Is the hashtag #FightForWesternCivilization the worst thing on Twitter today?

@EJ (TOO)
Aww, thanks! Sometimes my depression tells me no one cares what I have to say, so it’s always good to get feedback from others (even if the feedback confirms what my depression says it’s still useful).

@EpicurusHog: Reality has never stopped them before, so I don’t see why it would now.

@PI: as a professional graphic designer, do you have any comment on the short-lived Trump-Pence logo which has led to so much unseemly mirth in anti-Trump circles.

@GoM

It manages to combine violent imagery (it’s a sideways fist) with a wanking dick, so… It’s pretty much a perfect representation of Trump. =P

I was mostly referring to the fact that — like most things involving Trump — nobody seems to really think seriously about whether something they say or do makes any sense until after the fact. I mean, logos aren’t the most important thing in the world, but you do need to make sure that the logo doesn’t actually damage the message you’re trying to project. I was involved in the Appalachian Mountain Club back in the 80s when some people decided our existing logo wasn’t “professional” enough, so they commissioned a new one that just looked too corporate-y, which is not what you want for an outdoorsy environmentalist group.
I wasn’t particularly thinking of the homophobic aspect — with Trump’s people that’s sort of a given — but in fact that might not resonate well with his strongly homophobic base (that is, it’s a mistake, but probably not a yuuge one). I was mainly thinking of how it reinforced the “Trump screws everyone who works with him” meme. I mean, you don’t want to make it easy for the other side. It would be like Clinton choosing a logo that looks crooked — you don’t need to constantly remind everyone about the other side’s memes.

This is the first time I’ve seen the trump-pence graphic. Agree that it looks like the T is diddling the P, but that could just as easily imply that Pence is a woman (which would be equally troubling).

I agree with PI that it would be better with more stripes.

I feel this would be relevant to the discussion.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/dominance-and-humiliation-no-middle-ground

A few select quotes

Early on I realized that when it came to Trump if I figured out the stupidest possible scenario that could be reconciled with the available facts and went with it, that almost always turned out to be right. The stupider, the righter. So with this rule of thumb in hand, as the empiricist my Dad taught me to be, I just kept following that model and it kept working.

Trump spent a day trying to get out of his commitment to Pence, doubting Pence was really someone he even wanted. So Pence gets the veep slot but at the cost of being publicly branded as someone Trump didn’t want. Junk that was forced on Trump, someone to whom he owes nothing, except possibly contempt.

Eventually he won’t be able to ignore that question. And what will his answer possibly be? Trump has already managed to take Pence the governor of a major state and recast him as a ridiculous figure, the guy who managed to bag the vice presidential pick only to have the guy at the top of the ticket broadcast to the world that he’d rather not have him.

the entirety of Trump’s political message is dominance politics. To paraphrase McLuhan it is both the messenger and the message. Trump attacks, others comply and submit. Whether or not that is always true it is the story and the promise he has sold his supporters. Trump’s handling of his vice presidential pick casts him in an extremely unflattering light. It is simply no accident that those who come into his orbit, who join with him, are rapidly visited with a string of indignities that stand in a bracing contrast to the power and status they earlier enjoyed. On the field of other political actors, other would-be ‘alpha males’, for Trump you are either his enemy or his property.

GrumpyOld SocialJusticeMangina | July 16, 2016 at 6:05 pm

I was mostly referring to the fact that — like most things involving Trump — nobody seems to really think seriously about whether something they say or do makes any sense until after the fact. I mean, logos aren’t the most important thing in the world, but you do need to make sure that the logo doesn’t actually damage the message you’re trying to project.

I don’t think this will damage what he’s trying to convey. It’s mostly younger, liberal people who’ve drawn the buttsex parallels with the logo, so I think that there would be enough dissonance within the right to overlook it.

Besides, anything can be dirty if you think hard enough.

I wasn’t particularly thinking of the homophobic aspect — with Trump’s people that’s sort of a given — but in fact that might not resonate well with his strongly homophobic base (that is, it’s a mistake, but probably not a yuuge one).

I was actually referring to the homophobic nature of implying as a “joke” that two homophobes are having buttsex.

Like I said, it smacks of the “homophobe is secretly in the closet” trope that I despise because it turns homophobia into something LGBT people do to themselves, so straight people are off the hook for blame.

And also like I said, there’s plenty of mockable material there to stave us off of making homophobic jokes, because they’re jokes at the expense of the LGBT community, and that’s a very liberal demographic.

I don’t like the idea of self-identified liberal people making jokes out of gay men. Just because they’re aligned with liberals doesn’t give the liberals in question a free pass to turn homosexuality into the butt of their Trump jokes, just because they know that most of us within the community won’t vote for Trump, especially now that he’s got Pence as his Veep nomination, who is a HUGE homophobe. He’s the guy who signed the bill in Indiana that allowed businesses to discriminate against LGBT people on ‘religious’ grounds.

I was mainly thinking of how it reinforced the “Trump screws everyone who works with him” meme. I mean, you don’t want to make it easy for the other side. It would be like Clinton choosing a logo that looks crooked — you don’t need to constantly remind everyone about the other side’s memes.

