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

dammit beaten to the punch by phil d

http://img.wennermedia.com/square-220/kanye-west-donald-trump-b4066de3-ce94-4f4b-bb1c-35d6bdf8b924.jpg

petulant manchildren: pick only one

manthreading

man.......threading

a thing that men do

that manthreading piece didn't seem to know what the word "prolific" means

yeah that was not the takedown I was hoping for

so glad we all canceled our NYT subscriptions but still have thoughtful pieces like that to click on. where else would i find my portmanteau neologisms to keep up with the kids?

portmanteau neologisms

the next Parquet Courts album title

k3vin is so sad that I canceled my NYT subscription in 2010

I liked Jeet Heer's thread about representations of ppl having sex with animals and vegetables in Canadian fiction, more twitter threads like that please

Yeah I got no beef w Jeet

From that Vox bit:

Do you think if it does go away, you'll regret your vote in any way? Thinking, “I voted for this person who took away my health insurance.” Or … it's like, that's one of so many things, like you said, jobs, the economy?

Two things:

1) endless journos are still continually reinforcing the "trump voter" = "working class" = "rural white folks" connection, as if you have to drive a coupla hours west of the Acela corridor into deep coal country to talk to Trump voters and not, say, Staten Island

2) journos(and all of us, pretty much) do not understand how to talk to victims of a con

What should they have said?

Trump voters are for sure varied, but working class/rural white folks, especially in red states, seem to vote as more of a bloc than, say, rich white educated people.

Some of these Trump supporters, they remind me of this guy I saw on the news once. There was a huge rainstorm, and a lot of the viaducts had flooding beneath them. A few feet of standing water. There was one guy being interviewed on the side of the road, and the newscaster motioned to his car, which was mostly submerged. "Didn't you see all the other cars stuck?" she asked. "Yeah," said the guy. "Then why did you think your car could make it?" He shrugs. "I don't know."

Where was it I read the observation that Americans deep down probably do want socialism, and that it's neoliberalism that turned them off this time around? I can sort of see that in the breakdown of recipients of government aid, how the red states (Trump people) get something like twice as much from the government despite contributing much less in taxes, vs. the blue states, who contribute more in taxes but get less in spending and projects and whatnot. Which in a way probably goes back to education, how little people really understand about the government, laws, civics, the things that affect them. When I read that interview with the woman in the Vox piece just upthread, I thought, huh, this is a person that seems like they'd really benefit from the security of liberal Federal aid, of a government safety net, but for myriad reasons is aligning herself with the party that's not just against that, but has worked for decades to prevent democrats from implementing policies that might help her.

It's pretty tragic, just a fundamental failure to understand the abstract and concrete roles and nuance of government, and the intricacies of contrasting/complementary policy. I can only hope (I guess?) that given Trump, etc. seems like the worst of every possible scenario across the board, that his failures will be much more obvious than Obama's perhaps more subtle successes.

I think choosing someone from Kentucky legitimizes the person in the eyes of Trump supporters that may be reading. Imagine the spin "Well that was a Trump supporter from Staten Island, hardly someone from 'real America' therefore not exactly coming from the same place as most of us in the red states... I commend them for voting Trump, but still. Rural America is a different place."

xxp

http://gizmodo.com/men-please-stop-manthreading-1790036387

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, December 13, 2016 11:29 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

gizmodo post manages to be dumber than the tweetstorm that inspired it

Well that's the strength of the marketing and messaging of the right. People in economic situations voting red when most of the things republican platforms push unquestionably directly disadvantage them- that's been the case for awhile now.

xxp

http://deadspin.com/triple-h-donald-trump-is-unclear-on-whether-wrestling-1790037536

Back in 2007, WWE ran a storyline that culminated with CEO Vince McMahon being blown up in a limo. You don’t need me to tell you that McMahon is still alive and was not actually blown to pieces, because you aren’t a moron who thinks wrestling is real. Apparently, the same cannot be said for our future president.

Last night, a 2008 clip from the Opie and Anthony Show began recirculating. In the clip, WWE wrestler/McMahon son-in-law Triple H briefly mentions the limo-explosion storyline, and then reveals that Donald Trump—a longtime pro wrestling performer, mind you—called McMahon’s office to find out if he had really died after the explosion aired.

ugh Kanye and trump meeting and the fact that it's being reported on like it's big news is so depressing. what a shit time to be alive

lol Trump frantically calling McMahon's office !! xp

the gizmodo post was at least readable

A lot of people think of democratic policies as an effort to redistribute wealth from the middle and working classes to the lumpenproletariat. People at the Sanders/Trump voters summit last night were convinced that if the minimum wage were raised, they'd end up paying for it via higher costs for goods and services. Xp

ugh Kanye and trump meeting and the fact that it's being reported on like it's big news is so depressing. what a shit time to be alive

journos continue to fall for Trump's schtick hook line and sinker. had to get those pesky Russians out of the headlines somehow!

