Trump's America, March 2017: Using His Inside VOICE

xxpost Yeah, I was gonna say. We're just in an era where more of the white supremacists feel comfortable espousing their viewpoints in mixed company. While undeniably horrifying, it's also kinda refreshing to see that villains aren't pretending to be anything else these days.

I dug this of general explanation of GOP epistemological issues:

http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/3/10/14871696/scott-pruitt-climate-denial

sign me up! real america can go fly a kite!

https://newrepublic.com/article/140948/bluexit-blue-states-exit-trump-red-america

i like a good sad liberal rant.

i laughed...

"Not even the good people of Canada should have to stomach a mass migration of moping American liberals mumbling, “Live locally … make art.”

cillizza to cnn!

*farts*

Always misread his name as Clitzilla.

We're just in an era where more of the white supremacists feel comfortable espousing their viewpoints in mixed company. While undeniably horrifying, it's also kinda refreshing to see that villains aren't pretending to be anything else these days.

I totally disagree with this actually. Whatever a representative of the US government is willing to stand up and say in public automatically becomes an acceptable way to talk. I don't think it's bad for racists to understand they're supposed to be ashamed of being racists.

I totally agree with your last point, but I don't think your point and mine are mutually exclusive. It'll become more acceptable to people who are already inclined in that direction, but when rhetoric and policies become more overtly racist the opposition becomes more vehement. This shit's always been there, but it's easier to pretend that it isn't when it's couched in euphemism.

My hunch is that Steve King plays peek-a-boo with his white supremacist ideas, and covers his eyes whenever it is inconvenient to see them. Then, if he can't see them, they must not be there.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Sunday, 12 March 2017 19:59 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Convenient to have the 'eyehole malfunction' as a ready excuse you'd imagine

how many fucking times do I have to repeat that "red" states in them Deep South are home to the biggest black population clusters in America and that talk about blue states seceding from them, whether jokey or serious, isn't cute

Yes - it wd make more sense to talk about cities seceding from the states that surround them but there would be a few logistical problems there

the singling out of Mississippi is particularly egregious

much of the black population in the South is rural so fuck the cities seceding thing too

ok man

I agree w you that "secession" talk is 100% stupid

Also the Bluexit plan ends up with a very lopsided military arrangement. The blues get the scariest 1/3 of the nuclear triad but the reds get all the missiles and bombers

Where are y'all hearing this secession talk in the first place?

and it illustrates, for me at least, how 1) urbanization and 2) the internet - among plenty of other phenomena - has made the idea of geography as the primary unit for political mechanisms like benefits, voting, etc feel increasingly antiquated and almost bizarre

xpost

xp Scott Seward's link (which in fairness puts right in the subhead that it's not a serious plan)

and it illustrates, for me at least, how 1) urbanization and 2) the internet - among plenty of other phenomena - has made the idea of geography as the primary unit for political mechanisms like benefits, voting, etc feel increasingly antiquated and almost bizarre

xpost

Everyone OTM is OTM regardless of their zip code

totally!

baker is ranting, sure. but how much of his "proposal" is just acknowledging facts that are already in evidence? i've gone to "good" public schools in both blue states and in red states. they're not equal. what baker is talking about is implementing on a policy level plans my family is right now carrying out on a personal level. i'm moving from indiana to oregon. and yes i'm conflicted about that, from moving to a city where people put "black lives matter" placards in every window while simultaneously pricing black people out of the city, but i can't fucking live here anymore. there's no opportunity here, no hope here, and i can't do anything to help, i won't be able to make this state better, ever.

i'm pretty happy with being in California right now, albeit living in a city that is pricing everyone out except for Hollywood actors. well, even them too. the character actors are going to move to Valencia eventually, I bet.

i was back in my mom's town just outside Chicago for a couple weeks and managed to witness an argument in which a Trump voter pulled a gun on some Berniebros who ran into his mailbox. i want to believe it the mailbox incident was mutually exclusive from the blue/red divide but...well, if the other Trump guy across the street hit his mailbox I don't think he'd have pulled his gun.

I can confirm from personal experience that the quality of public schools varies wildly even within the same state, red or blue.

I am 100% for breaking up the United States into smaller countries. Our experiment has failed. It's not worth continuing this back and forth. At least the northwest should break free. America would be better off splitting into multiple separate countries.

That's symptomatic of the bigger problem rushomancy is characterizing, though.

Making individual investments on our own, we're never sure if a little here and there is enough to change things; easier to save up our little here and there and use it to move to another place where things have already changed.

The way a society can resolve this - taxing your little here and there and spending it responsibly and effectively on improving schools, and maybe even providing good steady jobs - is busted right now, because (too lazy to link to rolling explaining conservatism thread). So you end up moving to Portland, where you contribute, by spending all your saved-up little here and there on property, to gentrification, which may or may not help to resolve the uneven attempt at egalitarianism that created the initial individually insurmountable problem.

I've had a big lunch so I may only sort of be making sense.

living in vermont i've felt no need or desire to get involved in politics because a) at a nat'l level vt is blue as all hell and b) at a local level they are hyper hyper local and as someone passing through it was a little intimidating

now that i'm moving to a less-blue-but-still-blue western state (nm) where the local issues are very intimately enmeshed with nat'l issues (namely: immigration), i'm actually hoping to Get Involved in a more meaningful way

Living in DC any desire to Get Involved is immediately tempered by the realization that you are surrounded, literally, by people doing it professionally at a national and sometimes global level, and also there's no voting legislative representation to fight for or with, so biggest shrug ever - unless you mean to go into the Involved For Six Figures And 70+ Hours/Week subset which I'm not ready to do personally

yeah that makes sense

meanwhile: a friend of mine is a run-of-the-mill immigration lawyer in new mex and, being one of the few ppl that does her job in a sparsely populated state, is completely overwhelmed by ppl treating her like the biggest ever expert --- i get the sense that it's not too difficult to assume a lot of clout just by getting to work in areas without really anyone doing much

if sean spicer would try to be less passive-aggressive defensive i might grow less worried about russia hacking the 2016 US presidential election in favor of his tax-returnless and combover-ed boss

i feel like massachusetts is kind of its own thing already. and i like that about it. and i am definitely a fan of romneycare.

i do have irrational south and midwest fear. fear of a white rural planet. christian fear. i'm working on it though.

