Let’s say it’s symptomatic of the nation’s ideological divide.
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Well, as Trump himself said: “you need people that are truly, truly capable… We need to get the best and the finest, and if we don’t, we’ll be in trouble for a long period of time. And maybe never come out of it.”
And by “best” he means “attractive” people who aren’t smarter than himself.
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Well, for one thing Obama had the majority of the popular vote. Let’s put that aside, though, because – broken system or not — both became President by the terms of the system. Instead, let’s look at the base reasons driving people to say “not my President” in both cases.
In the current case, liberals and progressives are saying it because (with the evidence of 35 years of media exposure behind us) he’s a raging narcissistic and sexist man-child confidence artist who (based on his statements about world leaders and his choice of advisers and cabinet members) is an extremely poor judge of character and ability, to a dangerous degree. Feel free to dispute this.
In the case of the last President, conservatives were saying it because he’s an African American (well, also that he was a “soshalist” and a Muslim, but there’s no evidence of either being true).
It’s not creating your own reality, just acknowledging that reality is so awful one feels compelled to obscure it a bit. No-one using this extension thinks he won’t be the POTUS for the next four years, nor will they ignore all his depredations.
Imagine a cash-strapped college which has been bequeathed an extremely large amount of money by an arsehole alumnus, on the condition that a large and offensive monument (say a statue of said alumnus grabbing the p*ssy of a beauty queen) be placed in the middle of the quad. The school administration, requiring the money, erects the monument, but since there’s nothing preventing them from doing so they also place a tarp over it permanently.
The awful statue is still there, of course – students passing by it on the way to the new science centre know it’s there and what it is. The morbidly curious have access to photos of the monstrosity if they so desire. And everyone’s doing their best to find a way to get rid of it and restore normalcy (because a YUGE ugly and offensive sculpture sitting in the middle of campus, tarp-covered or not, is not normal). The tarp just makes the current situation slightly more bearable.
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That will show 'em!
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I still prefer MINORITY President.
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How about changing “President Trump” to “Fuckface von Clownstick”?
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I read the scare quotes as relating more to Trump’s surreal character, rather than a rehashing, rubber/glue-ing of the anti-Obama bumper sticker. Trump is a self-professed con-man (not paying taxes is just smart business!) with a TV show where he plays a slightly reality-shifted version of himself as a businessman. Sure, people accused Obama of being all kinds of secret things that he wasn’t, but Trump is literally an actor playing the role of Trump, a King Midas with a bully pulpit. Even many of his supporters didn’t actually expect him to win, as he probably didn’t, and both were just making a spectacle to mock the political process and the office of the president. That’s what scare quotes do. denote that this thing is a comment on, a parody, or a play on the thing it purports to be.
But, even if you read it as a direct analogue to “Not My President,” Trump, has, in no uncertain terms, told many, many groups of Americans that he does not represent them, or their wishes, and that he thinks they are losers, and has no interest in being their president. You could stretch Obama’s “Clinging to guns and religion” to fit this template, but even his words were in the context of people being scared, and feeling helpless and his sincere desire to help them. To interpret Trump as himself claiming that he is not the president of many Americans requires no stretching.
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For what it’s worth, like I already said I don’t think putting quotation marks around “President” is a huge deal and I don’t feel very strongly about this. But I dunno, there’s just something about this hill that makes me feel like it would be a fun one to die on. Your parable of the statue and the tarp makes me think of a couple of things:
Nobody can live with the statue, but people are willing to make do with the tarp. So in a sense the tarp can be seen as an impediment to more considered and effective action; maybe if you removed the tarp people would be more likely to agitate for the removal of the statue, holding protests and signing petitions and exploring legal avenues. That’s what I wanted to say with the reference to “completion errors”. It’s one of those established psychological thingies. And yeah, I don’t know if “removing the statue” with impeachment or whatever is really the right thing to be talking about at this point, but I’d rather we were having that conversation than this one and remember that we were fucking around with these stupid browser extensions when Trump was still a manageable threat. It didn’t work then and we ought to know better by now.
