The next four years in one GIF

boing
42

So, your plan is to just wait it out for four years doing nothing of significance? Throwing a ball against a wall for four years?

Honestly, I’m not with you on that. It seems petulant. You aren’t being sent to your room for disobeying daddy, this is not a punishment. You’ve just over-invested yourself in a political candidate, who lost, and now you have nothing.

I can’t even tell you how disappointed I am with our current president, because race relations have fallen to lows not previously seen in my lifetime during the course of his administration. I voted for him twice as a insignificantly small but still important gesture of tolerance and understanding and hope for our future, only to find myself called a wide variety of slanderous names because of my ethnicity.

I’m probably going to have my comment deleted for not toeing the party line.

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43

Boy oh boy are you in for some BoingBoing grade disappointment! No one’s going to kick you to curb for a bit of contrarianism. Heck, disagreeing with @doctorow is our unofficial passtime (he’s often wrong, but he’s sometimes very right).

Welcome to the BBS! Seriously, stick around. We’re an acquired taste, but we’ll try not to bite :innocent:

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44

So you’re blaming Obama for race relations declining? Is there something he did specifically, beyond being the first black president? Also I’m wondering how you feel your vote was a “gesture of tolerance”. What exactly were you being tolerant of?

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45

What was I being tolerant of? Insinuating assholes, principally. The people of this world that bypass color of skin and content of character to mock “the other”, because they need to feel superior to someone, somehow, so they claim superiority over others because of geography, social status, or profession.

As for blaming the president for the decline in race relations: No. I blame his followers. After (I won’t bother to count how many) red states flipped blue, after so many people showed the world that African Americans were, at long last, equally able to achieve the highest position of authority in the world… slowly the accusations of racism, sexisim, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ignorance, able-isim, and the classic “being a nazi” ramped up until it was inescapable. These accusations were never leveled at my face, of course, because they were leveled at where I was born, at people of my income level, at people in my profession, at people who were so much like that I was included without consideration.

And you? What tolerance have you shown?

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That sounds a lot like a broken window fallacy.

The idea that political pendulum overshoots create activism might be true, but it is also true that a glazer gets employed to fix the broken window. Society benefits in neither situation, however, as (human) capital is misdirected towards repair rather than creation.

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47

I’ve never managed to hold someone accountable for the reflexive bigotry of those who are afraid of him.

I blame his followers

You blame the military? Those are his “followers”. You must mean his supporters and boosters and voters. Funny you’d call them ‘followers’ and not see how you ‘other’ people that very way.

Bravo Sir! Well managed dissonance!!

These accusations were never leveled at my face, of course, because they were leveled at where I was born, at people of my income level, at people in my profession, at people who were so much like that I was included without consideration.

So you were told. So you believe. So you say.

This is my act of tolerance. Please clarify while it’s available to you! Why do we bear the burden, for you, of what other people said about yet other people? I mean, nobody said it to your face, and in fact, maybe nobody here said any such thing - yet you seem to assume we could speak for these people who weren’t even speaking to you, yet hurt your tough tough thick skinned feels so bad.

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Your logic is like a pretzel. An oroborous that wraps around itself. You stretch for every argument and twist until it conveniences you.

Bigotry benefits no one. It is the ultimate truth that humanity must stand united, as kin across this globe. Your insistence on making people into villains because of where they are born and the color of their skin is not beneficial to this in the slightest.

Calling the military his followers, when clearly they are his subordinates, that’s another bit of you twisting words to fit your own narratives, which only serves to feed some kind of superiority complex. You are correct though, among backers and boosters of the present administration I do witness a significant amount of well managed dissonance.

You want clarification? All right. You have never spoken to me in person. The fine people on the television have not spoken to me in person. The people on this, and many other forums, have never spoken to me in person. The fine hosts on NPR have never spoken to me in person. I have, however, been lumped in through the broad sweeping generalizations that have been made by people on television, on message boards, on social media, and on the radio to groups with whom I would have some extreme personal disagreements.

And, let me look at your posting history… Ahh, here we are, in reference to a plate that might poison people, you suggested that “What the capital L libertarians need to make is a punchbowl like this. That would be fitting.”

Yes, suggesting that people with political ideologies other than your own should die. The hallmark of tolerance and respect. Shit like that is why you need to step up and accept responsibility for your actions and the actions of those like you.

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[quote=“Victory_Oracle, post:42, topic:90165, full:true”]
So, your plan is to just wait it out for four years doing nothing of significance? Throwing a ball against a wall for four years?[/quote]

No. To appreciate what the gif is about, you have to have watched or know about the film it’s taken from. Since it seems a lot of people haven’t had the pleasure of watching “The Great Escape,” I’ll try to explain.

