This board is deader than Hillary Clinton's political future.

[Derived Absurdity]

C'mon people. Talk.

Or you can just, I mean, keep not talking, if you want. In which case I'll probably leave for good. This board is sort of like an unhealthy addiction for me by now, but one that isn't rewarding in any way because there are NO CONVERSATIONS, EVER. So I might stop torturing myself by coming here pretty soon. I know, I can hear the desperate outcry, I know you all love me so much and will miss me greatly, but sometimes you guys have to face the consequences for your actions.

srsly tho

[CashRules]

Here's a good one for you. I was arguing with a few Islamophobes/BLM-haters/homophobes earlier and I happened to click on one of their profiles and realized it's my nephew - the older brother of my #1 pet lesbian. I reminded him he has a brother and sister who are both gay and relatives who are black. He reminded me that I turned his sister into a lesbian. He was raised by his aunt, my older sister, and she's filled his head full of so much nonsense there is no hope for him. I'm probably going to have to kill him - it's an honor thing.

[Blade Azaezel]

Well, we pitters had a good 13 year run. Like everything else in 2016 it's time we died.

[aels]

Well, be more controversial, you fuck. I post more when I'm mad at people.

[aels]

Well, we pitters had a good 13 year run. Like everything else in 2016 it's time we died.

People are sending death threats to Sir David Attenborough now so basically humanity is worthless forever: http://metro.co.uk/2016/11/17/sir-david ... p-6263850/

[CashRules]

People are sending death threats to Sir David Attenborough

WTF? Those people should be shot. What started all this?

[aels]

David Attenborough was asked in a Radio Times interview what we could do about the fact that Donald Trump - a man who does not believe in climate change - is now going to be president and he replied:

“Well, we lived through that with earlier presidents - they've been equally guilty… But what alternative do we have? Do we have any control or influence over the American elections? Of course we don't," he said.

Adopting a hushed tone, he said: "We could shoot him, it's not a bad idea" before chuckling.

And people think that a 90 year old man who is basically Earth's grandpa is absolutely definitely calling for the assassination of Trump. I would put money on the fact that some of the people sending threats to Attenborough have said that someone ought to shoot Obama. And claim that people these days are too sensitive.

[aels]

Oh God, I'm now afraid that 2016 is going to end with someone killing David Attenborough on New Year's Eve because 2016.

[Anakin McFly]

Well, now Trump would like all Muslims to register themselves. I figure we don't have much longer before the second Holocaust, and then the nuclear apocalypse will come to save us all. I'm following all the proceedings with horrified fascination.

[CashRules]

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter ... n-muslims/

It's not clear what the rambling idiot actually thinks because he can't stay on topic for more than a few seconds. But a database/registry for all Muslims is not going to happen.

[Anakin McFly]

I meant this one,just out in the news: http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN13B05C

Looks like they're referring to immigrants and visitors from Muslim countries with terrorist presence rather than Muslims per se, but it's still dodgy.

(Meanwhile, Orson Scott Card really doesn't like Trump. My opinion of him went back up a few notches. Currently reading Speaker for the Dead.)

[Boomer]

I've just been super busy lately, but I've been meaning to respond to the other thread where we were discussing libertarianism. I'll get around to it.

[Unvoiced_Apollo]

I've just been super busy lately.

This. Unlike the rest of you liberal fascist commies, I've a life better spent focusing on work, seeing real life friends, and trying to find a relationship than to spend it in a place where we (mostly) agree.

Most subjects posted I usually agree with the sentiment of thr OP, so I see no point in saying anything, especially when others already say it before I can & usually much better.

[Derived Absurdity]

I sort of think there's at least a 40% chance Trump doesn't make it a full year. Then we'll probably get Mike Pence in charge of everything. Yay!

So, uh, what do we make of this article?

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/yo ... ying-wolf/

It sort of pissed me the hell off but maybe that's jut me overreacting to everything again. What do y'all think?

[CashRules]

That article is correct in that there is a habit on "the left" of slinging the racism charge indiscriminately at anyone who doesn't support the Democratic party. I'm surprised I haven't been called a racist recently. The graph showing what percentage of people have an unfavorable view of certain groups is interesting and the author is correct in that it seems to show this isn't a very useful measurement considering those with an unfavorable view of heterosexuals ranks close behind those with an unfavorable view of blacks and Hispanics. NRA members? Yeah, I hate those guys too.

