I haven’t met nearly as many, except online (err, that sounds weird… except for the ones who I happen to interact with that I know exclusively online… various fandoms I’m in and the communities they’re active on tend to cross generational lines), but I agree. No generation’s perfect, they’ve certainly got their flaws, but they’ve been handed a $#!+ sandwich by our generation and the generations before them, are blamed for everything, and they still manage to be far more savvy and empathetic than I was at their age (and I considered myself pretty progressive for the time, but I was also casually ignorant in so many ways).
It’s going to be a tough few years, and it may well slow progress down significantly beyond that. But, as of right now, I’m not worried about the kids ruining the world. We’ve done that quite handily without them. I think they’re one of the few things still moving in the right direction. (And popular fiction seems to have well prepared them for young adults fighting back against dystopias).
Recession, a likely attack by another country, manipulation by Russia, an even wider divide between the citizens of the country, an even larger erosion of civil liberties, massive social unrest, and normalization of mob mentality violence.
True. Trump doesn’t believe in anything other than himself. Cruz is an out-and-out Dominionist who thinks that The Handmaid’s Tale should be an instruction manual for society.
Confessions also aren’t credible, apparently, as long as they subsequently go back on them*.
(* - Unless they’re black, in which case, even if DNA exonerates them a white rich presdential-elect confessed sexual assaulter can still profess to believe their guilt because, “if they were innocent why did they confess?”)
The worst of the Bush administration’s damage all happened in his first term. 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, the PATRIOT Act, the great recession—we’d still have had those things and more even if Kerry had ousted Bush in 2004.
I read the article, and it seemed to indulge in the same smug erasing as so many of the other two camps things. This time we focus on Kim Davis. How awful it was for everyone to dismiss Davis, not taking her beliefs seriously without good reason. What I remember as the crux of the issue when it was debated as here, how she may have been harming other people, doesn’t merit a mention.
Why would it? We’re only talking about conservatives and liberals – of course only represented by liberals with the privilege not to be in danger from the former – so we can ignore the rest of America, and then marvel at the disdain seen for conservatives, now without visible reason. And of course any disdain conservatives have for liberals is reaction to that, never a consequence of their biases, never stuff that would be invented and promoted anyway like the war on Christmas.
When Mindysan33 wonders at not wanting an authoritarian misogynist racist as president being considered “smug”, she’s not missing the point of the article, she is picking up the heart of its approach. People not caring who may be hurt by the conservative agenda, if not delighting in it, are the real reason Trump is president. We do ourselves no favors by imagining their victims were never the issue.
Given past campaign rumblings that Trump would delegate domestic and foreign policy to the VP, along with the fact that Pence said out loud that his role model is Dick Cheney, I think we’ll have a de facto President Pence regardless.
A lot of economists are saying that we’re sitting on a bubble right now already that will inevitably pop, due to the fed’s keeping an artificially low interest rate to prop up the stock market. If Trump’s policies work and we avoid that, I doubt any democrats will be giving him credit. I’m not particularly convinced Trump’s going to be able to create a ton of jobs though, but some aggressive trade policy negotiation might force us to make more goods locally and bolster things in the short term. After all, it’s not really fair or good for the environment if China can work a near-slave labor force to the bone churning out cheaper products without any decent environmental standards to boot. We just can’t compete with that right now. We need to shift that trade balance back a bit.
In the long run, I agree with Musk. We’re going to have basic income because AI is going to do anything most people can do, better. If you don’t keep people fed and happy, they revolt. I think only Bernie could have pushed us in that direction earlier. At least if Trump can manage to drain some of the swamp, we’ll be able to elect leadership that can see the future coming.
Let’s be clear: they’re not voting for more misery for themselves, they’re voting for more misery for the educated and comfortable cosmopolitan elites and for “undeserving” minorities.
