That bastage! Look at what he has wrought with his Authority! Trump will turn those same powers back on the liberal elite and place a lower value on human life, and they can choke on it! Serves them right for their eight years of profligate protection of the health and rights of all Americans.
Damn, dude. +1/like/upvote/Timex.
Agreed, great post.
A point that folks should consider, is that part of this hijacking has been enabled by the left. To some non-trivial degree, the left is reaping what it’s sown. Malathor’s position here, while I think ignoring certain realities and very real, dangerous implications of Trump’s apparently gross incompetence, is at least part a reaction to partisan demonization which has absolutely been put forth by the political left for years.
This is not a one sided thing in this regard. In many cases, the left engages in exactly the same kind of bullshit soundbite based garbage, portraying their opponents as evil demons who hate brown people. And to some degree I feel like this has driven the GOP to embrace this persona. It’s not an excuse, in my mind, but it is a contributing factor to it happening. Trump is the manifestation of the response to this, which seems to have essentially just said, “Well fuck, if we’re boxed in as bigots, midaswell just put up an ACTUAL FUCKING NAZI and go with it.”
I honestly don’t know what the fix is at this point. Neither side wants to be the “good guys” and act like mature, ethical, responsible adults in the face of dirty tricks from the other side. It ends up just ceding power to their opponents, since the dirty tricks fucking work.
The problem isn’t really with the politicians. I mean, it is, obviously… but they are more of a symptom than a disease. They’re a symptom of the dimwitted and lazy population that America has become, who is addicted to sensationalist garbage. Our politicians play the media, and our media has adapted itself based on what we demand as viewers… and what we demand is absolute fucking shit. “Man, it’s bullshit that Trump gets 90% of news coverage… Let me tune in to see what an imbecile he is today!” Or, “Man, muslims are gonna destroy America… let me tune in to shows that exclusively blasts my own views back at me at maximum volume!”
Neither conservatives nor liberals have a monopoly on lazy ass messaging designed to court the dimwitted and weak willed. Because that’s what most folks are. And ultimately, the end state here is that things get worse and worse, and eventually shit hits the fan, and the dumb folks die. Like, literally die. Because the dim witted and weak willed are the folks who won’t be able to cut it when society collapses.
It’s a grim picture of the future, but I’m not seeing it turn out a lot differently given how no one cares about the real world any more. They just care about “winning” some political game… What’s nuts is that they aren’t even really competing. They’re tricked into thinking that some damn political party is “their team”, and that its victories are their own… despite the fact that “their team” is kind of garbage.
Hear, hear. I’ve been bitching about this for years. It’s no longer a debate between two rational but opposing schools of political thought. It’s just pure Red Team vs Blue Team. No one cares if Obama deflated a football or Trump bribed a ref, they just want their team to win because the other team sucks!
The biggest problem of “us vs them” is when it’s knee-jerk. Where you have to be 100% against everything the other side believes in. We can say that it has existed in politics at all times, but I counter that it has really been the last 8 years that have brought it to a head. The GOP’s flat out, in plain English, stated goal for the Obama administration was “just say no”. No matter what the Dems proposed, the GOP stood against it, even if it benefited the GOP constituents as well. Other than a very few slam-dunk bills, there was 0 bipartisanship in the last 8 years. Even after something got passed, the GOP did nothing but commit themselves to posturing about how horrible that thing was.
Now there is no such thing as a “good bill” anymore, in the eyes of politics. If the Dems support it, the GOP opposes it. The Dems are now on board, opposing anything the GOP proposes.
Really, we’re screwed. There is nothing that we, ad individuals, can do. If the whole country was against the “winning” mentality, we could elect new officials who run on platforms of bipartisanship. However, the RNC and DNC has managed to turn the other side in to the enemy in the eyes of the voters as well, creating fortresses of hate that will aggressively oppose any candidate that even appears to be working with the other side. Look at what happened with Chris Christie when he dared to offer some praise to Obama. He was almost run out of the party. His handshake on the tarmac and quotes were used against him in the primaries. No one pointed out that he used political power in illegal ways for “bridge-gate”; that kind of thing as fine. Praising Obama for something though? You’re dead to us
I think it’s someone who is going to be willing to use the dirty tricks to force a fair system on America, and Americans are going to have to reject extremism. A more moral Huey Long?
I don’t know if we can do it- but we have no choice but to either flee the country (and that’s no guarantee of safety given America’s power), or have faith in the people to come back to their senses.
Well we’re fucked then.
On a wonky sort of note, if people do want to target the left, justifiably, for some of this, look no further than the whole poststructuralism/deconstuctionist phase of academia from a few decades back, which has become sort of the new norm in a lot of fields. In this intellectual movement, the very language and structures of what was then considered mainstream or “normal” discourse were attacked, undercut, and dismissed as tools of the hegemonic culture, instruments of oppression, and outgrowths of a parasitic. misogynist, and capitalist culture run amok.It wasn’t enough to disagree with a critic’s interpretation of a text or artifact, you had to totally destroy the entire framework the critic was using and replace it with your own. Any attempt to argue in the old fashion was dismissed as pitiful and desperate bourgeois attempts to preserve the ancien regime.
I exaggerate only slightly, and yes, this was mostly in the rarified and usually not terribly significant realm of academe. But the concept was alluring to a generation of students who found in it the perfect tool to attack the status quo and to create a new reality where their work would stand out, instantly relegating centuries of scholarship to the dustbin of history. It didn’t quite work out that way, and there were actually some very cool intellectual avenues of approach buried in the postmodernist movement, but I don’t think anyone really anticipated the bleed-over effect into mass politics.