As far as Trump receiving a higher percentage of the minority vote than either Romney or McCain, I honestly don't find it surprising. The Democrats ran a campaign of no substance based on "Trump is a meanie" all while rigging the system to make sure they nominated one of the most corrupt and unlikable people on the planet. My own poll of lesbian tri-racial Hispanics shows 100% support for Trump because "It should be obvious that bitch doesn't care about minorities and doesn't mean a word she says."

This election, by design, came down to the most corrupt and dishonest politician of all dishonest politicians and a completely unqualified stale Cheeto with a mop on his head. The stale Cheeto won. This is how disliked Clinton is - she lost to a guy with not only has no rational plan for anything, he doesn't even have a workable plan for developing a plan. Meanwhile he seems determined, although the process is still at an early stage, to surround himself with people with "questionable" views on race relations who will be the ones actually tasked with coming up with a plan. But, even though I'm concerned with Trump choosing Pence for VP and now the Bannon appointment, this still doesn't help the fact that Democrats are going to keep losing if their campaigns continue to be based on nothing more than "he's a racist/sexist/homophobe/orange-tinted really, really, really mean guy who says really, really, really mean things".

Also, concerning Trump's original answer about David Duke (the one before he disavowed Duke and the Klan a dozen times or more) I can't be the only person to notice that Trump often seems to not understand questions the first time they are asked and gives vague non-answers to questions that should elicit quick and automatic responses from anyone who pays attention and has normal comprehension skills. It's like he discusses these things with Melania later and she explains it to him in small words so he can go "Oh, so that's what that means." so he can then give an answer the next day that at least makes sense. Does it really make sense that a person who understood the question would say he needs to do some investigating of the KKK before deciding if he wants their endorsement? Nobody, racist or not, would answer that question the way he did the first time it was asked unless there is some sort of mental block or hearing impairment preventing him from comprehending exactly what is being asked.

I also note that the article includes Trump's unambiguous dismissal of David Duke from the 2000 election when Trump had considered running for President as a Reform party candidate. That's something I meant to mention during a discussion several months ago but didn't.

This part:

As multiple sources point out, both Hillary and Obama voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which put up a 700 mile fence along the US-Mexican border. Politifact says that Hillary and Obama wanted a 700 mile fence but Trump wants a 1000 mile wall, so these are totally different. But really? Support a 700 mile fence, and you're the champion of diversity and all that is right in the world; support a 1000 mile wall and there's no possible explanation besides white nationalism?

is entirely on the mark. Democrats were desperate. They were faced with an opponent who doesn't play by the standard rules of political discourse (because he's fucking weird, not for any actual dislike for politics or because he's an "outsider") and the Democrats had no plan of their own on how to react to someone who wasn't predictable. Enough of the voting public picked up on the fact that at least some of the charges of "racism" were way off the mark that they started tuning it out so even if some of the complaints were credible people had heard it so long they were tired of it. Even enough minorities were tired of it by election day.

I may take a more in-depth look at the article later to see what i can find to disagree with (there has to be something) but so far it seems correct and credible. Meanwhile I'm going to dig a bunker to hide the lesbians in case Trump decides "fuck it" after a month or two in office and resigns and we're stuck with President Penis...I mean Pence.

[Derived Absurdity]

Hmm, well, I'm skimming it again now and it seems to have been heavily edited since the first time I read it. It was a lot worse yesterday. But basically, my reaction was: yeah, this is mostly for the most part correct about how Trump is not actually a white supremacist and how Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) are mostly fear-mongering and stuff, but you're skipping over a whole hell of a lot of pretty damning evidence for Trump's racism in favor of easy targets. Like, I already knew the KKK thing was sort of bullshit. And I already knew the "Trump called all Mexicans rapists" thing was, at best, an exaggeration. And I didn't really find a lot of the anti-Semitism charges credible. But that article just completely ignores a lot of well-documented, well-known examples of Trump being racist. Like the fact that he said Judge Curiel couldn't do his job properly due to his heritage. Like the fact that he supports stop-and-frisk (racial profiling). Like the fact that he seems to think all black Americans live in miserable violent hellscapes. Like the fact that he continuously retweeted white supremacist Twitter accounts, far more times to be a coincidence, and once retweeted fake racial crime statistics from a Neo-Nazi. Like the fact that his company was sued multiple times by the Justice Department for racial discrimination. Like the fact that he still thinks the Central Park Five are guilty even after they were exonerated by DNA evidence. And of course like the fact that he was the public face of fucking BIRTHERISM for years, which everyone seems to have forgotten. There's probably more that I'm forgetting. This article just ignored all that in favor of easy targets. It's a textbook case of cherry-picking.

