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One of my favorite video memes of all time.
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This is certainly a part of it.
I think another part is folks who look selectively around them and become convinced that at least something is being accomplished by Trump.
Listening to NPR interview swing district Texans near the border today was disheartening. Trump supporters were a bit vague on the details of why they supported his candidates, but reasons included:
- He cares about strengthening border security: This from a woman who travels to Mexico weekly for everything from groceries to dentistry and feels it isn’t right for Mexicans to come into the U.S. illegally because they’re freeloading and cheating the system. Never mind that Trump is also eager to make it harder for them to come here legally.
- Guy making buck in the local fracking boom. Credits Trump with the improved economy and the voter’s own salary doubling since switching from firefighter to oil worker. Not taking into account that Trump had little direct influence over either.
- A border sheriff who’s usually a Democrat and thinks a wall as such would be a bad idea (maybe a few more security cams might be okay). But who now supports Trump because he’s the first president who went out of his way to take the concerns of local sheriffs seriously.
- The general idea voiced that it’s about time we put America First and stopped all the outsiders mooching off our hard work.
The gridlock between Obama and his Republican congress in trying to fix problems has all been laid on Obama’s shoulders. All Obama’s successes overlooked (deporter in chief much?). While the sheer pace of change under Trump, any change, is viewed as a positive thing.
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#magabomber
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A drug addict who raids the kids’ savings account thinks he’s acting in his own self-interest, because his idea of self-interest doesn’t involve much of the future.
Some people are addicted to infomercial shopping. Some people are obsessed with reality TV shows.
Some people watch Fox News and get a teeny little dopamine hit every time the president publicly performs exactly the sort of anxiety-fueled, incoherent pan-belligerence they feel in themselves.
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and lego fucking batman
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The whole Sayoc thing makes me wonder: there seem to be many occasions in history when people who knew they were being screwed over declared allegiance to at least some of the very people who were doing the screwing. What did it take for them to see the reality? War? Famine? Pestilence?
Part of me also thinks this is nothing to do with left and right as we currently have those concepts, but just straight-up late-stage capitalism getting to places we’ve not seen before.
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Everybody here is like, “yeah, those damn Republicans,” but this article points out that Democrats in a position to stop this banditry (or at least prosecute it) instead did nothing. My point being that we’re all down here fighting over scraps, while a vast criminal enterprise runs the country. And that criminal enterprise may have some different entities vying for power, but we’re going to get screwed regardless of which one is currently on top.
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This guy is a crazy loser. He was going to lash out at the world somehow, and could just as easily have adopted a number of other ideologies. In this case, Trump’s dog whistling was the low-hanging fruit. Now everyone is trying to score political points off him.
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It has long since stopped being about politics or economics, or even left and right. It is a full-on culture war. The sooner those in all other cultures - in all countries - other than team ‘white, right, might, fight, hate, resent, lie, cheat and steal’ realise this and get together to do something about it, the better. That culture is subsuming and fragmenting all the others. It really is rather like the 1930s in Europe, all over again.
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LBJ said something about this, years ago. I don’t remember exactly, but it went something like: If you give a voter someone to look down on, he’ll vote for you no matter how you screw him over. Yup.
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That is true. He used it to explain how poor whites could vote against their own interest with the republicans.
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Here in the UK there was unrest in Britain in 1819 (Peterloo), 1919 (gunboats off the Mersey) and in 2019 we’ve got Brexit and we get to see impact of WTO trade rules on just-in-time supply chains testing the adage about society been 3 meals away from anarchy.
We’ve appointed a Minister for Food Supply and apparently there will be adequate food supplies, but I think it may be time to invest in tumbrels…
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I wish that it was the kind of anarchy that takes over the supermarkets and warehouses to distribute the food according to need. I get the feeling Westminster fears that far more than nihilistic looting.
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Even the most cursory reading of that article makes it clear as a bell: GEORGE SOROS FINANCED THE WHOLE THING!!!11!!!1!!1!!!11!
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The Reichstag fire of '33 had this same kind of effect, but fascism has evolved into a so much more effective, personalized set of political weapons.
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Saw that on Twitter last night from the thorough David Dayen. Truth be told, IndyMac had already stolen the house before Mnuchin bought it but he seems to have completed the foreclosure after that.
A few tweets later saw another little tidbit that Michael Flynn had met a few (or more?) with the Saudi general who is now implicated in the Jamal Kashoggi torture and murder.
The world is slipping over from surreal into pure Dada, Ubu Roi division, by my itchy dick.
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That’s good Cory throws in Kamala Harris and Eric Holder in the same way he throws in Mnuchin, so we know that the only correct person to elect or appoint, for all offices, is Bernie Sanders. We got it, Cory. Mnuchin commits the crime, then Harris/Holder wink at Mnuchin, do the secret handshake, and are complicit in the crime. Harris/Holder have no other considerations but helping Mnuchin, because, that’s what corrupt entities do, they help each other! All parties are the same. All this would be happening under a Hillary or Obama-Third-Term Administration. It’s Bernie and Pure Socialism or nothing.
Exactly. Kamala Harris and Eric Holder materially and financially benefited in the exact same way Mnuchin did. Everything Trump and Mnuchin are doing is exactly what Clinton would have done.
Amazing that so few people “get” it, like you do. And thank you for spelling it out. Because sometimes people think that someone like you is being sarcastic.
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