Pol Pot?
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Not equally bad, equal result.
What is happening is the result of a hell of a lot more than the election. Clinton would have comfortably delayed the implosion for a few years, but she wouldn’t have prevented it.
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That’s incredibly speculative. What is clear is that from an optimization point of view, neither candidate improved upon many reasonable social objectives, but Drumpf is the equivalent of iterating to a loss orders of magnitude higher than where you were before, such that decades of progress may be wiped out.
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I could not agree more. I wrote my newly elected Congresswoman last month to tell her this is exactly what I expected of her.
I understand this isn’t pleasant. But if you ever expect to have the opportunity to bring your actions in line with your ideals, to fix this country, and to make the world a better place—if you want 2018 to offer any of us even a tiny flicker of hope—you must first deal with the blight on the republic that is Donald Trump. He must be contained and thwarted at every turn. With a Republican House and a Republican Senate, do you think Democrats will be able to roll out any pet projects or make any meaningful progress?
The Republicans will jam a stick in your spokes every. single. time. Dehumanizing one’s political opponents might be unseemly, but these people are scorpions.
So, yes, gridlock is good. It’s all we’ve got! If the election had gone the other way, the average Republican would be the stubbornest, lyingest, tantrum-throwingest creep he could be. He’d leap out of bed every morning positively glowing with the joy of his mission: to keep the Democrats from doing each and every damn thing they had the nerve to try to do. You need to be that creep. Remember, these are the guys who threatened to start impeachment proceedings on Day One of a Hillary Clinton administration and to dig in their heels on her Supreme Court nominees—indefinitely. Before she was elected, they were salivating about all the things they would not allow to happen. (This was back in the mists of October 2016, of course, a time of such dewy innocence, when many of us believed that rules still worked. You know, before the Enlightenment got canceled.)
Sadly, perversely, every piece of Republican legislation you vote for will be spun into another point in Trump’s favor, more fraudulent evidence that he deserves the position he swindled away from the American electorate. So yours must be the way of the obstructionist, the denier, the stonewaller. Hold that line!
I urge you to strike these bromides from your mind: “Politics is the art of the possible.” (Not anymore, it isn’t. Now it’s the art of hamstringing Donald Trump.) “Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” (Too late. The good has a shiny new enemy named Donald Trump.) “Patience is a virtue.” (There’s no time, and besides, virtue is no longer virtuous in Donald Trump’s rancid America.)
And so, when I receive my primary ballot in 2018, I will ask only one question before I mark it up and mail it in:
Did she do everything in her power to oppose Donald Trump?
If you didn’t—if you bent and nodded and cooperated—I will vote for any Democrat who runs against you. But if you refused to fold, if you stood up straight and kept your eye on our objective, you will get my grateful vote.
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I feel really bad for you guys in the States. Unfortunatly I´m stuck on the same planet so I will also feel the fallout (quite possible literal) of the Insane Clown Posse´s policies soon enough.
What a time to be alive.
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I still hear people saying that…It just blows my brain…they look like normal human beings but they’re somehow unable/unwilling to realize they’re being herded into the pen. I wonder when buyers remorse will set in for some of these morons?
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It’s speculative, but it’s based on solid historical trends: We’re more polarized than at any time since the Civil War, and that always exacerbates things. Wealth disparity this high pretty much invariably leads to revolution of one form or another. Fascism and liberalism swing in cycles and it’s been swinging this way.
This is where major trends have been leading us. I think there were a couple definite points we could have made a dramatic turn, but Clinton was not one of them.
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Words only mean what they mean in his head, at that moment in time (and they might mean the opposite next time).
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We were always going to lose. Inherent problem of strongly associating your social movement with nonviolence and passive resistance.
If every leftist/progressive/liberal went out and purchased some firearms and some guerilla tactics books then maybe the people who actually run things would have some respect for us*.
/You think there isn’t a policy advisor keeping track of who can easily be steamrolled or which groups seem to be preparing to resist?
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On climate policy, Trump is a catastrophic reversal while Clinton was business-as-usual. But, since business-as-usual was already globally suicidal, it isn’t that much of a real world difference. Fucked either way.
Trump’s purge of all climate scientists from the DOE will reduce their ability to criticise him from within the administration, but it has little policy relevance. He wasn’t going to listen to the science anyway; the GOP base is heavily committed to climate denial, and Trump will always prioritise the prejudices of his base above the demands of reality.
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I am not a “he”, refrain from referring to me as such.
And you say my labelling system is fickle.
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Your comments are regularly a stereotype of an unexamined life of male privilege. It would be an insult to people who are truly trans/queer and/or multi-gendered to show you the respect they deserve.
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That seems like an appropriate point to link to this again:
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Pretty much my position for over a year now. Also, more or less the same thing on the economic front- Trump is going to tear down any remaining barrier between Wall St and Pennsylvania Ave, whereas Clinton would have simply stood around watching everyone else chip away at it.
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I encountered far fewer people actually saying that, than those who insisted upon interpreting them that way.
Your personal anecdotal claim is duly noted.
Next!
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OTOH, to halt too much false equivalency: reproductive rights and minority disenfranchisement.
Clinton was bad, but Trump is worse, on pretty much every issue.
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The only comfort, if you may call it like that, is that this gouverment will be so incredibly incompetent that it will implode within months. Mark my words.
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I’ve been having a private conversation with another member here who was able to turn my disorganized thoughts into a fuller, and therefore more useful, explication of why I have reacted so strongly. The ideas are truly mine, but I could never have expressed myself as clearly as @bibliophile20 has done on my behalf:
Philosophically, I suppose that I should apologize for stepping over the “Be Cool” line, and on principle for respecting people wishing to be addressed with their chosen pronouns. However, in this case, I will not do so, and I do not feel hypocritical having stated as such.
First, I have strong philosophical issues with your repeated desire to be addressed as an inhuman object, i.e. as an “it”.
Second, you routinely engage in goalpost moving combined with the equivocation fallacy; this is particularly egregious because you have occasionally changed what a specific word means to you on sequential uses of those specific words. This leads me to believe that you are not debating in good faith. Whether that lack of good faith is malicious or not, I cannot say, as I cannot read your mind, but the substance of that lack of good faith remains, and will continue to remain in existence outside of yourself, no matter how much you attempt to edit your own reality to exclude that lack of good faith.
Third, as a result, I feel that either you are a trolley baiting people or someone whose grasp on reality is tenuous at best; for all of your repeated emphasis on “I use parallel models to approximate reality and react accordingly”, you never seem to include the perspectives of other people in those models. Instead, the most generous interpretation I can have is that you populate them with clones of your own mindset, and I refuse to let you dictate my reality as that.
But, finally, I feel that letting you dictate the conversation as you always try to is doing a disservice to those who are actually struggling with self-expression and self-identity, perhaps verging on out-and-out mockery of their honest efforts. Because I do not believe your efforts are actually honest. You’ve contradicted yourself too many times and your reaction to being caught is to always make the other person defensive.
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That’s… actually his goal. It’s not a good thing. See his quote about how things will only be fixed when there are ‘riots’:
An ineffective, dysfunctional government mostly benefits the already powerful.
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When the ends justify the expense of screenplay rewrite Options…wait, what?
Conan, what is best pogrom in life?
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