Aftermath

As always, Ed has good analysis here and here. From the first link:

A critical element in Trump’s election victory was how the mainstream media was totally blindsided by the Internet. Have you noticed how the old media still acts as if the Internet was some kind of extension of the print-based world they dominated? They have no clue: virtual space shares little with meat space. While most of the people who use the Network do it instinctively, it’s not so very hard to become conscious of it’s vastly different nature. The old media still assumes they can somehow build walls around media and create an artificial shortage of news as a product. They are the only trustworthy source, of course. News is whatever they choose to tell you is newsworthy — except that news of that sort is not the same as data on the Internet. Information is free and it was the free exchanged of ideas in conflict with the mainstream media that enabled this political revolution.

It’s funny: 100% of mainstream media content creators are coastal. Do you would ever think they would give a fair shake to people in flyover country? There’s no incentive for them to do so. Middle America types, as normal human beings, can only be mocked for so long before dropping the gee-wilikers act and start seriously having a problem with it. This is neither an endorsement nor a condemnation on my end of anything that will happen, or has happened, as a reaction to being unfairly maligned; just an observation of basic human behavior. I’m not surprised of the blowback against elitism and coastal neo-liberalism. If you bother people who just want to be left alone enough, they eventually won’t give damn what names you call them or how much shame is heaped on them.

As Scott Adams is fond of saying, none of the candidates “align with my political views,” but I prefer some more than others. Trump’s nationalism is more in my favor, because nationalism tends towards being in the favor of that particular country’s citizens. The same with isolationism and fascism. At the opposite end is imperialism and globalism, which tend towards a significant strain in national resources and require lots of mass socialization for people to be sort of okay with it. I didn’t vote on principle and for practical reasons, but as it stands now I, materially, preferred Trump over Clinton.