Trump, May 2017: 100 days of [unintelligible]

I thought the accepted protocol was, in fact, to lightly cup the buttock of a person who refuses to take your hand.

― PJD PDJ DPJ (DJP), Tuesday, 23 May 2017

I tried this on Saturday, didn't work

https://i.redditmedia.com/KZfgmGbUIZWLYq2CUxvS-wLZU0xv6t8EfP_KrssM8iA.png?w=1024&s=0a1fe2c8b98221e77b0e94cc8e629927

i can't blame her campaign, really. when your opponent is this giant fucking world record asshole who is literally one of the worst people on earth and flaunts it at every opportunity, it's probably pretty tempting to just point at him and say "look. look at that. you're not going to vote for that, right?", and surely they did tons of focus testing that determined that "look at that. don't vote for that" was more effective then "i'm going to keep doing what barack obama did, basically" as a message. but the increase in personal attacks compared to previous campaigns is pretty jarring.

I think this is a reasonable explanation that has been very easy to dismiss in hindsight, though it would've held more weight if voting was mandatory and not something you have to actually compel people to go and do. I mean, my mom has a pretty poor voting record but she was all over early voting for Hillary in 2016, but I guess there were just fewer people like her than there were people who just didn't feel like buying what anyone was selling.

Trump taking aim at them where it hurts: their self esteem.
Is there anything particularly wrong with this? No rhetoric is going to be remotely useful but it's probably better to call them dorky failures than use the kind of grandiose hyping up of 'evildoers' that Bush kept engaging in.

― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Tuesday, May 23, 2017 9:23 AM (six hours ago)

yeah i like "evil losers"

It's terrible, not merely because of the inarticulacy of it, but also because of what it implies. Losers = bad people, people who win = good. Well, the fact is, the families of the tragedy are the losers, here.

Have you heard about the evil losers
Beaten by the Donald Trump every time

evil dopes

Angry young jihadi men are just medieval cosplay versions of elliot rodger. They are total losers. The only thing wrong with Trump's statement is that he is also a loser and for similar reasons.

Would it help to start saying that ISIS stands for "I'm Sexually Impotent, Señorita"? Or maybe just start calling them tinydicks. Is that offensive?

A certain senator is getting feisty!

I hope Gen.Flynn decides to comply with our Intel Committee subpoena to produce business documents. Otherwise all options should be on table

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 23, 2017

The Plankton tweets!

theres a ludlum fanfic that shouldve been let die

we only defeated the Taliban thanks to Bush's crafty "Taliban stands for Total Abject Losers I Believe Are Nerds" strategy

'evil losers' is going to be trump's 'we will fight them on the beaches' isn't it

#BreakingNews - @realDonaldTrump retains atty Marc Kasowitz as private atty in independent counsel probe more coming

— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) May 23, 2017

Angry young jihadi men are just medieval cosplay versions of elliot rodger. They are total losers. The only thing wrong with Trump's statement is that he is also a loser and for similar reasons.

fwiw, the most persuasive research I have seen on the backgrounds of people who join ISIS suggests the majority are from aspirational middle class families and have above average educational achievements but hit some kind of roadblock. In the west the classic stereotype would be people who have fallen into petty crime, drugs, etc, and converted in prison but the archetypal recruit in, idk, Tunisia or Kazakhstan, is probably going to be closer to something like an engineering graduate to gets out of university and realises the job market is terrible or police / military officers who get to a certain rank but can't progress any higher. They are then fairly susceptible to people who will maliciously play on that resentment and bitterness to convince them that they can help overthrow the corrupt secular, western-tainted systems by taking part in a global religious revolution. There is obviously an appeal to self-esteem, wounded pride, etc as well.

The "losers" narrative is a fairly ineffective but not incorrect way to undercut the idea that there is some heroism involved in killing children but obviously doesn't address the numerous roadblocks (everything from corruption to racism to static social mobility) that contributes to the initial resentment. It is less dangerous than the clash of civilisations narrative or the unintended glamourising that a lot of the right has relied on in the past though.

so trump used to be more articulate? https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/23/donald-trump-speaking-style-interviews/

That's our Trump, not PC, talking straight.

I echo the above, that him speaking of ISIS the way he speaks of Marco Rubio or Arnold Schwarzenegger neuters whatever force such blunt talk had to begin with. He might as well call them girlie men.