And it also annoyed me that people were taking the point of this article to be "see, Trump's not racist, here's EVIDENCE!!" When that was obviously not the article's point. Scott (the author) never said Trump wasn't a racist, he just said it was silly to call him an open white supremacist and that he's no more racist than past Republican presidents have been. And yet, it was written in a way to make it very easy for someone to take it that way. I'm not sure if that was intentional.

So it did puncture a lot of holes in the standard media narrative about Trump, but I think it missed a rather important point in doing so. Like, there is a giant hole in this analysis. Trump still used racial angles in a way no Republican candidate has done in my lifetime. Most of his rhetoric was still upholding an "Us vs Them" view of the world, dividing humanity up by all of its differences and separating us, which was a general theme of his whole campaign, and which is definitely a terrible attitude to take to the world and may not be racist but is definitely in the same neighborhood. This is more than just the media overhyping a few non-stories. And there's a lot of evidence pointing to how this type of thought, which he propagated, helped him greatly through the primaries. Scott really should have mentioned that. The fact that he didn't makes me think he didn't think it was important.

So there's nothing technically really wrong with the article (at least from what I can tell), but it just kind of misses the point.

As for the Democrats flinging insults at their opponents rather than coming up with anything to support themselves: yes, I agree. In fact I read an interesting analysis of the two campaigns before the election that said, despite surface perceptions, it was Hillary and the Democrats who were running on fear and Trump who was running on hope. Clinton was all about how scary and evil Trump was rather than how good of a candidate she was, while Trump ran on hope about making America great again and how we're going to bring back jobs and drain the swamp and whatnot. And, just like eight years ago, hope won. Bernie Sanders would have ran on hope, which is why he would have won in a landslide. And it doesn't seem like the Dems have learned this lesson, despite suffering their most humiliating defeat probably ever.

[CashRules]

It should also be mentioned somewhere, so I'll just mention it here, that the Trump campaign did a good job of painting Hillary as the candidate most likely to start World War III. True or not, that perception cost her votes and her accusation that Trump was Putin's puppet backfired on her even if it wasn't obvious during the last debate. Another thing to note, this is the first time I can remember that the consensus is that a Presidential candidate won all three debates and the VP debate was won by that candidate's running mate yet the ticket that lost all four debates won the election. I said before, Trump campaigned in the right states at the right time and it won him the election. The fact that Trump has no chance of bringing back the jobs lost in the Rust Belt and that he played the rural "Christian Right" voters in the Bible Belt like a fiddle - these things just don't register with most voters. Elections are about perception and planting that perception in the minds of the right groups of people at the right time. For better or worse (it will be for worse) Trump just plain outmaneuvered Hillary in the last two weeks before voting day. She was way too sure of herself and thought Trump was the one trying to pull ahead and she and her campaign completely missed the fact that he already was ahead with a week to go and he spent the last two or three days cementing that fact.

[Derived Absurdity]

Yeah, I've been reading reports about how Trump's much-mocked rallies in the last few weeks were actually far more effective at gaining necessary votes than Hillary's vaulted "ground game". Hillary's campaign was just astonishingly terrible in virtually every way, probably because they were so convinced it was in the bag that they felt they didn't even need to try. Well, Obama should have taught her eight years ago that nothing is in the bag, and Trump beat her now the same way Obama did (this was sort of illuminated by many poor rural white counties which went for Obama twice going for Trump now). And this is evidence for something I've been saying for a long time, that Hillary is simply really just not very smart. I mean, even Hillary's harshest critics are always willing to say, "Well, she might be unethical and corrupt, but you can't deny her intelligence." But where is this intelligence? She never learns from her mistakes, ever. Iraq led to Libya would have led to Syria. Obama led to Sanders (which should have been a warning, even if she won that particular battle) led to Trump. She always does the same stupid things over and over again, and it finally caught up to her this time. She got what she deserved.

And one good thing I can take from this election is that this idiotic 50s-era McCarthyism Hillary hung her campaign on proved to be ineffective. All this "Trump is a Kremlin agent" stuff she's been pushing for months simply did not register outside of a tiny group of Beltway hacks she presumably surrounds herself with. I've been saying over and over again that this tactic is astonishingly stupid and ineffective, because normal people don't give a shit, and they're not going to ever give a shit no matter how hard the media pushes it. Well, I was right. I was just really dumbfounded that, out of all the shit about Trump, she chose to lay into the "Russian stooge" angle the hardest. Not only did it show how stupid and out-of-touch she was, it showed what kind of person she was.

