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

republicans are cowards, degenerates, and perverts

why are we using the term "fake news" to describe propaganda?

Was talking to a friend about this today -- facebook has no need to "play censor" or fact-check every article, it should just ban egregious websites.

hey all you have to do is google James Conway, Kellyanne's husband, whom I first learned about in the late '90s.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, November 29, 2016 10:32 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i assume you mean George T. Conway III unless she's a serial conway-marrier

friends just call him jimmy or sometimes jim bam bojangles

slimy jim aka george

Just had a heated phone conversation with my dad (I made a friends-only Facebook post advocating burning the flag and tweeting it at Trump; he freaked the absolute fuck out and is convinced I will never have a job), tried talking him down by mentioning the importance of not normalizing THE PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, who will appoint 2-3 Supreme Court justices, talking about stripping citizenship from people for exercising their most basic First Amendment rights, talked about local actions like delivering recount affidavits to city hall yesterday and volunteering for Planned Parenthood, when some fucking south Philly lowlife came up behind me and starting smacking me in the mouth and chest. Knocked my glasses off, I have a little bit of a fat lip, otherwise fine, but THIS IS NOT FUCKING OKAY. I don't know if this is because I was talking loudly about PP or if it was just because south Philly is full of shitheads, but I'm not taking any chances.

ugh I'm sorry that happened to you.

Bradd Jaffy ‏@BraddJaffy 1h1 hour ago
Romney on Trump in March vs. Romney on Trump tonight. Breathtaking.

http://i.imgur.com/DA7wNM6.png
http://i.imgur.com/tvXTVMh.png

buncha cucks amirite

I like the Trumpian "By the way" - nice touch Mitt

i feel like his anti-poetry is going to infect us all in the end

that ship had sailed man. people can't help imitating him

it's a compulsion

"He's just been out of the race for about six months...It's still good...it's still good"

jesus, telephone thing that's awful!

baldwin as trump telling himself 2 weeks ago "don't worry, hillary's still ahead in the polls."

I sort of want to see the_donald's reaction to Mitt (laughing at victory over the cuck, presumably - but not so much swamp-draining) but I'd rather have my IP logged spying on Stormfront at this point.

How does one create an ongoing culture of active engagement and resistance? how does one create any sort of culture? Should I start a new thread for this?

If we give a damn about the constitution, Donald Trump has to sell off his empire and place his assets in a blind trust, just like every other president has done for the last half century. If he chooses not to do this, then Trump is constitutionally unable to be president, just as if he was born in Kenya. It's that simple.

http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/andrew-ross-sorkin-s-joke-letter-to-trump-he-has-to-sell-the-stuff

hey all you have to do is google James Conway, Kellyanne's husband, whom I first learned about in the late '90s.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, November 29, 2016 10:32 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i assume you mean George T. Conway III unless she's a serial conway-marrier

― the klosterman weekend (s.clover), Tuesday, November 29, 2016 11:22 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

friends just call him jimmy or sometimes jim bam bojangles

― Treeship, Tuesday, November 29, 2016 11:50 PM

eh call him ishmael

it feels useless/pointless but it is kind of weird that we now live in a world where you can directly, personally insult the president via the internet

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, 29 November 2016 16:48 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If you were a racist you would have learned this 8 years ago tbf

How does one create an ongoing culture of active engagement and resistance? how does one create any sort of culture? Should I start a new thread for this?

― (rocketcat) (kingfish)

on the one hand i can see people not wanting this entire board to be all trump, all the time, but on the other hand this stuff is important, and it's too big for one thread, which we can't all keep up with anyway.

the most effective forms of resistance, i feel, will be off-internet, but at the same time i don't think we can or should just say "ok we'll abandon the internet entirely", it's not practical.

I know this was commented on even before the election, but I was just jarred by the realization that, regardless of what he actually does or even if he drops dead before his inauguration, the office of POTUS may have been fundamentally altered and tainted by the simple fact that Trump won. How many presidential election cycles are going to be (even more) fucked up circuses of nakedly sociopathic adult babies unleashing their ids first upon one another and then subsequently upon the nation that voted them into office? How do we come back from a president who doesn't care at all about the foundations of the country he's been appointed to run?

All rhetorical questions. Just needed to vent my fresh horror.

