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

https://thecorrespondent.com/5696/were-heading-into-dark-times-this-is-how-to-be-your-own-light-in-the-age-of-trump/1611114266432-e23ea1a6

sarah kendzior is scaring me

I really would like everyone saying "this is not normal" would go back and actually read through the history of the United States and what this country has done to practically every marginalized group it has ever encountered.

It's helpful to say that the path we are currently on is dangerous; saying it's not "normal" is to glibly ignore all of the horrendous things that have happened in this country's history and to falsely conflate "normal" with "good" and "desireable". The problem is much deeper and much more insidious than that. This is, after all, the same country that lynched members of my family less than 100 years ago; in the global scale of history, that was yesterday.

A good 2002 piece on Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.

DJP otm history is always instructive

altho tbf having a totally unqualified/unprepared moron as chief executive is def not normal

re: that Kendizor link "The days of Free Speech may soon end." I'm getting kinda sick of proclamations like this. We're basically building such a bogeyman that if Trump doesn't end up actually having journalists gunned down in the street he'll look moderate against expectations.

Trump’s appointees need to get confirmed. Attorney General-designee Jeff Sessions, whose nomination to a federal judgeship was blocked in the 1980s by a bipartisan group of senators because of alleged racist comments he had made as U.S. attorney, will not be able to coast through the Judiciary Committee, despite the fact he is a member. (In fact, that actually hurts his prospects – because he cannot vote for himself.)

lol totally forgot about this. confirmation hearings will be fun (I bet he gets in tho)

I'm getting kinda sick of proclamations like this.

agreed that hysteria is not a good look. basically the flipside of "they're comin for our guns!"/FEMA camps/we're at WAR WITH ISLAM stuff

xpost Senators voting down another Senator is not going to happen

true, but imagine the grandstanding

the thrilling empty threats, the blatant lies, the partisan bickering

agreed that hysteria is not a good look. basically the flipside of "they're comin for our guns!"/FEMA camps/we're at WAR WITH ISLAM stuff

^alas, that hysteria proved to be effective

on the subject of leftist steps moving forward, just wanted to take a moment to note the two middle-aged glassy-eyed crank socialist white guys who spent their evening last night outside of a town hall for columbia grad workers contemplating our upcoming union election, trying to berate students (who are already being swayed by an aggressive anti-union campaign from their bosses) into voting 'no' because the UAW ''supports trump'' and anyway because unions are a reformist tool of capitalism and only revolutionary politics represent true solidarity with other workers. not the actual workers in front of them, telling them that they personally, desperately, needed this union in order to get paid on time and secure protections against the depradations of trump as well as columbia, but some other workers somewhere else. to be fair they spent most of this argument convinced they were talking to barnard contingent faculty at a barnard event, so maybe those are the workers they were thinking of. suggestions that they leave and find the people they were actually looking for were viewed with evident suspicion --- a classic reformist trick of the economic nationalists at UAW headquarters, no doubt!

mostly i focused on trying to shepherd students up the stairs in good cheer, and making it clear that the intensive loud men shoving flyers at them were not affiliated with our union. i would have rather been helping set up the refreshment tables but so it goes.

at one point, after they switched to calling us the ''columbia faculty'' and waxing on about how it took the bolsheviks (he struggled to get the name right) to bring revolution in russia, i pointed out that i don't stand outside their meetings telling people the communists or some other group that is not the World Socialist Web (or whatever their flyers said they were) are inside, and they accused me of red-baiting. a student felt so harassed by them that she went to get campus security; they said ''the UAW is calling the police on protesters!'' and started filming her (and her six-month-old baby) on their cellphones. solidarity!

Er ''intense'' not ''intensive''

re: that Kendizor link "The days of Free Speech may soon end." I'm getting kinda sick of proclamations like this. We're basically building such a bogeyman that if Trump doesn't end up actually having journalists gunned down in the street he'll look moderate against expectations.

exactly, not trying to underestimate the awfulness here but we're going to slip into this same pattern where Trump gets praised for any little baby steps he takes towards being "presidential"

^alas, that hysteria proved to be effective

yeah but I would prefer our side to be somewhat fact-based

things are gonna be bad enough, no need to go full-blown makin-shit-up-to-be-scary

i completely agree shakey. just making a minor "btw" point.

Things will be bad, things will probably not be as bad as the worst predictions, and the worst predictions would ideally be framed in terms of 'this is how bad it COULD get and why, and here's what you can do to help forestall the malignity' rather than 'TRUMP WILL LITERALLY EAT YOUR CHILDREN IN FRONT OF YOU, BE VERY AFRAID' (which is not at all what I'm suggesting Kendzior's piece does).

The emphasis should be on skepticism, pragmatism, vigilance, and practical positive action.

otm

I really would like everyone saying "this is not normal" would go back and actually read through the history of the United States and what this country has done to practically every marginalized group it has ever encountered.

