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

I don't think you can say he's not charismatic. He's a TV star! His charisma might not work on you personally, but objectively he obviously has star power.

― birthday party, cheesecake, jelly beans, boom (tipsy mothra), Sunday, December 4, 2016 8:32 PM (thirty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There's a diff between being charismatic and being on TV a lot, as if simple repetition generates charisma.

His charisma is, like, the reassuring appeal of your barista or your mechanic being dumber than you are.

i mean he's just a blustering asshole, which i understand has charismatic appeal for a lot of people. plus he's very good at making himself the news (cf. john barron)! but i have been sick of his shit for like three plus decades now :\

He's not charismatic, but people find sociopathic bluster and insensitivity alluring for some stupid reason. Cf. When people admire someone for "not giving a fuck"

he's got a certain new yorker playboy flair. he's been on TV shows and in rap songs for decades

“Trump was a businessman and an entrepreneur,” Putin said in the interview, which also touched on international affairs, including the war in Syria. “Now he’s a government official, now he’s the head of the United States of America, one of the leading countries of the world, one of the world’s leading economies, one of the world’s leading military states. To the extent that he was able to achieve success in business, this shows that he’s a smart person. And if he’s a smart person, that means that he will totally and quite quickly understand the different level of his responsibility. We presume that he will act based on this position.”

Remind me of how they reacted to the warship deal.

iirc, they lodged a formal complaint, called the US ambassador in for a bollocking - saying it threatened permanent damage to Sino-US relations and promised a wave of retaliatory sanctions against any US business involved in any aspect of the agreement. The reaction to this has been relatively mild so far.

Yes, well, the warship deal was a, how do I put this, an agreement under which the US would sell Taiwan warships, whereas the topic in question this week is an idiot taking a phone call he shouldn't have. But as long as apples = oranges supports your theorem of how Trump is totally being strategic, hey, who am I

xpost At least Putin knows he's spouting complete bullshit, as opposed to most of the people who affirm Trump's intelligence and ever-impending maturation.

I liked this bit of detail:

Putin called Trump “talented” and “colorful” during the U.S. election campaign (Trump said Putin had called him “a genius,” thanks to a mistranslation)

excited to see trump doubling down on china

Fake news seemingly almost caused a mass shooting today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/12/04/d-c-police-respond-to-report-of-a-man-with-a-gun-at-comet-ping-pong-restaurant/?postshare=8831480898259994&tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.8f6a65150e5f

The restaurant’s owner and employees were threatened on social media in the days before the election after fake news stories circulated claiming that then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief were running a child sex ring from the restaurant’s back rooms. Even Michael Flynn, a retired general who President-elect Trump has tapped to advise him on national security, shared the stories.

So Joe Lieberman is still alive, I assumed he had crawled under a rock and died
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/joe-lieberman-democrats-left-taking-over/2016/12/04/id/762064/

Fucking idiot

Imagine the voice, trembling with outrage.

Not you milo, lieberman.

"To me, both parties better watch out not to go back to the extremes —— left and right —— and not working with each other," he said.

What extremism are we seeing in the democratic party that goes beyond basic new deal ideology? Meanwhile the republicans are gleefully inspiring attempted mass shooters by convincing them that democratic politicians are pedophiles.

And tweeting a bunch of provocative, insulting shit about China in the middle of the day as if China was some sort of celebrity rival

"Even Michael Flynn, a retired general who President-elect Trump has tapped to advise him on national security, shared the stories."

This is terrifying

Yeah that guy is a fucking lunatic

DC Police has confirmed the assault was PizzaGate related.

Wait, not assault, he had an assault weapon - I think - didn't assault anyone. Sorry.

jesus fucking christ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/12/04/d-c-police-respond-to-report-of-a-man-with-a-gun-at-comet-ping-pong-restaurant/

posted above

Fucking rube loons are convinced this is an "inside job"-type incident: a left-wing elite conspiracy to discredit pizzagate so Democrats can continue doing what the most love: ruining the lives of innocent children. I can't even.

*they most love

i honestly can't even bring myself to read about "pizzagate"

not the shooting, but the whole controversy. there's no way i don't come out of that a little dumber

Jet fuel can't melt real cheese

A+

It's about ethics in pizza journalism

I really want this to be more funny dumb online shit, but gunman showing up plus Mike Flynn's son tweeting about it is not sitting well with me. Apparently Mike Flynn himself also made some reference to unspecified "pedophilia investigations" in discussing Clinton-related stuff on Fox News

xpost the story above is the shit I find myself most terrified in the "post-fact" landscape. I might not bat an eyelid if some idiot wants to post some Snopes-debunked horseshit on FB, but when they're shooting outside a Planned Parenthood or bringing a deadly assault weapon to a pizza parlor....that's terrifying, and it can happen pretty much fucking anywhere.

replace can with will and welcome to the next four years

I'm trying to repress these feelings, see...

I'm still thinking about that woman whose Twitter feed I posted. Like, what if you asked her, would you support abortion being illegal throughout the country? Would she be into that? Opposed to that? She didn't come off as religious.

she'd probably be down with that ban. a lot of pro-life people don't take any kind of larger view of the issue of abortion -- how it relates to women's autonomy over their own health decisions, how before abortion's legalization it happened anyway but was dangerous, etc. they just look at the issue in itself and decide they are uncomfortable with the idea so it shouldn't happen.