A less rhetorical question: how do we get the citizenry to reinvest in a basic knowledge and understanding of civics? How do we sexy up shit like the social contract? Because it's becoming increasingly clear that, if we don't all choose to actively invest in some common core principles, this shit is in danger of unraveling.

Well, a Trotskyite view might be that the worse things get the better.

On that view, people will see how shitty it is when garbage voters elect a shitty president whose administration is full of garbage and whose policies turn out to be made entirely of shit. Perhaps they will recoil from the shit/garbage sandwich and start caring about electing quality humans again.

Public education is already shrilly lambasted for being a liberal indoctrination process. Schools are largely staffed by well-meaning liberal white female Democrats; I'm not sure you can make them even moreso. Kids go to college and reportedly spend all their time cataloging microaggressions, apologizing for their privilege, and seeking safe spaces ringed about by trigger warnings. I'm not sure you can make it even moreso.

On that view, people will see how shitty it is when garbage voters elect a shitty president whose administration is full of garbage and whose policies turn out to be made entirely of shit. Perhaps they will recoil from the shit/garbage sandwich and start caring about electing quality humans again.

It never works this way and no one anywhere on the left side should assume as much, he only gets unseated by active effort.

At this point, I feel like this stuff needs to happen outside of school. I didn't give a shit about government when it was being described in a dry monotone by a teacher who clearly gave an equal amount of shit. But how do you educate people or convince people to seek out education when it isn't compulsory?

I also have no idea whether it's actually true that public schools in red states are staffed by democrats. Not convinced of that.

xxp: Agreed. There's plenty of active effort out there though. Plenty of resistance in the 60+ million people who voted against him and will presumably do so again.

But to put the current anti-Trump coalition over the edge to victory, you need some of his current support to drain away. I don't personally much care whether that's because he turns out to be a hideous shitmonster and people recoil from that, or - contrariwise - because the torches/pitchforks crowd concludes he's not doing ENOUGH.

Anyway, I think it's a mistake to assume that "education" is all we need here. Plenty of educated people become conservative!

the extent to which this guy has already betrayed 90% of the people who voted for him is incredible, really

anyway so what is this deal he supposedly made with Carrier? when did this happen? All I keep hearing is "he's saving jobs already!" but...how??

It's a pretty clever political move that, according to people in the know, is (duh) not as good as it seems. I'll try to find a link.

we're going to be subject to four years of this, huh. "1000 jobs are staying here!!!!" meanwhile everything else is going to shit

labor-involved guy I am fb friends with:

So state of Indiana takes money from public schools to keep Carrier jobs; undisclosed inflated Defense contract payoffs offered. For progressives thinking this is any kind of a good thing, I refer you to a whole organization Good Jobs First (www.goodjobsfirst.org) which has been debunking these kinds of deals for decades. It is the idiot version of industrial policy that saves a few jobs while undermining them for every other worker.

Also they totally went around the union and didn't notify them, but found some rube to say "GEE THAYUNKS MISTER TRUMP" on fox news.

Anyway, I think it's a mistake to assume that "education" is all we need here. Plenty of educated people become conservative!

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Wednesday, November 30, 2016 8:39 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd never suggest that our current problems will be solved by education alone. This is going to have to be a steady assault on a number of fronts. But wrt your latter concerned, I'm less concerned with educated people becoming conservative than I am with uneducated people being played, in the same way that I'm less concerned with how people choose to cast their vote than I am with whether their ability to vote is being actively hindered.

'latter concern'

yeah with no specifics it's hard to tell wtf is going on. especially since the president has no executive power whatsoever at this point. from what I can discern they're still shipping 1000 jobs to Mexico and now most likely getting a big tax break so win/win for them I guess.

amazing how different the headlines look today than what they did when Obama "saved" 1.5 million jobs in the auto industry, but hey

xp also I think Indiana (Gov Pence) offered Carrier some state tax breaks. I don't know how easy it will be to keep pulling off the same move, but I'm sure he'll find some cooperative governors and companies. Maybe even "save" some jobs that were never really going to move.