From a linguist http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=32844

XP There's still time!

ty caek xp

This is...a bad take:

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/527805/

What Progressives Miss About Arms Sales

Celebrating their success in retaining blue-collar jobs is one way Republicans are winning the votes of working-class Americans.

ANDREW EXUM
2:34 PM ET POLITICS

I love how MacArthur thinks this is some kind of a big secret.

A revealing Q&A with Rep. Tom MacArthur: he says some Republicans privately want to leave the health-care law as is https://t.co/WtR5vxXr4f

— Robert Costa (@costareports) May 23, 2017

Do tell

The "losers" narrative is a fairly ineffective but not incorrect way to undercut the idea that there is some heroism involved in killing children but obviously doesn't address the numerous roadblocks (everything from corruption to racism to static social mobility) that contributes to the initial resentment.

I know ShariVari. I'm not going to start adopting Trumpian attitudes wrt terrorism. I don't feel a lot of sympathy, though, for anyone who responds to their own bad lot in life by hurting others. I'm also sort of uncomfortable naming racism and economic injustice as "causes" of terrorism, because that seems to imply that victims of injustice, or people who had opportunities taken from them, will just "naturally" turn to some kind of antisocial outlet. And this is just not how it works.

This guy did what he did because he made a decision to buy into a certain ideology.

I'm not going to start adopting Trumpian attitudes wrt terrorism

Adopt Trumpian children instead

and then abandon them in bars

Like, elliot roger's bad luck in love didn't cause him to shoot those people. Trump's emptionally distant father didn't cause him to become a malignant narcissist who makes sexist remarks in order to feel powerful. These are contributing factors but in a civil society there needs to be a concept of moral agency. That's why I don't think it's enough to see jihadist ideology as just a social problem. It is that -- it's arisen in this way at this specific time because the conditions were right for it. But it's also a political ideology that people believe in. It has its own substantive reality; it's not reducible to its causes.

dude acting like people whose entire families have been killed by drones should play by your rules is nagl

As far as I know the people behind these attacks are not people whose families have been killed by drones. Probably more importantly ISIS does not understand itself to be retaliating against the West because of the Iraq War. They see themselves as being engaged in a war of ideas against the West.

dude acting like people whose entire families have been killed by drones should play by your rules is nagl

What you call "your rules" are the principles underlying a civil society with respect for human life. One you either feel like living in and preserving, or you don't. Now you can quite easily and plausibly argue that drone warfare is a fucked-up thing, but to extrapolate that to "well, if someone's family was killed by the US military then all bets are off" is, I would argue, much more nagl.

"Arabs clean yr doorstep" never agl iirc

Like this is not excusing drone attacks at all. It's not even saying that the violence purveyed by the West doesn't contribute to an environment where people become drawn to ISIS or similar. But I also don't think it's a good idea to just say this attack is simply "blowback." Why target an Ariana Grande concert in that case?

Xp sleeve again

I would buy t-shirt or print of

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 23, 2017

i'm a little worried about josh marshall

is there an option for his deleted porn query tweets

Hooray oh wait

Leaked transcript: Trump praised Duterte for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem”

He's murdering people.https://t.co/KvuaSjDMM6 pic.twitter.com/1pyBJs4s2H

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) May 23, 2017

He left it up!

Xp mayor j.

Yeah ned thats chilling

Are ISIS suicide bombers really that different from the Eric Hoffer's True Believer of early 20th century authoritarian mass movements? More than half of the pull quotes here apply equally to Edwardian anarchists, Bolsheviks, Nazis or ISIS suicide bombers.

young guys throwing epic temper tantrums?

I'm not sure I understand how Trump's Duterte comments are breaking news. Duterte has been unambiguously promoting the murder of his people for months, and Trump has been unambiguously championing Duterte's actions for months. Horrifying, of course, but nothing new.

when will werner herzog make a trump documentary?

Doc about Sean Spicer would be better

spinsly man

There are a heap of people replying to that Jaffy tweet saying basically "theyre drug dealers, whats the problem?" Urrrrghh.

(I mean ok I'm not gonna take anything a fucking pepe frog says seriously but still)

masculinity is the most undiagnosed mental illness: the story of 2017

^^^