So yeah. I'm not glad Trump won, but I am very, very glad Hillary lost.

And I know the pundit consensus is that she handily won all three debates, but that wasn't my consensus and I'm wondering if it was the consensus of most other normal people. Yeah, I guess she "won" in that Trump self-immolated all three times with no help from her, but she astonishingly came out of all three debates looking worse than she did before (at least to me), which was almost impossible. Both of them lost. Anyone even halfway competent would have absolutely slaughtered her.

[CashRules]

Chelsea Clinton is supposedly considering a run for Congress to continue "the Clinton brand". They actually said this, these corrupt fuckers that spend all day enjoying the smell of their own farts actually consider themselves a political brand. It was a letter meant to do nothing but appease "donors" to their charity (actually white-collar criminals illegally funneling money to the Clintons through their so-called charity) who are highly pissed about the outcome of the election. People with billions of dollars to spend don't appreciate buying an election and finding out they actually get nothing.

[phe_de]

So, uh, what do we make of this article?

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/yo ... ying-wolf/

The article starts with a statistical fallacy (claiming the Trump message resonated least with white people; just because the growth of the support compared to 2012 was smallest for white people. They still voted for Trump by an overwhelming majority).

But I agree about the dog whistle part. Reading between the lines and looking for hidden clues that may or may not be an indication for an opinion that may or may not be there should be left to conspiracy theorists.

Especially politicians, who are known to say what their audience wants to hear, should not be measured by what they say, but by what they do.
What Trump has done since the election is nominating candidates for his future government. Sessions, Flynn und Pompeo made the news in Germany.
Whether these choices make a case for Trump not being more racist than his white predecessors remains to be seen.

[Anakin McFly]

Lol: http://www.thegailygrind.com/2016/11/18 ... ng-coffee/

also I kind of want to stay off the internet because its being especially terrible right now. the cancer has spread to my country's social media and I ended up googling 'why are people so racist'. it's not even the subtle racism or people being oblivious to privilege; it's outright insults and calling black people apes and that everyone who disagrees is a libtard, and the fact that this was happening in the comments on the FB page of the largest national newspaper of my tiny Asian country makes me so mad.

I spent most of yesterday having the flu, staying off the internet, doing household chores and playing Civilization 5. It was one of the happiest days in a while. 10/10 would recommend.

[BruceSmith78]

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.


Note how totally non-racist this statement is. I'm serious. It's anti-illegal-immigrant. But in terms of race, it's saying Latinos (like every race) include both good and bad people, and the bad people are the ones coming over here. It suggests a picture of Mexicans as including some of the best people - but those generally aren't the ones who are coming illegally.

I call bullshit on this. Saying that illegal Mexican immigrants are mostly rapists and drug dealers and criminals is fucking racist, and this dude is being way too charitable with that shit.

I've known quite a few illegal immigrants from Mexico, a ton of drug dealers and criminals, and probably more than a few rapists, and in my experience the illegal immigrants are just trying to keep their heads down, stay out of trouble, and make a decent living. Getting over here is not easy, and they don't wanna get sent back. The drug dealers and criminals I've met, while spending my entire life on the border, are American citizens.

Now someone can pull some statistics and maybe prove all that shit wrong (I highly doubt it), but painting an entire group of people (yes, illegal immigrants from a specific country are a group of people) comprised primarily of non-whites as criminals, rapists, and drug dealers is absolutely racist, and we can see the effects of that racism quite plainly.

[BruceSmith78]

His pyramid mysticism analogy is also bullshit. Pyramid mysticism is quite obviously nonsense, while old rich white dudes being racist against non-white dudes is so obviously real it's idiotic to contest it. Seeing an old rich white dude say or do something that can be construed as racist and assuming it is in fact racist =/= noting unusual coincidences regarding the pyramids and assuming the pyramids are magic.

[Derived Absurdity]

Yep.

This guy, a social liberal, has an Internet reputation for being extremely "charitable" to his ideological opponents, to such an extent that he attracts a lot of alt-righters and race realists. Cassius has already said a lot about that type of "charity". He would probably have a complete field day with this guy. In a way he embodies a lot of what Cassius dislikes.

[Islandmur]

Sorry i've been missing but i get home at 7-9 each day and while I browse by the time I read a thread usually everything I would say has already been said.