In the gif we have Hilts, an American prisoner of war played by Steve McQueen. He’s an American flyer who’s been captured by the Nazis. Far from sitting on his hands as the Germans would prefer all POWs do, he constantly attempts to escape and otherwise undermine camp rules and routines. He’s done this at several camps, and for his trouble he’s now been sent to one of the most secure camps in the Reich, one that holds an international group of anti-authoritarian malcontents.

Whenever Hilts is caught, the Germans toss him in what’s called “the cooler”, basically solitary confinement, for a stretch (they can’t leave him in there permanently or beat or torture him because the Geneva Convention, a form of rule of law, is in effect); that’s the room you see there in the gif. Each time he’s bunged in, one of his pals throws him a glove and ball to pass the time (and to annoy the guards with the constant, monotonous thumping they can’t do anything about). He’s not happy to be there, but even in the cooler he does what he can. The moment he gets out “The Cooler King” is back to disobeying the rules and plotting another escape (probably resulting in yet another stint in solitary).

Now Hilts is very effective at vexing the fascists, but it is only when he gives up some of his American rugged individualism to contribute his skills to a larger escape effort that he sees truly serious effects that extend beyond the camp. He is joined by other skilled individuals (e.g. an entrepreneur/scrounger, an artist/forger, a miner/tunneler, an academic/linguist, a shopkeeper/tailor, etc.) under the direction of an organisation to help pull off one of the most successful mass POW escapes in history – one that diverts German troops from the war effort, creates chaos inside the Reich, boosts the morale of prisoners, and generally embarrasses the fascists.

Does that sound like spending four years doing nothing of significance? American studios in the 1960s didn’t make epic movies with all-star casts about people doing nothing, any more than liberals and progressives in the U.S. are going to let the current pack of right-wing populists we’re stuck with now have an easy time of it.

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50

Not so long as slactivism exists.

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51

Welcome to Boing Boing, comrade.

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52

Been here since 2007. Around March? Blame XKCD. Never bothered with the comments section really.

53

So, the plan is to be annoying and help others leave the country? Annoying has never changed an opinion. Annoying actively drives people away. Kinda like how I felt driven away from the political base I supported in two elections because I was being so frequently called a bevy of common internet insults because of my income level and ethnicity?

Also, doesn’t the “Cooler King” get shot at a German checkpoint at the end of that film? I mean, it’s been a few years since i’ve seen it, but i don’t remember a sweet motorcycle jump saving him that time. Just saying.

Final note, I promise: Isn’t it really really funny how America, the UK and (in a few months by the polls) France are now the extreme conservative countries of the world, while Germany is a bastion of liberal democracy?

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I haven’t made an assertion that can be proven right or wrong. I have no idea what your pinning on me here.

55

OK, on the one hand, I agree. Suggesting that people you disagree with should die is way out of line, even if that death would be ironically caused by a person’s own contempt for product safety legislation.

On the other hand, it does seem a bit hypocritical that being reduced to “people like you” and held accountable for the actions of others is okay when you do it to @AcerPlatanoides, but not when other people do it to you.

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[quote=“Victory_Oracle, post:53, topic:90165, full:true”]So, the plan is to be annoying and help others leave the country?
[/quote]

The plan is for liberals and progressives to resist authoritarianism within the country we’re stuck in however we can and the best can under the circumstances, preferably working together. Are you always this much of a literalist?

By the way, whinging about getting our fee-fees hurt because it’s pointed out that the preponderance of people who make bigoted statements happen to share our background is not the kind of plan we’d embrace as effective, but you do you.

No, he ends up tangled in the barbed wire barrier at the Swiss border after doing the motorcycle jump and is recaptured and sent back to the same camp. Guess where he ends up and what he’s doing in the last sequence of the film (hint: see the gif). The implication is that his defeat is temporary he’s not going to stop resisting the right-wing authoritarians he’s stuck with.

[quote=“Victory_Oracle, post:53, topic:90165, full:true”]Isn’t it really really funny how America, the UK and (in a few months by the polls) France are now the extreme conservative countries of the world, while Germany is a bastion of liberal democracy?
[/quote]

That’s because Europe’s 20th century fascist period and its consequences are passing out of living memory, and with them the lessons of the past (per Santayana). Given its special commitment to preserving those historical lessons, Germany will hold out a bit longer against the metastasisation of right-wing populism in the West (although AfD’s growing popularity there is cause for concern).

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I credit McQueen’s sweet metaphorical jumping of shark.

blob.jpg564×564 93 KB

(Bud Edkins did the real deal.)

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58

I completely agree. Shoes on pavement. Money transferred. Reactive infrastructure built. Goals, missions and objectives carried out strategically with extremely effective tactics.

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60

Tell that to Rosa Parks. And Mahatma Ghandi. And Alice Paul. And Nelson Mandela. And …

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61

Shhhhh.

Feeding it only encourages it.

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