User talk:PackMecEng
Welcome
A belated welcome to Wikipedia! Now that you're an official Registered User, here's a coupe of items for your user page if you like. You can find other User Boxes to chose from here. Once again, welcome. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 02:41, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
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- Thanks! Still doing my best reading though all the best practices and formatting. So many articles but looks like good info! PackMecEng (talk) 03:16, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
- Glad I can help. I took the liberty of putting these items on your User page, (this is your Talk page) along with a userbox that says you're interested in history, assuming you are of course -- naturally you can add and remove whatever you like.
Also, you might want to familiarize yourself with Wikipedia:Manual of Style if you haven't already. This is where you'll find all of Wikipedias policcies and guidelines. Don't be overwhelmed. Virtually no one knows all the rules by heart, but at least you know where to look if and when issues come up. See you around! -- Gwillhickers (talk) 18:43, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
- Glad I can help. I took the liberty of putting these items on your User page, (this is your Talk page) along with a userbox that says you're interested in history, assuming you are of course -- naturally you can add and remove whatever you like.
pied piper
I had never run across that alleged strategy. Thanks much for posting the politico link,[1] it is a goldmine of factoids. Most of them belong over in USPE, 2016 rather than in Donald Trump of course (or in the campaign-specific spinoff articles), but it does have a lot of explanatory power. Not only was the polling bad -- politico's conclusion-paragraph on November 7th about the ups and downs of the Clinton'16 campaign which ended on a clear confident victory-note sounds ironic in the present timeframe with the benefit of hindsight -- but the switcheroo from the various estab-backed candidates to an unexpected anti-estab candidate redrew the swingstate-map, and at a time when Clinton'16 was tied up fighting off Sanders'16 on their left... making them unable to properly reposition their stances aka run to the middle, because not only were they fighting a rear-guard action against the liberal wing of the party they were no longer running to the same middle they had always planned on! I would be interested in seeing if the messaging and spending patterns of the DNC, and also of the Clinton'16 campaign and affiliated PACs, with respect to the various potential repub nom contenders, justifies the idea of the alleged Pied Piper strategy. It would be WP:OR just digging for the raw numbers as wikipedians, but if we can find an analysis-piece that was performed by a third-party journalist or political scientist or somesuch, that would count as WP:RS. In any case, appreciate you finding that URL, made my day :-) 47.222.203.135 (talk) 00:33, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
- Thanks! I was looking a bit while at work and didn't see anything jump out at me. I had planned on looking a bit more. If I find anything worthwhile I will certainly let you know though. Feels rather ironic considering how things eventually turned out though. PackMecEng (talk) 03:05, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
- Well, whether ironic is the word for it or not, there was definitely a long confluence of things that led up to the final outcome. Estab-repubs did not fight Trump because they did not take him seriously, estab-dems (allegedly) did not fight Trump because they wanted him to take out the estab-repubs, the media (allegedly) wanted Clinton to win and gave Trump double the free coverage that they gave to all other candidates combined, yet once Trump became the nominee the media *still* could not tear their eyes away thus continued to give him more airtime than Clinton, the media and the pollsters and the pundits all predicted he would lose, PrioritiesUSA believed the estab-media-pollsters who said Trump would lose PA by five points and pulled their millions (diverting from the potus-race to the usSen-races), Clinton too believed the estab-media-pollsters and wasted time and money campaigning in AZ/GA/TX/OH and neglecting MN/MI/WI... meanwhile, back at the ranch, the anti-establishment repub has mended fences with Priebus and the RNC establishment, and combines his unruly mass rallies with their disciplined groundgame, then by capitalizing on free media (no news is bad news) just eeks out one of the most astounding general election upsets in decades, maybe ever. This was a wild election cycle, with irony piled on surprise piled on seeming-self-satire by both major parties... what a crazy year. And I fully expect that history is just getting started on showing us how topsy-turvy the world can become, once the moorings break lose it is hard to halt the shift... see also realignment election, which is predicted every cycle, but this may *actually* have been one, if the EU is any indicator. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 17:18, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
- What I find kind of interesting these days is the populism wave in Europe. Does not get a lot of coverage here in the USA, but seems to be spreading all over the world. You mentioned EU and to me that really seemed to be the start with Brexit. Now the governments in Germany, France, Austria, the Netherlands, UK, and Italy are all fielding fairly strong populist candidates. Even parts of Asia, mainly with China, but also with the Philippines Duterte are peeking into the game. Not sure what will happen in South Korea, but that's going to be a sight with the turmoil over Park. They seem to be fed up in general with "government elites" which is a large drive again with China and South Korea. What kind of surprised me was Japan with all that, Abe being fairly popular but his main base being content about the present but pessimistic about the future. The next few years will be a heck of a ride, with no one really sure how it will end up. PackMecEng (talk) 04:24, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
- Yes, correct, although 'populism' usually is translated straight to 'racism' by the WP:RS, there is only the most tenuous linkage; example, Trump managed to win more African-American voters and more Hispanic/Latino voters than Romney, especially low-income folks, because he was anti-establishment AND pro-populist-economics. The old saw about it's-the-economy-stupid holds true nowadays also; plenty of coal-miners in WV/etc that would usually be expected to be dems, have now 'permanently' been turned into repubs, not because they are "anti-science" but because they are pro-self-interest and perceived Obama and Clinton were not going to preserve the coal industry, which ended up being a dealbreaker. The political spectrum of the EU is *very* shifted compared to the USA, so the examples over there are far more abundant, and the risk of a massive terrain-altering shift considerably higher.