Of course I wish more people's ideology aligned with mine but ungaming the system so that people can form their own informed opinions and act accordingly is much more important to me.

oh yeah, I'm fully prepared for four years of Trump taking credit for every little thing that goes right between now and 2020, then maybe finding a way to still blame Hillary when the price of gas goes up in a couple years

Anyway, I think it's a mistake to assume that "education" is all we need here. Plenty of educated people become conservative!

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Wednesday, November 30, 2016 8:39 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd never suggest that our current problems will be solved by education alone. This is going to have to be a steady assault on a number of fronts. But wrt your latter concerned, I'm less concerned with educated people becoming conservative than I am with uneducated people being played, in the same way that I'm less concerned with how people choose to cast their vote than I am with whether their ability to vote is being actively hindered.

― i need microsoft installed on my desktop, can you help (Old Lunch), Wednesday, November 30, 2016 9:48 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well that's more a matter of get-out-the-vote operations, helping people get ID in states where necessary, fighting bad legislation, etc. than education.

I spend a lot of time reading Trump forums and comments sections, and these people totally cut themselves off from "MSM". So they just edit out anything critical of Trump. We're always going to have to deal with this problem unless something is done about this refusal to engage in critical thinking. Trump knows damn well he got elected by pandering to people who hate and people who refuse to believe anything they read in the news. If a news story is unfavorable to him, he just says they are biased. There has to be massive pressure on Trump to answer to the idiocy and hate of those who elected him.

This shit needs to be rubbed in his face, whether through massive protests, or mass confrontation on places like Twitter:

https://www.splcenter.org/20161129/ten-days-after-harassment-and-intimidation-aftermath-election

A less rhetorical question: how do we get the citizenry to reinvest in a basic knowledge and understanding of civics? How do we sexy up shit like the social contract? Because it's becoming increasingly clear that, if we don't all choose to actively invest in some common core principles, this shit is in danger of unraveling.

― i need microsoft installed on my desktop, can you help (Old Lunch)

my answer is that we don't, not in any of our lifetimes, that first we need to recognize that at least one of the core principles underlying democratic governance has already unravelled.

the basic principle behind voting is that the will of the people, as expressed through elections, is the ultimate defense against tyranny. this principle has failed recently in a number of elections around the globe, most recently and definitively in the united states. we must recognize that elections are not, in fact, an ultimate defense against tyranny, and we must design and implement new systemic defenses against it.

your goal of elevating the level of civic consciousness is a worthy and noble one, but my personal opinion is that the necessary preconditions for this effort to be successful on the required scale do not exist in america, or, to the best of my knowledge, anywhere in the world right now.

I'm less concerned with educated people becoming conservative than I am with uneducated people being played

god, absolutely. it's so alarming how many people out there were so willing to believe stories that had no factual basis whatsoever - as much as everyone blasts the MSM these days they at least have editorial standards

I was talking about this with a (similarly gutted) friend the other day; it's not so much the rise of bigotry that bothers me, it's that people apparently have no standards for fact checking whatsoever, that the snarky "I reject your reality and replace it with my own!" comeback is now apparently a legitimate worldview. cuz one leads to the other, when you follow a site like Breitbart which details every single violent crime committed by a black person or a refugee but stays silent when white people do it, it leads to people holding some pretty internalized racist views. simple really.

to man alive, no disagreement on voter access, GOTV, etc.

FWIW millions more people voted against the clown than for - they just didn't do it in exactly the right places.

Meanwhile: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a51099/trump-romney-dinner/

god, absolutely. it's so alarming how many people out there were so willing to believe stories that had no factual basis whatsoever - as much as everyone blasts the MSM these days they at least have editorial standards

I was talking about this with a (similarly gutted) friend the other day; it's not so much the rise of bigotry that bothers me, it's that people apparently have no standards for fact checking whatsoever, that the snarky "I reject your reality and replace it with my own!" comeback is now apparently a legitimate worldview. cuz one leads to the other, when you follow a site like Breitbart which details every single violent crime committed by a black person or a refugee but stays silent when white people do it, it leads to people holding some pretty internalized racist views. simple really.

― frogbs, Wednesday, 30 November 2016 14:59 (seven minutes ago) Permalink

Sure, but the left is susceptible to believing things contradicted by facts too. Politics is emotional. People go to Breitbart because it taps into something they already feel. Maybe those feelings can be redirected differently, but we have to understand that.