74% of the American population have IQs between 90 and 109, THE AVERAGE RANGE. The meaning of this election has to do with cultural factors not intellectual abilities. (I am a psychologist, who has given IQ tests for 20+ years.)

we can't forget that half the population has no common sense.

Just couldn't leave the smart-ass remark alone

Note that I didn't mention what they were below average at. Nor did I mention whether they were below the median or the mean.

"Average"-- the arithmetic mean; commonly known as that number you get when you divide the total on the list by the number of entries on the list. By definition, then, half are above and half below less the number, if any, that might actually be in the middle.

But, that only makes sense when dealing with a bell curve. Other curves require medians, or modal points. And now if you want to bring in ranges, that blows away the whole simplistic point of arithmetical averages and sends you straight into modal points.

But, little of this counts should I take my own silly comment seriously and say it was about education and understanding, not IQ points.

(Although, yeah, this last election is evidence of a lot of stupidity out there.)

He argued in your behalf! So, my position as a psychologist, who has given thousands of people IQ tests, is that we never assign JUST a number. We talk in ranges, because no IQ test is perfectly predictable of a person's potential. He stated that from his perspective as a statistician, and now distinguished professor, is that he thinks in data points. Viva la difference!

trump got less than 61.5 million of the 227 Americans 18 or older who could vote.

Fascism is coming thanks to the votes of about a quarter of eligible citizens.

They are a minority. Don't let them rule like a majority.

Look at the shitty people in Congress. Look at the shitty governors and the shitty state legislatures across the country.

but man, he pulled out the worst of the fucking worst. Who in the their daily life are otherwise lovely people like my neighbors.

Americans are fucking morons. They have a big surprise coming. The crying is it will affect US.

With about another 5% leaning shitty, but who are persuadable in certain circumstances.

I think you're right about Obama too. He represents the best of us. And he's such a great speaker that he lifts people up with his words. Makes them feel as though they can be better, do better, aim higher. Oh gods above, we're gonna miss that man.

But I was born and raised in red Indiana, and I know how shitty people really are.

I think we had a white voter backlash this time around. A anti-intellectual, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and just plain ignorant backlash, to use your words. And although the MSM loves to think they were disenfranchised blue-collar workers, I've seen polling showing they were mostly upper middle class voters who were not financially stressed at all. They were, however, afraid. They were fearful of THE OTHER, of losing what they have, of CHANGE.

I wonder where that fear comes from. From ignorance? From culture? From personality? How da hell do you fight such deeply held and irrational fear?

Thanks for the laugh. Fear comes from the unknown. You know lots of gay people you don't fear them anymore. You live around Mexicans you don't fear them. I have had Mexicans be nicer to me 99%of the time than white people in a store or restaurant. Going out of their way to be nice. I can't imagine the selfishness the unchristianess (made up a word?) that would say hey I don't care if children lose their parents forever-as long as I make .50cents more an hour. It's just pure selfishness.


But I have to say I had racist parents. They had horrible opinions of Black people. I never understood it. Our suburb was lilly white. I think it's a mental defect or maybe a lack of a soul.

As John Lennon sang in Working Class Hero: "They keep you doped on religion and sex and TV, but you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."

TV is the main drug, now. Too many people look at the world as just a "reality" TV show, so they elect a "reality" TV star. (And then there are those of us living in ACTUAL reality....)

I mean, this is in addition to the racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia, but it sure reinforces the anti-intellectualism and outright ignorance.

Really? This is how you want to attract white, working class voters? Driving a wedge between whites and blacks is a Republican strategy-when did Democrats start doing it?

White Americans, and frankly, I don't give a shit about winning elections any more. What good will it do? We had 8 years of a terrible president in Bush, and we thought that it was worth it to get a great president in Obama. Now, we have an even worse president than Bush. So what good does it really do to win a fucking election? Anything good as a result will be quickly undone in the next cycle.

I just don't think we will win many elections by openly denigrating white, working class males. We are in this together and adopting a strategy where we put down a big segment of our population is foolish. I tend to agree with you about the elections, we seem to be continually moving further right after each election. And yet, polling shows Americans want more progressive policies. We are buying the media lie that the populace is "conservative".

The White working class won't support a progressive agenda. They only want benefits for themselves and no one else. They only want Capitalism when it works for them. No amount of reach out is going to work. They're shitty people. End of story.

Not all white people think alike just like not all black people think alike. Seeing the election in such simplistic terms works against us. Calling all white people "shitty" is really, really dumb.

Again, look at the state and federally elected officeholders, not just the president, and you see a definite pattern.

The KKK and other bigots, sure. But most of the rest are simply misinformed and ignored. Our educational system has failed now for decades to produce people who can think critically. We aren't teaching kids how to judge the reliability of information and make a conclusion. We're just teaching them to accept the information. That coupled with social media where we can just fall into our own little bubble of what we want to hear is proving to be a dangerous situation.

that is some of them, but most of the ones I know just plain like looking down on certain people

How do you exactly "reach out" to them?

they are so easily fooled by lies and propaganda, I think it is impossible

we need to work on the sane people who either didn't vote or threw their vote away

and being nice - they do not respect you.

We need to start just telling them like it is, this is how it is and they will go along because they are being told.

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
~
LYNDON B. JOHNSON, 1960, remark to Bill Moyers, "What a Real President Was Like," Washington Post, 13 November 1988

Oh.
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Never mind.

Even supposedly neutral shows are actually right wing now and whenever the topic of Liberal talk is discussed it's treated like nothing but a money pit.

Republicans who listen to right wing radio are the absolute most obnoxious.

my neighbor with the trump sign worked 30 years for CDOT and is retired with a fat pension.. no money worries at all. Why should he be disgruntled? WTF is his problem. Collecting a taxpayer funded paycheck and pension.
Then there's the couple down the street, own a couple of houses, new cars.. WTF is their problem?

