Wow. Whoa. That is some group of people. Thousands. - US Election Day 2016

Granny Dainger otm

yeah i posted about that earlier but whatever

xp

HRC was diligent, capable and deserving as many, and we thought we were righting wrongful persecution when we defended her. It's the liberal impulse.

However, brand equity isn't rational. Advertising doesn't exist to help consumers rational choices, but to shift their unconscious impulses. Negative brand equity is real. How many of you have stepped inside a Sears or K-Mart lately? That's the kind of burden HRC carried, and it wasn't necessary to tie our hopes to this rock.

If we're a party of ideas, not people, then we can live in our own echo chamber where baseless allegations are refuted and pretend others listen, or we can just side-step the mud and pick someone capable who represents the ideas, not themselves.

can we have some thread/space where we can just express love and comfort one another?

b/c that's all i need or want at the moment.

― wizzz! (amateurist), Wednesday, 9 November 2016 09:50 (forty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

good thoughts to american ilxors.

hard to know how to react to this. i'm starting to feel like i want to live somewhere away from the politics of hatred, or just away from politics, and maybe there are some places like that now, but the world is shrinking for those who want to live in societies based on decency and fairness. it's like there is no escape, no way of stepping outside a broken system. and i say that fully aware that i'm not even in the usa and in a position of privilege in the country where i live.

I will say the next 4 years will do a lot for mental health awareness in the American public.

A textbook malignant narcissist on the TV every fucking day.

Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World (1997):

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

So I actually went to bed at 12:30. I slept two hours, then tossed and turned as my heart couldn't stop beating. I refused to check my phone or turn on the TV. I just learned the news half an hour ago.

This is symbolic at this point, but in the current tally Clinton is within 90,000 votes of Trump, with a few million left to count.

NYT is still giving HRC a 1% advantage in the popular vote.

Projection, that is.

But yeah, the NSDAP only got 33.09% of the German vote in 1932. Small comfort.

This is symbolic at this point, but in the current tally Clinton is within 90,000 votes of Trump, with a few million left to count.

― Mike Pence shakes his head and mouths the word ‘no’ (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, November 9, 2016 11:08 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If Clinton has conceded and it turns out that the count is wrong isn't that already final?
I mean hopeful that what now seems inevitable might somehow miraculously be shown to be a mistake but I think that's just a dream .

& just wondering what this election is going to act as a beacon for in the light of the shite that went down after the Brexit results. & where else on the planet it might enable further stupidity but christ.

sorry sanpaku but i never want to see another percentage again

Still can't really sleep

no, me neither. tried several times; heart beating out of my chest. need to feel some kind of communication but don't want to keep my partner up.

i cannot tell if the numbness or blankness i occasionally feel is just disbelief or some kind of encroaching, benign acceptance of death and its associates

http://i.imgur.com/4AYJ9N2.jpg

Well! So the Supreme Court. And the Affordable Care Act. And the Iran deal.

maybe if the oppo dump drops real quick there's still a chance

Conceding has no legal force. Gore conceded, but recounts and Bush v. Gore followed.

But yeah, the NSDAP only got 33.09% of the German vote in 1932. Small comfort.

But in a multi-party system numbers like these, beating the second-largest party by 13 percentage points, are (normally) a big victory. And despite this, the Nazis still had to revert to extra-legal measures to seize the power.

a tiny bright light in this is that i've been reaching out to friends i hadn't spoken to in months (and they've been reaching out to me). i hope that sort of connectedness keeps up, just a little bit.

and i say that fully aware that i'm not even in the usa and in a position of privilege in the country where i live

This country hasn't elected anyone running on an explicitly racist platform yet but it's going down a similar path. I suppose the only real hope is that this is such an obvious administrative and economic failure that the backlash is swift, furious and lasting. But that's zero comfort to anyone caught up at the sharp end, or the rest of us if the failure is particularly severe.

What this means for Syria, and the Middle East in general, is particularly terrifying right now.

Stay strong everyone. I know this won't mean much coming from someone who mostly provides drive-by opinions on metal threads, but I'm wishing you all well. I can't really offer any consolation because the UK has it's own fascism to do. Still can't believe this is happening, though. It's like on the morning of the Brexit results I'm in a daze thinking "wait, that wasn't supposed to happen wtf"

Hope that makes sense I haven't had any sleep either

I'm just sick of waking up with his horrified feeling of disgust and dread, three times in the last year now.

Which is the least fucked country we could all move to?

the weird thing is i find myself thinking of moving back to ireland, where the centre-right is still kind of entrenched, as if that's a perfect government. i can't exactly see a fascist rise in ireland but presumably it doesn't take much to make it possible. maybe immigration is too new a thing for ireland, in a few more years there might be a lot more hatred and resentment.

this is an xpost, i'm not suggesting ireland is the answer. canada? normally i'd say scandinavia but they aren't immune from far right politics either, right?

the weird thing is, if there's a domino effect of all these far right leaders/parties getting into power, when do they stop praising each other and acting like best pals? like surely the seeds of a war between western powers are being planted in all of this.

lots of weird things.

the weird thing is, if there's a domino effect of all these far right leaders/parties getting into power, when do they stop praising each other and acting like best pals? like surely the seeds of a war between western powers are being planted in all of this.

― Bein' Sean Bean (LocalGarda)

if history is anything to go by, a couple hours after the invasion starts.

sounds about right.

We got our own Trump moment in 2011, when the local xenophobic populist party rose in the election to become one of the biggest parties in the parliament (and largely held on to that position in the 2015 election, despite losing some votes). And of course the leader of that party (who is sceptical of climate change and against abortion) is praising Trump in the news today. So yeah, with politicians rising to power on a nationalist/conservative/racist/anti-immigrant platform in here, Poland, Hungary, France, Denmark, UK, USA, etc, things aren't looking very bright in the so called "developed" North.

