I feel as if I were on an operating table, drifting off under the anesthesia, only to recognize my surgeon as Hannibal Lecter.
As a feeling of dread follows me into the darkness, I wonder what state I will be in when I awake, if I awake.
I am sure that it won’t be good.
No laughter here.
Well, now we’re probably gonna see the same old pattern again anyway. The Dems can’t do anything for a while anyway, so it would be good time for soul-searching and researching the electorate out of media attention. Instead, I guess it will be just another very public civil war, like always (hello, Labour?).
Militarily, Singapore is stronger than Malaysia. Do you expect Indonesia to invade?
[quote=“doop, post:124, topic:89005, full:true”]
Build a wall.
[/quote]Arbeit macht frei.
And you are smart. Smart enough to refrain from saying anything of this sort before the deluge. Actually, that is untrue, you muttered a fair bit & in a good way, now and then. But… there were so few of us speaking out against the Hillary hagiographers here 2-3 days ago. And we were excoriated for our illegitimate, public WrongThought.
There was such silence from you shrewd men.
For fuck’s sake, we had actual human slavery in this country for the first 89 years of its existence. And we had de facto slavery (I’m not talking neoliberalism, I’m talking actually enacted Jim Crow laws) for another roughly 100 years after that.
But Donald Trump is the apocalypse?
This is awful. This is bad. I don’t like it. I’m not really sure what else to say. But you know what he’s not proposing to do? Let you own your neighbor. (Is the KKK? I don’t know! But Trump isn’t.) There are worse things in the political history of America than Donald Trump being elected president. And most of the BB commentariat has relatives who were around for those worse things.
Don’t despair. There are a couple of bright sides to Trump’s election:
firstly, I believe America might well have become unrulable under Clinton because the right wing is at the brink of civil unrest. Every small failure of the government would have been inflated to max by the Alt-Right, the Teabaggers, the conspiracists and all the right-wing nutters. Now it’s for those right-wingers to prove their worth and for the opposition to monitor and critisize their every step. Secondly, if we all survive these four years, the US will probably be ready for a much better democratic presidency because we all know Trump will fail to make things good for the average Joe. Hillary would probably have weakened these chances. And finally, it’s good for culture in general, because the best culture is always protest and just like Punk culture flourished under Reagan and Thatcher, new rich protest culture may well flourish against Trump that might at last challenge the established culture of lobbyism and corporatism.
You are seriously going to blame minorities for the result of this election, just because something like a third of Latinos voted for Trump? You know who really, really voted for Trump a lot? White people. Including an embarrassing proportion of white women.
ETA: I don’t imagine I’ll sleep well, but I’ve seen all I can bear to see tonight. Goodnight to all.
HRNNNNNNGGGGGHHH
NO, I AM NOT BLAMING MINORITIES.
I am blaming you, the Democratic Party and all its members, for actively letting Hillary steal the nomination, being smug enough to think that was sufficient, that all the minorities would vote for you no matter what, and not learning a fucking thing from this.
Edit: Royal You, I don’t want to be a dick here, and that was dickly of me, I apologize to you personally. But it really vexes me how people are not learning lessons here even in the face of overwhelming failure. That’s everything you accuse the Republicans of.
Can you expand on that? Nobody is going to attach Singapore. They will loose all that business. A US recession will affect everybody but life will go on. I wouldn’t want to be in Iran right now though.
A lot of this was the demonizing of Hillary and the normalizing of Trump to create a false equivalency in voters minds. Then, good old sexism tilts the scales. I can’t tell you how many times I heard people say they were equally bad candidates when, in fact, Hillary is one of the best prepared candidates in history and the Donald the least. Look at this:
A person who hated Trump but could not vote for Hillary. “divisive, unlikable, hypocritical, possibly corrupt, contemptuous
Hillary Clinton. And she spent the general election campaign batting away one scandal after another—scandals that became outsized because she refused to address them.”
That is just a laughable package of lies and deceit. How many Benghazi hearings does the country need, Republicans? When will right wing bloggers stop lying about imaginary criminal indictments over the email non-scandal? Why was the press so focused on Hillary’s emails but totally ignored when the Bush people lost millions of emails directly related to several criminal acts including outing an active CIA agent just for fun.
HRNNNNNNGGGGGHHH yourself; I switched to the Dems so I could vote for Sanders in the primary, and he won my state. So you can keep that. Also, re: blaming minorities, that’s why I QUOTED YOU.
I hope so; but then again, that’s up to the college students and the teens.
Us adults have to focus on keeping our job and a roof above our heads.
I’m saying Democrats just assumed minorities would vote for Hillary and they could take them for granted.
They didn’t. That’s not the fault of the minorities, it’s the fault of the Democrats.
Edit: Make clearer who ‘they’ are. ‘They’ are good people who need a positive message that they didn’t get.
You sound European.
We already have one armed uprising in the US, the “police state”. It can be considered in insurgent force in many ways. If others have done it, you might also. But I think that unarmed uprising is under-rated. The problem is that most refuse to do it, even when they know they are becoming marginal, and can see things getting worse. I kind of wish I could understand the risk-analysis people use to observe “This thing could very well render me/my family/my species extinct - but I shouldn’t do anything about it because I will get in trouble.” But somehow the alternative isn’t trouble?
It is risky to act, and it is risky not to. And even if you do, you need to decide what is the best time and way to act. I think that being constructive and networking with people directly does not usually require armed conflict. Most people are still not going to want to shoot an unarmed person for going about their daily life, unless certain ideological triggers are present. Scavenge, repurpose, implement bits of guerilla infrastructure for food, transportation, currency, education, etc which are missing. Get involved in town politics where it is easier to make a difference. The key is for one and the people one knows to solve more problems on their own than allowing to be exploited by others outside the group. It’s not easy, but it can be doable if you start small in manageable steps.
good catch.
No, the problem isn’t Malaysia, it’s that the US navy holds the balance of power in the China Sea. If Japan is no longer under US military protection and rearms in the face of Chinese expansionism, or if the Philippines decide they are really attached to their own rocks and don’t have the US to act as a check on their own military ambitions, there are an awful lot of potential scenarios in which an outright war between three or more nations in the region is entirely possible.
Singapore is the same as Panama and Suez, in its strategic value for the region, in that you can’t really fight and win a theatre-wide conflict without holding it. Even if that weren’t the case and a war was restricted to the contested islands, I have a lot of friends in Japan and any conflict would doubtlessly involve the Japanese mainland sooner or later.
Basically, all the scenarios I see playing out if the US pulls out of the region with no attempt to rebalance power end up with hundreds of thousands of dead, if not in Singapore itself then right on my doorstep.