I think the vast majority of people involved in "pizzagating" don't really believe it, it's total 4chan schtick. The hard part is figuring out who if anyone actually does, it's like a turing test for basement-dwelling losers.

Well it was banned from /r/the_donald, then it was banned from /r/conspiracy to /r/pizzagate, then it was banned from Rediit in it's entirety, so by this stage if you've followed it to voat.co (which is running rife with 'false flag' and 'the Oregonian ran an article about this 10 hours before it happened') then you're either a true believer or you're pretty dedicated to exoteric lols.

wtf is voat.co ?

Well I don't know what it was a fortnight ago, but now it's mostly "the Reddit clone tha pizzagate moved to"

https://voat.co/v/all/top

Ben Carson, u got a job despite yr protestations

i guess trump can now cross 'diversity?' off the to-do list he scrawled on the back of an envelope on nov 9

I'm still thinking about that woman whose Twitter feed I posted. Like, what if you asked her, would you support abortion being illegal throughout the country? Would she be into that? Opposed to that? She didn't come off as religious.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, December 4, 2016 11:54 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

she'd probably be down with that ban. a lot of pro-life people don't take any kind of larger view of the issue of abortion -- how it relates to women's autonomy over their own health decisions, how before abortion's legalization it happened anyway but was dangerous, etc. they just look at the issue in itself and decide they are uncomfortable with the idea so it shouldn't happen.

― Treeship, Monday, December 5, 2016 12:01 AM (nine hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im sorry but who the fuck knows? i kind of get your point a little bit in posting that twitter profile to highlight how prob most trump voters are somewhat apolitical and not outwardly enthusiastic about their racism but the amount to which you are zeroing in on such personal details about this person is kind of strange eephus. she's some random 19-year-old college girl in the south, she supports trump but im not sure what else about her politics you can surmise from her tweets? do you know her or something?

based on a quick glance i knew a lot of people like her in the almost exclusively white ohio suburb i grew up in... and i think some of them are democrats and some of them are republican. a white bread apolitical blandness doesn't necessitate wanting abortion to banned and trump in office even if it might entail other regressive politics

Idk if I'm following this...whatever...correctly but I think it's a good point to say that it's the people you wouldn't expect and not really the KKK kind of open stuff that we should be newly, unpleasantly aware of. I saw an article the other day about how protestors came out to disrupt the planned KKK march in some city and the article was like "See, our people of this region are good! We don't support hate speech!" but the real story to me is how many people stayed home bc from BOTH the Klan parade and the counter protests because they don't explicitly align with either but they're more comfortable with the rhetoric based on white supremacy and catering to race-based manufactured insecurity just the same.

IMO one of the most important things is direct governmental checks on Trump's power. That mostly means getting more Democrats (or I guess anti-Trump republicans if it's the only option) into congressional seats and senate seats, and also into state legislatures, governorships, pretty much any office at any level right now. There are local elections in many places in 2017. There are congressional elections in 2018. Volunteer for a campaign in a "flippable" area. Donate money. Go to your local democratic committee meetings. Run for local office if you're so inclined, even something that seems rinky-dink like a county position.

Also, there are still a few days left to phone bank for or donate to Foster Campbell, a dem senate upstart who is currently in a runoff election in Louisiana. Getting a democrat there means we have 49-51 in the Senate, which means we are much closer to being able to block people like Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, whatever nightmare Trump nominates to the Supreme Court, etc.

I think the vast majority of people involved in "pizzagating" don't really believe it, it's total 4chan schtick. The hard part is figuring out who if anyone actually does, it's like a turing test for basement-dwelling losers.

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive),

General Flynn, the next National Security advisor, previously tweeted about it, and his son doubled-down on it yesterday in a tweet

^^^^^^ this is exactly what's so scary about the whole thing. As much as I dislike sites like Breitbart it was at least comforting in the past to know that they were just on the sidelines. Now the dude who ran the site has the ear of the dumbest and most gullible president in history. So, that sucks

Exactly. I realized with dread during a discussion yesterday that we're witnessing the Fred Phelpsification of America. Fringe garbage people who are beyond reason or decency are moving from the fringe and into the mainstream. It remains to be seen if this is the disease's last desperate attempt to overtake its host or if it's just straight-up metastasis. But we need to chemo the shit out of these fuckers.

the amount to which you are zeroing in on such personal details about this person is kind of strange eephus. she's some random 19-year-old college girl in the south, she supports trump but im not sure what else about her politics you can surmise from her tweets? do you know her or something?

sorry, she was just somebody i came across while searching twitter for pat mccrory news, i have no personal knowledge of her, she just seemed somehow emblematic to me and a useful corrective to my reflexive notions of "who voted for this guy?" i guess what i'm saying is that if i want to understand how we win next time, i have to not be locked into the idea that trump voter = "joe lunchpail in ohio" or "dapper twitter nazi", not to deny these are important demos for him

also? i could see her voting for obama tbh