel, and god knows she is far from perfect. But she is competent, and focused, and does not often shirk making difficult decisions. Does any of that sound familiar? There is a reason Hillary Clinton's latest memoir book is yclept "Hard Choices".
But few people, especially difficult to distinguish within the surging herds and crowds of Sanders supporters, want to give her credit for any of her extraordinary accomplishments in public service. ...Why?
If everyone were judged ONLY in terms of their errors, missteps, faults, and flaws, NONE of us are good enough people to lead anyone, parent anyone, teach anyone, cure anyone, counsel anyone, and so on.
If you are distinctly unable to successfully explain your support of Bernie Sanders in any other way than attacks on his opponent, then it is quite obvious that either you do not believe there are any truly convincing arguments to support him, or you simply have not done your homework.
Now, with that said, let me encourage you to reconsider your attacks on Hillary Clinton. I am not asking you to vote for her. But I do believe she has earned far more respect than she has been afforded by people who do not understand 1) reality, 2) politics, 3) the reality of American politics, 4) the dire straits of the US government currently.
Sure, it is not sexy and revolutionary to be pragmatic about governance and how things work IN ACTUALITY in Congress and interconnectedly with the rest of the world. But, FFS, who else will volunteer to actually roll up her sleeves and say, we've got work to do, let's get to it.
Bernie Sanders does not want to do it. What Bernie Sanders wants is to push his revolutionary agenda through Congress. If you approach him with anything else besides that, from what I have seen, he will simply grumpy Grandpa wave it away because he's too concerned with his main agenda.
The problem with the Sanders campaign, as one article I read today put it, is if you are continually shouting about what is wrong and being self-righteously pissed about it, you are actually not listening to what others are saying. Most Sanders supporters do not want to listen to what others are saying, which is why they troll writers and journalists and send them death threats and so forth, who have been negative in any way in public toward Sanders or his ideas.
I will post a few articles here, some journalistic, some opinion/bloggy, in case you would like to read them, regarding Hillary and politics, just so you might glimpse a different viewpoint than your own. I am not expecting you to. But it is what a good padawan would do.
If you already know everything, then what is the point of still being on the planet? Learning continues, always, because everyone else knows something - at least one thing - you do not. Asking you to rethink things, as you have been pleading with others to rethink things on their end, is only fair. Who knows? You just might learn something new, or gain a deeper/different understanding of something you considered familiar.
And with that, I am out of this convo. Thanks for pretending to listen - I know full well this is tl;dr. Hopefully you, at least, have reconsidered how your voice might best be used during this long year of political discord. ...Or disregard this entirely. After all, this is 'Murica - people are fully free to be as stupid as they feel like being at any given moment in time. And that is precisely why Republicans and Conservatives love it so.
Hillary Clinton and the Audacity of Political Realism
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