(well, not entirely irrational in some ways (given recent events) but irrational in the sense that i would never travel down south in a million years...)

All other facts and context aside, Spicer is seriously like the worst spokesperson for anything that I've ever seen. He's like a McDonald's employee who gets exasperated every time somebody has the temerity to order a hamburger. FIELDING PROVOCATIVE QUESTIONS IS YOUR JOB, DO YOUR JOB OR GTFO.

and it illustrates, for me at least, how 1) urbanization and 2) the internet - among plenty of other phenomena - has made the idea of geography as the primary unit for political mechanisms like benefits, voting, etc feel increasingly antiquated and almost bizarre

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Monday, March 13, 2017 8:18 AM (three hours ago)

yet votes & culture are still breaking along the same regional lines ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Spicer's entire job is to defend the indefensible, plus he's probably been ordered to be an aggressive dick to anyone who comes off as critical. I'm not sure how he can field a provocative question without exposing the administration as a sham.

Defend the Indefensible: the Sean Spicer Story

contenderizer, look at votes for hillary by district? is what i'm saying.

or on a larger level, what many people in europe have asked of me: if the american president is like president of the world how come we don't get to vote for him

Conway is better at Spicer's job than Spicer is, and she's not even all that good. You don't even have to defend the indefensible, just spin and filibuster and tu quoque all over everyone's ass until they're too exhausted to press the issue. Yelping like a trapped rat just makes you and everyone you represent look as guilty as you probably are.

I am 100% for breaking up the United States into smaller countries.

good idea. that way instead of one wall we can have a whole bunch of walls, all over the country, with immigration checkpoints all over the place. you will need a passport and clearance to go anywhere. yes. what a great idea.

I've removed bookmarks for all the political threads but due to location feel the need to say: fuck Steve King

Earlier this year I decided to widen my horizons and started reading the website of the Sioux City, Iowa newspaper with an eye to subscribing for a while, not to hate read, but to see what perspective people are coming from.

Here's the thing: the framing and viewpoints, even just in how local events, business, and crime are reported, are skewed. And not to a national conservative narrative, but to a local lens that dramatically out of touch with the local reality, let alone how local and national politics intersect. There's very much the "small local town tries to hold its own" narrative, but even the Sioux City area isn't as small as what they're portraying!

It's difficult to relate to or speak about the area without falling into the narrative trap -- I'm not from there, and some of the basic assumptions about how things work start to show cracks under examination. So the half-baked narrative about small town people who can't find jobs versus immigrant-heavy industries like meat processing becomes this conspiracy about undocumented people working.. where, exactly? for corporate entities that have to have a social security number to check payroll? for large hog operations owned by the wealthy people who benefit the most from Trump policies? So it's either corporate beneficiaries cheating the system, or local monied interests using illegal labor practices, but the narrative never touches those issues, or investigates if they are issues and not paranoid fantasies used to explain how immigrants are living there.

But national politics are never examined except through this lens, and the unspoken, accepted narrative of local politics is very much an us-versus-them where "them" is people who can't possibly understand the "real locals." And I've fallen to this narrative, as have national writers when they drop into a city and report on what people say and not the reality they're living in.

oh fwiw I threw up my hands and walked away from reading Sioux City news because of said narrow lens. It's just so weird and frustrating.

oh as an addendum: in order to have enough people in the district (the gerrymandering isn't _bad_ but probably exists), Steve King's area includes one of the state universities. friends living in that county are very unhappy to be in his district, since we're talking about an area that stretches from all the way in the northwest (SC being on the South Dakota/Nebraska/Iowa border) to the county just above the state capital area, where the school is. I'd imagine international enrollment in the sciences/engineering are still high, making it weird

Yes, a logical extension of breaking up the US into various diff. countries is that every country will build a wall. If I can't travel to Mississippi or Arkansas easily, so be it.

hey, pplains deserves the right to leave and return from his state without undue burden

i'm good w/ breaking up the states. going to be a lot of red state refugees though. which hey, i guess could be an economic boon.

i do have irrational south and midwest fear. fear of a white rural planet. christian fear. i'm working on it though.

ive been down here my entire life - mostly rural growing up, mostly urban since college - and i've got it, too. not really doing a whole lot to work on it though. fuck these garbage people. p tired of being expected to empathize with them and their insane bigotries. and while that may unfortunately scan as classist af i'm very much talking about the wealthier trump voters (lots of my extended fam) as well.

The wealthier Trump voters are totally hiding behind all the 'deplorables'. The exact same camouflage has happened with UK Brexit voters.

all this secession talk is kind of nuts. it ignores the needs of those disenfranchised citizens that live in every state of the union who are americans unfortunately limited by the position of their birth and basically secession is openly advocating for just ignoring their plight in favor of not having to answer to trump i guess? also, maybe relevant to note that secession resulted in war last time and im not totally sure why it wouldn't this time also. maybe im just missing the sarcasm here

it's all a bunch of pointless noise, nobody is seceding from anything