Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

http://www.mtv.com/news/2955021/shirtless-trump-saves-drowning-kitten/

One of the stories of this election season is that the American right has now fully postmodernized itself. This would have been hard to imagine even 20 years ago. There was a time, not all that long ago, when conservative Republicans considered themselves the party of virtue, a word they used not only in the evangelical sense but also to conjure a loose tradition of European and American moral philosophy. They championed Locke as well as Leviticus. I remember, as a teenager in Oklahoma, the proliferation of books by William J. Bennett on my friends' fathers' shelves: parchment-colored behemoths full of phrases like "Aristotle would have loved this poem" and "the treasure house of human wisdom."

Virtue was church, but it was more than that. It was an intellectual formation, or at least a gesture toward one. It was a sense that great things had been thought and written in past centuries and that whether one chose to familiarize oneself with those great things personally, by reading them, respectable people would still regard them with respect.

Often the battleground for this idea was the integrity of language itself. The conservative idea, at that time, was that liberalism had gone insane for political correctness and continental theory, and that the way to resist the encroachment of Derrida was through fortifying summaries of Emerson. Great Books. Great Ideas. Ideas have consequences. Words mean things. Remember the Clinton-era furor over "it depends upon the meaning of what the word 'is' is"?

What had really happened was that the left had become sensitized to the ways in which conventional moral language tended to shore up existing privilege and power, and had embarked on a critique of this tendency that the right interpreted, with some justification, as an attack on the very concept of meaning. But what would we have without meaning? Isolation and chaos, conditions in which it would presumably be easy to raise the capital gains tax. So if the left found itself in the strange position of supporting science on the one hand while insisting that truth was a cultural construct on the other, the right found itself in the even stranger position of investing in meaning even as it dissociated itself from fact. Evolution was a myth and climate change was a hoax, but philosophers still had access to objective truth, provided they had worn curly wigs and died enough centuries ago.

I don't know when it happened. Maybe with intelligent design? Maybe Colin Powell's WMD testimony? Maybe it was already under way, with Fox News and Rush Limbaugh? But at some point, the American right — starting with the non-alt version, the one before the one we just elected — took another look at the postmodern critique of the linguistic basis of virtue and tumbled absolutely spinning into love with it. It turned out that postmodernism also contained the seeds of a system that would shore up existing privilege and power. All you had to do was take the insights of subversion and repurpose them for the needs of authority.

I think this actually relates to what shakey & i were just talking abt w/r/t politics as performance & truth value as being important but also as much about how something is conveyed as that it is conveyed

probably would help if the 2020 nominee were under a hundred. why can't younger people become politicans? the average age of house and senate is about 60. where's the freshness? it can't be my generation though because we have government-recognized slacker status. will have to be younger people.

Prior to this, we had three at least relatively young Presidents. The Democrats problem this time was that there was no rising star on the bench because they've done so badly on the state level. Most Presidents come from the pool of governors and Senators and there aren't that many Democratic governors and the Senate Dems average age is above 60 I think.

In other news I see that Cruz is already sucking up to Trump now too, awesome

milo otm

The Democrats problem this time was that there was no rising star on the bench because they've done so badly on the state level.

also i think it was widely perceived in the party that this was clinton's "turn" this time too

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/ct-trump-movie-truth-showbiz-mov-1118-20161117-column.html

In other news I see that Cruz is already sucking up to Trump now too, awesome

― Οὖτις, Thursday, November 17, 2016 3:06 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

TBF, if it wasn't Trump, he'd be sucking up to a dock post or the underside of a boat. Sucking up to things is just what aquatic mollusks do.

the president i get as far as not being TOO young. obama, dubya, and bubba in the comfortably not-too-young range. people don't want to vote for a kid. but there is no law that says congress and senate people have to be old white lawyers. it isn't in any rule book. i just think people should give it a go. pressure the morons anyway. i think some smart little grass roots attacks - even if its a losing campaign you get to bring up all the things wrong with your old corrupt opponent and the system in general - could actually be more useful than tons of public protests. you gotta bring the fight to them. they don't care about protests.