That is a good point, but as I said earlier: It’s not his base that’s making those references, it’s still the liberals who are memeing the fuck out of it.

Buttercup Q. Skullpants | July 16, 2016 at 6:59 pm
I wouldn’t be surprised if no competent graphic designer was willing to work with him, given his history of stiffing contractors, so he ended up with…well, a very “graphic” designer.

My money’s on an intern who may have not actually been a designer. Donald’s hella cheap if his many companies are anything to go by, so no doubt he didn’t actually want to pull the funds to hire a legit designer.

I’ve seen analysis that suggests the entwined initials are meant to be a monogram evoking wealth and luxury.

I’ve actually never heard that, but I can see why people would think so. I mean, look at the logo for Rolls-Royce:

http://www.car-brand-names.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Rolls-Royce-Logo.png

Rolls-Royce is a brand synonymous with luxury and sophistication.

I actually watched an episode of How It’s Made: Dream Cars where they made a Spectre yesterday, and all the stuff they do to make that car is really high-end. Wood paneling, hand polishing, A-Grade bull leather for the seats, and so on.

Not sure why they picked such a dull, blocky sans serif – I guess they decided the monogram shouldn’t be TOO fancy, which would alienate Trump’s base. But then I don’t understand why they made the “T” discontinuous, which is unusual for a monogram and makes it look like the “T” is going through the hole of the “P” instead of passing down in front of it.

A blocky sans-serif would be a more modern look, and it’s a style that’s very commonly used for political campaign logos, right after thin, “serious looking” serif fonts.

I imagine that a blocky font and a good amount of letter separation would help improve legibility for signs from a distance.

Regardless, they should have vetted the logo with at least one snarky, dirty-minded person before it went out.

Please. We all know the only person whose opinion Donald Trump cares about is his own. 😛

@Paradoxical:

That is a good point, but as I said earlier: It’s not his base that’s making those references, it’s still the liberals who are memeing the fuck out of it.

True. Trump needs to start reaching out to moderates in the general campaign, though, if he wants any prayer of being elected. He’s got his loyal base locked in, the 25-30% who will vote for him no matter what. They’re not the ones he needs to convince.

The fact that his campaign pulled the problematic part of the logo after 24 hours of mockery (and reportedly tried to walk back the Veep choice) doesn’t make him look very presidential to the average voter. I don’t know how plugged in to social media snark moderates are (probably not very) but the logo reactions were everywhere, from CNN to USA Today.

I wouldn’t be surprised if his rabid alt-right fanboys were very aware of the symbolism in the logo (not the homosexual subtext, but the “Trump is a manly alpha who penetrates things/Look! White Man on Top” subtext), and approved of it wholeheartedly. Seems like something an immature misogynist would give a hearty thumbs up to. It’s about as subtle as the MGTOW logo.

@axecalibur: ye gawds, I hadn’t even realized I was going back and forth between joekster and joekstra. Thanks for pointing that out. I think I like joekster more, and I’ll try to stick with that one. I’ve used joekstra in the past as well, and I sometimes go back to it. They’re both contractions of my first and last name. the caps is dependent on if I’m posting with a machine that autocapitalizes words.

No wonder people get confused by what I posted and what I didn’t…

By the way, how do I get a cool pic next to my name? I’d love to put a beardie pic next to my name. Or a Parasect. That would be cool too.

@PI: My guess was that it was done by some intern, because the Trump campaign seem to have an aversion to people who actually know something, but I was interested in seeing if you would agree with my hunch. I know just about nothing about graphic design, so my own opinion would be essentially worthless. (I believe the logo was done by the RNC, not the Trump campaign, but no big difference.) I had heard the suggestion that they had inadvertently hired a gay graphic designer who decided to punk them — the story was too good to be true, of course, but the logo was so awful (speaking of message, not design) that that story was not totally implausible.
We all see things through the lens of our experiences. In my case, the lens is having been a young draft resister in Federal Prison, where the capacity for violence (including sexual violence) is considered one of the defining traits of manhood. There were no women, of course, so I was considered one of the more acceptable substitutes by older men who would be hitting on women on the outside, so I was constantly having to deal with being hit on. (I never got raped, not even a close call, though there were plenty of threats.) In this situation, sexual activity is about domination, not about sex. So if I had enough brain bleach available to want to think about Trump fucking Pence, I wouldn’t be thinking of two gay men having sex, I would be thinking in terms of Trump making it clear to Pence that “around here I am the fucker and you are the fucked.”

@Buttercup: I think you always have to consider the possibility that Trump’s campaign is not about winning the White House but is mainly intended to solidify his command of his marks for whatever con he goes with next. You always have to consider the possibility that he’s strapped for cash and needs to make a score. I really can’t see what Pence gets him except for perhaps getting a slightly better turnout among anti-gay and anti-choice voters. The colorless, unpopular governor of a state that Trump will win without trying, whose views on immigration and trade will not impress Trump’s base, but who will confirm Trump’s misogyny and alienate gays and families of gays who might be tempted to regard Trump as not all that homophobic? I just can’t see the logic.

A few days ago I had coffee with an older American couple who moved to Sweden more than 40 years ago. The husband told a pretty amazing story about being a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war. It was quite interesting.