Yeah, yeah, Trump's dumb as shit and incapable of discerning reality from fiction. Is the sky still blue, too?

(xpost to WWE 'revelation')

That gizmodo post felt very 2013.

But I think the selection continually reinforcing the connection over and over again, and given how political campaign planners are always fighting the last war, this myopic reading of "average voter" will facilitate the targeting next time round. Yeah, it establishes the bona fides of the person interviewed or readers who might be Trump voters, but for every _media_ type reading it, it yet again makes them think "yeah, this is the representative voice we need to talk to."

For all the bubble talk lately, everything around this just reinforces the pundit bubble, if you will. "Real America is Elsewhere," to paraphrase Kundera.

Last night, a 2008 clip from the Opie and Anthony Show began recirculating. In the clip, WWE wrestler/McMahon son-in-law Triple H briefly mentions the limo-explosion storyline, and then reveals that Donald Trump—a longtime pro wrestling performer, mind you—called McMahon’s office to find out if he had really died after the explosion aired.

― nomar, Tuesday, December 13, 2016 12:52 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The whole scene had such great pacing and believable human emotion it's understandable that he was confused

so did trump have a baked in advantage as a man whos knowledge and perception of the world hasnt evolved since 1988?

You're being awfully generous with that '1988' there.

Considering he ran on turning the clock back to the 1950s ...

1950s in what country

Some of his supporters would prefer the 1850s, it's true.

As satire (I suppose), I thought this was funny: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/new-york-should-seize-trump-tower/2016/12/12/6dfdfc50-c0b2-11e6-897f-918837dae0ae_story.html

Kos ain't exactly helping things here with shit like this:

Be happy for coal miners losing their health insurance. They're getting exactly what they voted for

The idea that people deserve suffering for not voting correctly seems a bullshit holdover from dumber times, like how your kids only going to learn if you beat them repeatedly. Feeds into the Accelerationist thing. Can tribal groups or societies even "learn" like that?

Petty vindictiveness is a human reaction, but one don't do shit 'cept make everything worse.

OTMFM

manthreading

― k3vin k., Tuesday, December 13, 2016 12:02 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I hate this phrase, not the least because it will forever remind me of this:

https://vimeo.com/40608388

I liked Jeet Heer's thread about representations of ppl having sex with animals and vegetables in Canadian fiction, more twitter threads like that please

― soref, Tuesday, December 13, 2016 11:14 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm, this ruled

The ongoing anachronistic focus on the coal industry is yet another thing that seems very dawn of the 20th century. It's like blaming Brexit on disgruntled chimney sweeps.

yeah and its not like mother coal held its beautiful employees tight to its bosom or anything like that. it was all child labor, black lung and murdering people at the picket lines

all fine upstanding american traditions, sir

Thanks to a random reference I stumbled across the other day, I learned about Harry Caudill and his book Night Falls on the Cumberlands, which by all accounts essentially started the modern focus on Appalachia, with special reference to the coal industry, as a problem to be solved/ignored/pondered at, take your pick. A couple of years ago, the Lexington Herald Leader did a multistory look back at the book, its and his impact and numerous other points of history up to the present, under the overall title Fifty Years of Night. There's an ebook, but the individual stories can be read here:

http://www.kentucky.com/news/special-reports/fifty-years-of-night/

I highly recommend it -- among other things, it functions as a snapshot up to a pre-Trump candidacy, as well as allowing for the sheer amount of ambivalence threading through so much of what has happened there among those interviewed -- regrets, realizations, internal resignation. Not to mention a deeply ambivalent take on Caudill as he aged; he could almost be an American model for Ibsen's Enemy of the People, and some of what he eventually espoused is no-joke bad.

You'll never watch your life slide out of view, and dance and drink and screw
Because there's nothing else to do.

for all your FB friends swooning over Obama's Christmas card.

"In the summer of 2009, less than a year after President Obama took office, one of the first orders of business for the newly empaneled Senate Judiciary Committee was passing a long-stalled federal ‘media shield’ bill, which would finally provide a uniform level of protection to reporters who get subpoenaed to testify against their sources in court....

But just as it looked like the bill would sail through Congress and make its way to the president’s desk, it was stopped in its tracks. President Obama suddenly reversed course from his previous position and announced he would oppose the bill if the Senate didn’t carve out a giant national security exception that would make the important protections within it all but meaningless....

Sadly, this incident was only the first of several moves by the Obama administration that laid the groundwork for a potentially unprecedented crackdown on the press by the incoming Trump administration...."

https://freedom.press/news/how-obama-administration-laid-groundwork-trumps-coming-crackdown-press/

Cool, was wondering what I should use my time machine to fix today.

who has grounds to sue over this kind of thing? state attorney generals? the justice department?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/13/donald-trump-will-still-be-violating-the-constitution-as-soon-as-hes-sworn-in/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-d%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.53e931381f5f

any citizen?

this new act is worse than the old one, OL; consider that a "note"