Cruz took a selfie!

http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large-5/barnacles-on-dock-tom-bohon.jpg

found another!

http://i.imgur.com/GzZ3dXe.jpg

That MTV piece I really enjoyed.

https://twitter.com/TheAngryFangirl/status/799352770742616064

i just chose this because it happened to pop up on my TL, but to me this is why rhetorical carelessness in these sorts of arguments is so pernicious. guys like matt yglesias or even deej don't actually think racism "explains", completely on it own, virtually every ill in our society or the outcome of the election, but they make essentially that argument for purposes of economy (no pun intended) and clearness of message. but then you get well-meaning dumb people who actually take the message to heart

i guess this is really just the danger of having what should probably be a nuanced, academic discussion on the platform of twitter for anyone to see

Not sure if you all hate Jon Stewart or not but he talks about things that have been talked about in this thread.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/jon-stewart-the-daily-show-former-host-election-2016-donald-trump-republicans/

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-romney-idUSKBN13C2L0

btw lol @ this, gotta hand it to these guys for not holding a grudge i guess

in other words Romney becomes as powerful and world historic as Colin Powell and William Rogers.

romney as SOS would be less disastrous than some alternatives i guess?

So I really hope they (1) pick a more liked candidate in 2020

Don't worry, the chances of anyone running a candidate that isn't a while male in the next 20 years are pretty much zero so that should sort itself out.

https://twitter.com/TheAngryFangirl/status/799352770742616064

i just chose this because it happened to pop up on my TL, but to me this is why rhetorical carelessness in these sorts of arguments is so pernicious. guys like matt yglesias or even deej don't actually think racism "explains", completely on it own, virtually every ill in our society or the outcome of the election, but they make essentially that argument for purposes of economy (no pun intended) and clearness of message. but then you get well-meaning dumb people who actually take the message to heart

i guess this is really just the danger of having what should probably be a nuanced, academic discussion on the platform of twitter for anyone to see

― k3vin k., Thursday, November 17, 2016 3:19 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not sure i see the problem w/ this tweet but if the truth is dangerous maybe the lie isn't a platform worth standing on?

romney as SOS would be less disastrous than some alternatives i guess?

― k3vin k.

in another time it would be a sigh of relief. I get the feeling Mittens will talk to foreign leaders, recount the chat with Trump in the Oval Office, and Trump will fart in his face.

lol

still id be relieved w/ romney as opposed to giuliani (who i guess was floated for both sos and ag?)

I can't see the Senate confirming Giuliani to anything tbh

Romney would sail through

Romney is by far the least awful name floated.

he's certainly a less odious option than any that has been floated for almost any position in the trump wh thus far

arg sry for the redundancy

Romney would be a perfectly fine SoS. If anything, his inability to fully convince conservatives he is crazy probably cost him in the election.

If things are still being floated, I'd be cool with Romney for president, vice president, counsel, secretary of anything, too, at this point.

I don't know how Romney's much vaunted pride would deal with his sitting with those grifters, charlatans, and thugs, but then again he's a Republican.

yeah that's an interesting needle to thread ... Trump prizes loyalty above all else, I can't really see Romney being convincing on that level. but idk, he's probably pretty good at being a toadying lickspittle tbf

He won't pick Romney - he was calling Russia the #1 threat to the US just 4 years ago.

what happened to Newtie...? He seems oddly absent. Maybe he will get to head NASA, I'd be cool with that.

He won't pick Romney - he was calling Russia the #1 threat to the US just 4 years ago.

yeah but now that Russia helps the GOP win elections (something I still can't fathom as being anything other than treason, btw) he's probably cool w it

Newt will be Bannon's body double.

idk what trump's doing here with the romney float but it's definitely not actually nominating him for state. he's messing with someone.

If things are still being floated, I'd be cool with Romney for president, vice president, counsel, secretary of anything, too, at this point.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, November 17, 2016 4:42 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

at this point yea

idk what trump's doing here with the romney float but it's definitely not actually nominating him for state. he's messing with someone.

again with the 4-dimensional chess suspicions

Trump is a moron

the neoliberal consensus seems awesome this week basically xp

the team is casting about for anybody that a) is willing to work for them, b) will swear total fealty to Our Fearless Leader and c) won't immediately start a firefight with congress

in other news

https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/799323021341097984

99 problems but a bitch ain't one amirite

i volunteer as tribute xp

Gingrich out

Brave of him

damn

this is like musical chairs

probably would help if the presidential nominee in 2020 (if there is an election) is someone besides the most hated candidate at that time.

hey, Andrew Cuomo! star star

― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius)

yeah two words for you morbz "president-elect trump"

Obama looks 95 years old in that Twitter video.

was gonna say the same thing but i think the lighting is just funny, there seems to be a light directly above his head that brings out the grey in his hair

Gingrich out

― Clay, Thursday, November 17, 2016 5:00 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Can't wait to see which somehow-even-worse dude he finds instead