It's helpful to say that the path we are currently on is dangerous; saying it's not "normal" is to glibly ignore all of the horrendous things that have happened in this country's history and to falsely conflate "normal" with "good" and "desireable". The problem is much deeper and much more insidious than that. This is, after all, the same country that lynched members of my family less than 100 years ago; in the global scale of history, that was yesterday.

― ¶ (DJP), Friday, 18 November 2016 16:19 (forty minutes ago) Permalink

Yes. This is why I hated the "normal" language during the campaign. "Normal" is not the goal here. "Normal" is a false security blanket. Liberal cocooning with grubhub and prestige television. Trump didn't make Jeff Sessions out of clay, he is in the fucking US Senate.

he is made of clay tho

the "normal" language may not be accurate re: history but I think a lot of the intent is motivational - these people having power should not be just another administration, don't become indifferent to the consequences (esp if you don't face any yourself), stay pissed off rather than depressed and hopeless.

isn't this also about the notion of "normalization"—of accepting false frameworks that do violence as inevitable or acceptable

obviously, lots of bullshit is already normalized—black lives matter was largely a push against the normalization of something terrifying & real & violent. I think the push against normalization is OK if it's done w/out acting as if its an exclusively new thing.

it's a bit of a fine needle to thread, to point out that trump is uniquely bad but also teh systems that have rewarded him are just one data point in a long line of structural violence

You can achieve the same effect with "This is not right".

on npr this morning they interviewed a woman who worked with gen flynn in afghanistan.. she said some nice things but also said he was as organized as pigpen from the peanuts. when asked what her reaction to his appointment was, "my heart sank"

awesome!

I prefer that these ideologues be incompetent tbh. incompetence will wreak its own damage/havoc, but I'm inclined to say the situation would be worse if Trump had a team of people who really knew how to get shit done and had terrible ideas, rather than a team that doesn't know how to do a goddamn thing and has terrible ideas.

at the risk of bringing up the Nazi comparisons again, one of the things that made them so awful was that they were so competent and bureaucratic

srs question: was J Edgar Hoover competent?

with these clowns the worst crimes are going to be lack of oversight i.e., what they enable more competent ideologues (like Ryan, local law enforcement, intelligence operatives, etc.) to execute

dude Hoover was a master

at keeping his job for almost 50 years, at least. xxp

it's possible this 'team' will have a hard time eclipsing the batshit thuggery of the Reaganauts, but records were made to be broken

also, the stakes are higher now

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html
this is maybe the worst piece I've read since the election

he published that the day trump announced his third racist cabinet member...

"Liberal cocooning with grubhub and prestige television"

this is most of the country forever though. not just now and not just liberals. as a people just really good at not thinking about what the government does and what people in power do. or they just figure they can't do anything about it. i dunno. iraq is a distant memory to a lot of people here. they couldn't tell you what has happened there in the last however many years. how many people could?

You can achieve the same effect with "This is not right".

― ¶ (DJP), Friday, November 18, 2016 11:20 AM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i agree obv, i didn't mean to defend the specific phrase "this is not normal" so much as reflect on the notion of "normalization"—where we are worn down to accept what's wrong as the status quo, & the debilitating, traumatizing effects of that. I think there's value in talking about that effect, and fighting it by continually reminding yourself "this is not right."

it's never been right. but yeah i guess this is the new improved even worse now.

liberal cocooning with grubhub and prestige television is the modern day equivalent of middle class folk cocooning with their color tv and tract housing in the burbs

shit coming home, they think, to people who have been insulated from most forms of oppression heretofore

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/14/chuck-schumer-the-worst-possible-democratic-leader-at-the-worst-possible-time/

So we have to count on this guy to lead the opposition?

it's a country based on dominance. built and based on it. and that's the bargain everyone who lives here makes in order to have all the crap that we have. not to question too much how we get it. we all do it.

sorry, need more coffee didn't mean to go all chomsky! gonna go listen to blue cheer.

no, Schumer v likely to be useless. end run around him

^^^

I prefer that these ideologues be incompetent tbh. incompetence will wreak its own damage/havoc, but I'm inclined to say the situation would be worse if Trump had a team of people who really knew how to get shit done and had terrible ideas, rather than a team that doesn't know how to do a goddamn thing and has terrible ideas.

indeed. someone (Eichenwald?) had a good piece about how Trump is kind of blowing his political capital early on for no reason. at the very least it's gonna be fun to watch this all unfold.

I do not think this will be fun

from the intercept article - this shit is definitely going to happen imo

Schumer has long been the Democrats’ point man in efforts to craft a bipartisan deal to slash taxes on multinational corporations.

yes, he reiterated his intention on this a couple weeks before Clinton's inevitable victory

yeah I don't foresee any concerted resistance to a tax cut that vastly benefits the wealthy, unless Warren or Sanders mount a lonely filibuster or something

I like the fighting spirit of this article:

http://inthesetimes.com/article/19638/fighting-trump-isnt-enoughwe-must-also-wage-war-within-the-democratic-party