And that, I think, is what happened. The more the left internalized postmodernist ways of discussing political issues, and insisted that only their framework was valid, the more they lay the groundwork for what we see now. Because what the Trump upheaval is showing us is a large group of people who are rejecting the existing framework as illegitimate, and insisting that only their framework is valid. Except this time it’s not just in grad school seminars filed with LitCrit Ph.D candidates, and the stakes are much, much higher.
That’s really interesting, thanks for sharing @thewombat - my only exposure to academic anything is a younger family member with a recently minted philosophy degree who is strident in his super-left-wing views in the way only an early-20s new grad can be.
As an early-30s old grad, I take deep offense at this.
Also, in the spirit of the thread, anyone not willing to do absolutely anything to utterly and completely expunge the entire width and breadth of schools of thought and those that think them that brought us Trump from reality is a fucking enemy of society and must be tossed in the dustbin of history with the direct racist-fucks.
There is literally no compromise here. An entire worldview must be destroyed, and those that hold it it completely stripped of voice and power.
Yeah, that feels about right. Mmm.
So basically people on this thread are advocating embracing the Palpatine in us all.
I mean good luck with the crusade and all. I find it funny that the same vitriol I hear from the left now, I heard from the right when Obama got elected. Talking about eradicating worldviews, it just seems like some holy war than an actual opposition.
I don’t know what the best way to deal with a Trump administration is, and I still firmly believe all opposition must be contained within the bounds of law, but I utterly reject this equivalence.
One of the two men advocated torture and the deliberate murder of civilians. One of the two men claimed he would not accept the results of an election unless he won. One of the two men winked at violence against the press and protesters and made fear of a non-white ‘other’ a fundamental premise of his campaign. One of the two men openly bragged about committing sexual assault. One of the two men spent five years engaged in a grotesque, racist campaign of slander against the citizenship of the sitting President of the United States, and when called upon to rescind that campaign, blamed its inception on his political opponent. One of the two men threatened to lock up his political opponent upon winning the election. One of the two men refused to repudiate the endorsement of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. One of the two men demonstrated a total ignorance of the contents of the U.S. Constitution. One of the two men included in his convention speech the astonishingly authoritarian, self-aggrandizing phrase, “I alone can fix it.” One of the two men lied so frequently, so blithely, so blatantly, as to render any connection between his words and the truth purely coincidental.
Policy differences are what they are, and anyone who wants to say they were in the loyal opposition against Obama and opposed his domestic and foreign policies – god be with you. But to say these two men are equally deserving of deep, sustained, exceptional opposition, in my mind takes ‘even-handedness’ and ‘fair-mindedness’ so preposterously far as to actually put rational minds in the service of irrational gargoyles.
It won’t do, and I for one won’t stand for it ever again.
Hear fucking hear.
I see the two worldviews as linked. They feed off each other, and both need to be purged.
The rise of white identity politics can be linked directly to this postmodernist approach directed above- and that’s the difference between Trump and say, Wallace. Before it was white supremacy, now it’s white identity.
We can have our holy war- but it will end in nuclear hellfire. There’s going to have to be another way- and I’m willing to sacrifice some of what I believe in order to achieve it if necessary. The stakes are too high now.
Gee, I dunno, there might be a few minor differences. Like how Obama was the soberest, most responsible, most gracious, least corrupt President we’ve had in our lifetimes, and the right ignored all that and treated him like human garbage from day one.
And also that Trump really is human garbage - something a large percentage of his supporters will admit - and really will be disastrous for the country in a number of ways.
But the fact that Trump really is human garbage doesn’t matter. Liberals are attacking Trump, and liberals by definition aren’t allowed to go on the attack, even if the person they’re attacking richly deserves it. They’re supposed to sit back in their ivory towers and do nothing, just like the Real Americans want them to. When a liberal attacks - even in self-defense when the stakes are incredibly high - it’s mean and elitist and unfair.
Liberals are expected to act like adults; the right is expected to act like bratty toddlers. And because of this asymmetric expectation, a bratty toddler is about to become President and wish all the adults in the country out into the cornfield.
While there may be some sort of false equivalence between some sort of rarified and purified conservative positions as they exist on the cultural spectrum and coastal liberalism - though I have big questions if this is even possible anymore - this in no way should mean sympathy for tolerating the positions and behavior of Trump. Don’t get confused between the two.
I say go on the attack like mad- the folks who hate it already vote en masse against civilization, and it works on the folks who don’t hate it. Maybe it will make millenials vote en masse too- that’s the only way we’re going to take this country back.
Of course, the other way of thinking about it is that, having handed the Republicans the Presidency, both Houses of Congress, most of the Governorships and State Houses, and–soon enough, at least–the Supreme Court, there’s not really much point in fighting, since we’ll all me disenfranchised, in labor camps, or smoking piles of radioactive goo soon enough, anyway.
I’M IN A REALLY BRIGHT FUCKIN MOOD TODAY ALRIGHT
I was having a discussion with a close (and sensitive) coworker the other day and he literally started the thing you do when you suspect someone is considering suicide. Asking leading questions and trying to make sure I wasn’t thinking of ending it. That’s how pissed off and depressed this stuff makes me.
I will remember this statement for the next time. :)
For other sensitive people, for the record, hell no I’m not killing myself.