I'm just sick of waking up with his horrified feeling of disgust and dread, three times in the last year now.

Yup. What new terrifying and unexpected way will things get worse now?

(x-post with Matt DC)

No sleep here either. This is a horrible dream that I want to wake up from.

This morning, my wife (who hates Trump but follows him on FB) posted something on a post he made, something about how Hispanics like her would never let him be president, how the early voting numbers in Florida were pointing to what we all thought would happen all along - he would lose badly because he was way too insulting of minorities. The comment got fairly popular (500+ likes) and along with it came the Trump supporters, several of whom mentioned our son, referring to him as an "anchor baby" and asking how he is going to climb the wall next year. I told her not to worry because Trump was going to be defeated soundly. This is my son, by the way:

https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/15027909_10157760338600525_3158679263228380583_n.jpg?oh=a8a84ea501008aa2aecf1a55c1fe9111&oe=589A0B93

She thought of those comments when it became apparent that Trump was actually going to win, and started bawling openly for nearly half an hour. THEY won. The people treating this election like a fucking game. The guy who got cut off by a black man, got out of his car, screamed "Trump!" over and over and then began openly calling the guy the N-word despite knowing he was on camera. Hillary Clinton, a positively brilliant and capable woman who had been preparing her whole life for this, got defeated by the man who was handed everything he ever wanted in life. The man who openly threatened our democracy with cries of a "rigged election" is going to lose the popular vote by over a million (as projections say) and still be handed the presidency. Decades of progress undone because people cared more about an improper email server than someone who has been a con man their entire life - not in the typical Washington sense of the word, but an open fraud, who lies about everything and gets away with it regardless. I have to work in an hour and I have no idea how I'm going to keep it together.

So, to my thinking Obama looks like an Eisenhower: a popular president with no local or congressional coattails and will remain a one-of-a-kind figure.

I mean this is so fucked up but I am genuinely relieved that my son has white skin. My daughter, who will be born in 4 months, may not be so lucky. My wife, who does not, has been getting teased about Trump and "the wall" at work for a year now.

It must be fair to say that the art of the Pollster isn't cutting it anymore, like even when hedge fund giants payed for their own private poll it was way out. Useful for harvesting clicks and generating "content", but they seem completely irrelevant and discredited after 3 massively embarrassing fails in a row now.

I really don't think we can compare the situation to rise of the right wing and fascism in the first half of the 20th century. What's different is that there really seems to exist such a paradoxical thing as "internationalist ultranationalism", with both the right-wing leaders and grass-root activists like neonazis genuinely supporting similar movements in other countries (as long they are European/white, of course), forming alliances with each other, and so on. Of course there are precedents to this too with the Hitler/Mussolini alliance etc, but this new thing seems more widespread and heartfelt, not just based on political expediency. Which would mean no wars between Western countries, but on the other hand this whole right-wing wave will probably be more resilient than the 20th century one.

(xxxpost)

This is what I keep thinking of:

John McGuirk
‏@john_mcguirk
Mitt Romney got 60.9 million votes and lost. Trump has 58.1million and is winning a landslide. Democrats stayed at home.

I'm not gonna blame the racists or the media who pumped up and normalized this dude for over a year now. I place the blame squarely on all the people who pumped this "lesser of two evils" narrative for months and stayed home (or voted 3rd party) without considering that EVEN IF you can't look past the bullshit of the so-called "Clinton scandals" and buy wholesale that she was up to something sneaky, there is STILL one candidate who is unambiguously worse in practically every conceivable way.

xp:

Well, then where does Trump stand in the conflict between Svoboda and Putin? Just because a internationalist nationalism exists doesn't mean that international conflict is ended.

surely someone will leak his tax results now, or at least one of the oppo dumps rick wilson was blathering about

just occurred to me that we got a 9/11

all of the various scandals that people believed/hoped would make him unelectable - sexual assault allegations, Trump foundation shadiness etc - will these continue to dog him, or does that fact that all this stuff was out there and he won the election anyway mean that it's effectively neutralised? Is there anything else that could hypothetically be revealed that would sink him? I guess I'm part of me is still clinging to the hope that he doesn't actually take office (or is forced to resign pretty much straight away), realise that this is probably wishful thinking though

the woman accusing him of raping her in her teens dropped her case last week iirc

I'm just sick of waking up with his horrified feeling of disgust and dread, three times in the last year now.

To which I would add the slow motion car crash that is the Labour Party, all of which has conspired to destroy my lifelong interest in politics. I feel like I've been tottering around the ring, punch drunk and befuddled, for a while now and this has just left me on the canvas, unresponsive and on the way to intensive care. From now on I'm only interested in sport and art, fuck the rest of it.

i hope mainstream media outlets take a long hard look in the mirror.

I'm too old to be an athlete so I'll be an aesthete instead.

& if Trump doesn't take office does that not mean that Pence does?
Quixotically hoping that the apparent results of this election might just be held totally invalid. But don't see that as likely.

Hoping this is a bad dream and I wake up later. But think I woke up at 6 am and checked result sto find out taht they were like totally wrong.

As politician, Pence is worse for America than Trump.

soref, he still has 75 pending lawsuits. The Trump U. racketeering trial will proceed.

Ultimately, though, the GOP won't impeach him until his popularity falls to the 20% range. I believe that will happen, he's demonstrably inept, the financial markets are terrified he might speak on renegotiating the national debt, there's going to be a oil supply crunch in 3 or so years. But he's going to set us back a decade on the SC and climate action in his brief term, and that's best case. The foundations of democracy are threatened with his authoritarian tendencies.