No, most of the trumpers I know are doing just fine.. they have theirs and fuck anyone who might need some assistance because they never did.. bullshit! I'm sick of them all.

OK, maybe they're not racists, but they're sure willing to vote for one because Hillary had emails or some stupid shit. Yes, many Americans are just shitty people. OK, I'm done.

Tell me -- are you part of that 40%? I'm curious...

So, why waste the fucking effort?

Taking a road trip up the California coast a couple months ago, once you get out of the cities, you could see nothing but pro Trump signs. That's who his biggest supporters were. While Hillary was campaigning in big cities, Trump went to rural communities and farming towns. They're the ones who saw Trump's message and turned out in droves to elect him. We may never take back SCOTUS unless we start reaching out to the smaller communities in this country.

I really, really do not care.

Given that white people are still the plurality of voters in this country, people making sweeping generalizations about them isn't going to sway them to the "good guys" either.

If I didn't see the issues at a deeper level than most Americans, some of the commentary that I've seen here would probably turn me away -- e.g., "white snowflakes" and the like.

These mostly white dudes have had thirty to thirty-five YEARS to figure out what happened to this country, yet they still turn around and vote for the very people who are destroying their way of life.

Years ago, I was screaming about what was happening to anybody who'd listen. However, these guys voted for Reagan, who started the destruction of this country's living standards. I used to have compassion for these guys, but enough is enough now.

We don't need to be nice to them because they sure as hell aren't nice to us.

and the golden rule might apply, you know? This idea of insulting them does not help convince them has to go. There are people who start respecting you when you put your foot down with them. Tough love is what they prescribe for others. Often they respond better to it than we would.

I understand that a majority of white people, even white women, voted for Trump. Not all of them did (including me), and I'd prefer to not be "profiled" for their actions anymore than African Americans. There's several white folks who aren't doing well. I've worked alongside many of them in factories over the years. Some of the poorest counties in this country are in mostly-white former coal mining areas too. I hope Democrats will frame arguments in terms of class because I think there's a large number of untapped votes there. We're all going down the drain if people remain divisive about something as silly as skin color.

We're ALL related and we ALL came from Africa, some more recently than others. In fact, dark-skinned Africans from the NE part of that continent are more closely related, genetically, to all other "races" of people than they are to dark-skinned Africans from other areas. It's because our ancestors were in Africa for far longer than the time it's taken to spread out to the rest of the planet. Skin color lightened over time because whiter skin converts sunlight to Vitamin D more easily, so people covered in thick clothing in less-sunny areas were more prone to rickets than to sunburn in those conditions (especially if their diet wasn't rich in Vitamin D from sources such as fish).

Segregation hasn't helped matters. I think lots of people have very faulty ideas about each other. I've seen white people talk like they think most African Americans are on welfare. I've also seen African Americans talk like they think white folks are all living on easy street. Meanwhile, we're too divided as a small number of psychopaths trample others to fulfill their short-sighted and self-serving goals, like it's happened so often in human history.

These dudes are entirely the white dudes who think they should make big bucks because of their skin color and their dicks. I have dealt with these entitled assholes all my life. They think women and minorities don't deserve an equal footing.

They deserve no sympathy and no compassion. They willfully and stupidly vote against their economic interests over and over and over again. They have had thirty to thirty-five years to know how their living standards plummeted and who did it and why.

Just don't assume that we're all that dumb.

There's stupid people everywhere who get swayed by superficial ideas. I worked as a temp in a factory back in the 80's when one guy started playing his portable radio tuned to Limbaugh (the first time I heard him) during lunch breaks. Limbaugh talked about high corporate taxes paying for "welfare queens" (clearly insinuating they were mostly black), and I later heard white co-workers blaming that supposed phenomena for their minimum wage ($3.35/hour) in a literal sweat shop where people sometimes fainted in the "oven" where the painted parts were dried on a conveyor system.

As Noam Chomsky says, we're not effectively reaching these people. It doesn't help that people with lots of money also own most of our media. They WANT the "peons" of this country to be divided.

It also troubled me to see a poll a few months ago that indicated a pretty significant number of African Americans willing to vote for Kanye West. We're going to end up with Phil Robertson vs. Kanye West for President if this idiocy continues.

EDIT:
By the way, the African Americans at that crappy company were generally smart enough to avoid the "oven" jobs, which generally entailed blowing the parts with compressed air (to speed up drying even more) and inspecting them.
I don't think they were as naively "trusting" in the company as the white employees there.

It is nearly impossible to change that mindset.

“Ninety percent of everything is crud.” (Said in a period when a more descriptive word would have gotten censored.)

I prefer to believe that at heart most people are at heart decent beings. The problem is that too many have been taught to hate but were never taught how think so they cannot change their early programming.

George Lakoff attempted to help Democrats re-frame the political dialogue during and after the 2004 election but Democrats did not embrace his work at the Rockridge Institute. While Lakoff's ideas might not be practical, liberals need to find some way to reach a broader spectrum of the country and how to frame our points to influence them. Instead we tend to use the language that conservatives use to slant the argument by the very words that name the issues.

You also have no clue what happened in this election. What some guy said in 2004 bears NO relevance here.

Because rudeness is such a powerful tool to get people to change their minds.

You think that politeness and kindness is going to work on a group of people that voted for a man who made fun of a person with disabilities at a rally?

I suspect that once the Trump followers realize that he lied to them to get into office they will be willing to look at something different. Maybe they would even respond to reasoned arguments.

But if Democrats continue to fight among ourselves and DUers gratuitously are rude to each other we will get nowhere.

Shitty people are going to be shitty.

And that includes online.