- On a reasonably-multinational basis, though, we are simultaneously seeing a resurgence of nationalist sentiment (my-country-first-anti-globalism which is only about opposing immigration and using the military against foreign nations in a very weak correlative sense), plus a much more prevalent-in-terms-of-press-coverage resurgence of populist sentiment (which is tautologically defined as that-which-is-popular but more precisely is defined as that-which-earns-the-allegiance-of-lots-of-low-information-voters). 1890s was a big surge of populism, "raise less corn and raise more hell" for instance, but it was housed almost entirely within the William Jennings Bryan party -- at the time the repubs were the establishment, and ran the urban centers. The dems never 'won' their populist battle, but the *repubs* aka estab ended up splitting in twain, with the progressives 1930s-type T.R. repubs fighting the corporatist 1880s-type repubs for control. Now a hundred years later, the post-WWII establishment has been progressive aka Rockefeller repubs collaborating in reach-across-the-aisle fashion with corporatist aka centrist dems, weirdly enough: pro-military-interventionist abroad in their votes (if not always their rhetoric), pro-wall-street domestically in their votes (if rarely in their rhetoric), and tending to want centralized economic control by the federal government (despite rhetoric to the contrary on both sides).
- That is all shifting now: my-country-first is replacing internationalism militarily and altering globalism economically, and populist economics is pivoting the centralized economic control from being pro-wall-street to being the vastly-more-expensive pro-everyLowInformationVoter strategy (but still centralized control). Such shifts put the major-party coalitions (and the across-the-aisle cooperation which 'worked' until roughly 2010 or so) at risk of reconstitution into a qualitatively new form. This stuff is just WP:OR so take it with a pound of salt, obviously. But methinks you are distinctly correct when you say no one knows the future with any certainty: the shifts I'm describing could happen, but weakly, or could happen with a vengeance, or could appear to start happening... and then result in a massive reactionary backlash. Trump's win and Brexit and such might end up being like the Bull Moose Party, important and altered history but weren't the *key* historical lynchpins to a pivot-point... or they might end up being Archduke-Ferdinand-type canary in the coalmine indicators.
- Whether or not those specific events were the tipping-point lynchpins, we are fairly clearly *at* a tipping point, where the unpredictability is inherent in the times: the establishment political structure is being altered, and there is enough of a groundswell of people demanding change (including ~3m people that voted for Obama's version of change and then 'switched' sides to vote for Trump's version of change... but in a more pertinent sense stuck firm to demanding change consistently), such that plenty of possibilities are possible in the coming decade-or-less, that would have been 'impossible' just a couple-few years ago.
- I had not really considered the anti-elite anti-corruption stuff in Asia to be related, but you might be correct, that they are railing against the same sort of establishment power-centers as the "populist" millions of disaffected voters in the EU... will look into that, thank you. Japan on the other hand, would really shock me if they have a recognizably-populist movement of any sort... the culture there is so stringently homogenizing, there is room for a 'Japan-First' sort of politics (which in pre-WWII was a *military* sort of pro-Japan sentiment and in post-WWII altered to be an *economic* sort of Japan-First sentiment) but I would be interested/terrified/fascinated to see if there is a politically-powerful equivalent of 'non-urbanized blue-collar lower-middle-class' demographic in Japan. Will look at that too! Any more homework you need to assign me, please drop me a note, but for the moment I will flee your talkpage in fear of my brain hitting the 'full' marker and spilling out my ear canals :-) 47.222.203.135 (talk) 12:16, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
- What I find kind of interesting these days is the populism wave in Europe. Does not get a lot of coverage here in the USA, but seems to be spreading all over the world. You mentioned EU and to me that really seemed to be the start with Brexit. Now the governments in Germany, France, Austria, the Netherlands, UK, and Italy are all fielding fairly strong populist candidates. Even parts of Asia, mainly with China, but also with the Philippines Duterte are peeking into the game. Not sure what will happen in South Korea, but that's going to be a sight with the turmoil over Park. They seem to be fed up in general with "government elites" which is a large drive again with China and South Korea. What kind of surprised me was Japan with all that, Abe being fairly popular but his main base being content about the present but pessimistic about the future. The next few years will be a heck of a ride, with no one really sure how it will end up. PackMecEng (talk) 04:24, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
- Well, whether ironic is the word for it or not, there was definitely a long confluence of things that led up to the final outcome. Estab-repubs did not fight Trump because they did not take him seriously, estab-dems (allegedly) did not fight Trump because they wanted him to take out the estab-repubs, the media (allegedly) wanted Clinton to win and gave Trump double the free coverage that they gave to all other candidates combined, yet once Trump became the nominee the media *still* could not tear their eyes away thus continued to give him more airtime than Clinton, the media and the pollsters and the pundits all predicted he would lose, PrioritiesUSA believed the estab-media-pollsters who said Trump would lose PA by five points and pulled their millions (diverting from the potus-race to the usSen-races), Clinton too believed the estab-media-pollsters and wasted time and money campaigning in AZ/GA/TX/OH and neglecting MN/MI/WI... meanwhile, back at the ranch, the anti-establishment repub has mended fences with Priebus and the RNC establishment, and combines his unruly mass rallies with their disciplined groundgame, then by capitalizing on free media (no news is bad news) just eeks out one of the most astounding general election upsets in decades, maybe ever. This was a wild election cycle, with irony piled on surprise piled on seeming-self-satire by both major parties... what a crazy year. And I fully expect that history is just getting started on showing us how topsy-turvy the world can become, once the moorings break lose it is hard to halt the shift... see also realignment election, which is predicted every cycle, but this may *actually* have been one, if the EU is any indicator. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 17:18, 16 January 2017 (UTC)