And you know, a tarp is the wrong analogy. This is backwards:
Everyone sees the statue, it’s only you that sees the photos of the tarp if you so desire. Given the modern nature of browser extensions a better analogy might be that you have an AR app on your google glass that puts a digitised tarp over the statue when it enters your field of view. And new people coming along are like “what the fuck is that thing” and you’re like “what thing? Oh yeah don’t worry bro, there’s an app for that” but there isn’t. There’s no app for the current situation. Your app hasn’t made the current situation more bearable at all or changed it in any meaningful way. All you’ve done is gratify yourself, to the betterment of nobody and nothing else.
Welcome to Virtual Sand, please insert head.
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As I often say, the “worse” in “the worse, the better” doesn’t usually end up impacting the usually privileged progressive person calling for it as negatively as it does people with less money, options or social standing.
Except that the response “what thing?”, if it occurs at all, is a joke whether you’re talking about a tarp or an app (which I agree is a better metaphor). The person downloaded the AR app for a reason: to block out an ugly thing that they’re aware of. That doesn’t preclude them from trying to remove the ugliness, it just spares them from having to look at it every bloody day due to its prominent and unavoidable position.
Please. Do you really think @frauenfelder is calling for that? Looking through this thread, the people who like this app have a comment history, and sometimes a real-life history, of doing just the opposite in regard to what’s happening in this country. They’re just not eager to don the hair shirt or lament the fact that others aren’t doing the same.
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I am using #MAKA, and it helps a bit, but you do have to refresh quite a bit on sites like BBS to hide the…images. I’m still going to refer to the un-popularly elected president as the Short Fingered Vulgarian (SFV for short).
@gmbradley: Well, if this is your gripe, I will take this opportunity to remind you that Obama won the popular vote both times he was elected to office. Whereas the SFV did not, and neither did G-Dub his first outing, which is why die-hard dems also called him “not my president.”
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I’m running out of energy for my little crusade. I hope you won’t take it too personally if my replies get a bit glib and sarky from here on out 
“The worse, the better” would have been voting for Trump to stick it to the system. I can’t deny that I’m one lucky bastard but it sounds like you’re calling me out for my privilege when all I’m saying is, put the lipstick down. The pig is fine without it. It’s not even real lipstick anyway. Yes, the pig is going to do more damage to the less fortunate, but that’s true whether or not we pretend the pig has got lipstick on. Calling my desire for a pig free of imaginary lipstick “the worse” seems like a bit of a stretch. But then I’m probably stretching a bit too so I guess that’s OK. But surely lipstick free pigs is just “the normal”.
I worry that it does though. People spent actual dollars on “Make Donald Drumpf Again” hats, dollars that went in their entirety to the good cause of People Who Make Hats. Then I imagine that they wore those hats, and they maybe even thought it would make a difference and now Donald Trump is the president of the United States of America. Hooray fuck. But I’m getting off topic a little bit, at least the people wearing the hats weren’t the only ones who could see them.
Oh, I don’t think he’s calling for anything at all. He’s fucking around and having a good time and that’s great. I just want people to share jokes with each other instead of with their browser.
Don’t worry, soon there will be a chrome extension that uses sentiment analysis to filter out downers like me.
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I don’t take it personally, and your response was far from glib or snarky.
[quote=“doop, post:53, topic:93243”]
“The worse, the better” would have been voting for Trump to stick it to the system.[/quote]
That’s the flipside. Those bitter idiots have hurt the elites insofar that they’ve elected someone who’ll tank our stock portfolios for a few years (which losses will be offset by the tax breaks he’ll be giving us). Meanwhile, they’ll end up bearing the brunt of the “worse,” just as they’ve done every time they’ve voted against their own economic interests over the past 40 years.
But since the general election (and before from some of my fellows Sanders supporters) I’ve been hearing their own humourless version of “the worse, the better”, as in “bah, let him do his worst so everyone sees it. I hope there’s a war and another market crash. It’s the only way we’ll have the revolution that we need in this country.” A lot of those saying it are white, cisgender, healthy males from middle-class families who are college students or grads.
[quote=“doop, post:53, topic:93243”]
I can’t deny that I’m one lucky bastard but it sounds like you’re calling me out for my privilege when all I’m saying is, put the lipstick down.[/quote]
I don’t know enough about your circumstances to call you out personally. I’m just saying that those who call for “the worse, the better” are often comfortable members of the bourgeois intelligentsia, whose families won’t be dealing with the fallout of “the worse” for multiple generations.
Also, I’m not sure if you understand the metaphor about putting lipstick on a pig. This extension achieves the exact opposite, wiping the normalising lipstick the MSM is putting on the pig. It serves as a constant reminder when reading Google news or other news outlets that this is not normal, however much the NYT or NPR struggles to make it seem so.
Your concern is noted, but one of the great things about liberals and progressives is that we can have fun while also addressing serious issues and holding the line against autocracy. Someone posted the following quote from a recent John Scalzi essay, which is worth reading in its entirety because it offers good strategies for resistance before saying:
you know what, if I’m going to resist for the next four years, I’m gonna have fun doing it. I mean, come on: Thumping on racists and bigots and greedy assholes, and shoving sticks into the spokes of their shitty little plans? That’s holy work, that is, and I’m going to enjoy every minute of it. Opposing Drumpf and his pals is serious business, but I think if you can approach the work with some joy, it will help. I’m going to take pleasure in sticking up for my country. I hope you will, too.
Downers can have some fun, too, as long as they don’t lapse into self-pity. Masha Gessen, a champion in the downer field even by Russian standards, sat down with Sam Bee for an interview:
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I feel like you’re talking past me with the “the worse, the better” stuff. I’m not suggesting here that we do anything that makes any material changes one way or the other, I’m just suggesting that we shouldn’t do stuff that doesn’t.
I think I do. The quotation marks are a purely cosmetic change designed, according to responses in this thread, “to cheer ourselves up” or as you put it yourself to “make the current situation more bearable.” Superficial enhancement masking a grim reality.
Wide of the mark, in my opinion. Donald Trump is not the “president”, he’s the president. That’s not normalisation, that’s not a media slant, that’s a fact.
Yeah, well. The “line against autocracy” is breached. Liberals and progressives are losing, we are losing the world over and in my opinion we should be looking at what we’ve done wrong and what we can do differently if we want to put brakes to this descent. We played with browser extensions, we watched Samantha Bee and Jon Stewart and all the comedians who told us that politics is a circus while they themselves wore the clown-paint of “we’re not real journalists”, and we fucked around and we fucked it up. I want something different.
Emphasis mine. I’ll be more than happy to see pithy insults directed at Trump when they’re written down on a sign in the hands of a protester out in the streets doing it. The browser extension we’re talking about here is having fun doing nothing.
Action and resistance is not limited to street protest and other traditional forms of dissent. Everyone does their own part, not always in the dour way you seem to think is the only effective one. Sometimes it’s just a matter of maintaining morale, of letting others know that they’re not alone in their mockery of or disdain for an authoritarian regime.
Is that “having fun doing nothing”? If your answer is yes, look up the names George Grosz, Kurt Tucholsky, and John Heartfield. Google the name Hessy Levinsons Taft and consider the man who took her baby photo. I have no doubt that most of them would appreciate these browser extensions and other digital toys that point out that this is not a normal president instead of dismissing them.
The same would go for Stewart and Bee and Colbert and Oliver. Liberals and progressives are losing around the world because the institutions they put their trust in – political parties of the left, the mainstream press, constitutional structures, corporate cultures – have been corrupted and debased and gamed. Who do you think calls these things out if not the jesters? They’ve spent as much time exposing the failures of these institutions as they have mocking conservatives and right-wing populists.
There’s a reason that comedians and satirists are always the early targets of authoritarian crackdowns and intimidation campaigns by fascist bullies. The Americans who create these comedy browser extensions will be gone after, if not by the administration itself than by its thuggish followers. Whether it’s doxxing or worse, the people who “have fun doing nothing” as their act of resistance often end up facing this:
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