No one told these Tweeters that the #RepealThe19th hashtag was all a big joke

@starfury and Dalillama

cracked has a horrible habit of writting apologia for rather terrible people and I think a lot of it comes from a lot of their writers are middle class white cis men who don’t completely get that a lot of the people who are mad at misogynists and racists and the religious right and alt right are people whose lives are directly, negatively affected by those factions of society and they have the privilege of having the actions of those groups be an abstraction.

Well I agree with him that rural America is largely ignored and forgotten and that rural America has problems such as job loss that politicians largely ignore, but I don’t think basing an article on that issue on why liberals should be more understanding of Trump supporters is the wrong move.

Trump supporters tend to be wealthier than average, so the idea that he appeals to the rural poor is a myth (and something I actually think comes from a negative bias towards the rural poor)
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/

Also, Trump lost some rural areas and for a lot of people in rural areas, Trumps lack of a strong religious commitment is a real issue
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/10/04/rural-vote-presidential-election-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-creston-iowa/90951050/

Scildfreja Unnýðnes

First one’s sort of philosophical – is there a meaningful difference between us causing the extinction of every form of life on the planet and the extinction of arguably-sentient life on the planet? Second, there’s a not-unreasonable chance that our pollution could cause literally everything in the biosphere to die, a la Venus. Or has that been refuted at some point?

Second question first. No. We can’t do a Venus. Basically – the oceans didn’t boil away during the PETM, so it’s unlikely to happen now even though we’re driving the process much faster than the PETM. We could, of course, turn the oceans into fetid stinking anaerobic swamps if we’re not careful.

I really don’t see how we could cause the extinction of all life forms, no matter the brain size-capacity-function. There is life – of a sort – in every conceivable and inconceivable niche environment/ ecology across the world. From weird thingummies in the bottom of the lightless depths of the ocean to the pitiless heat and radiation of near waterless deserts to those strange things that accumulate in the sulphurous environments of volcanoes both above the ground and those venting through the sea floor as well as the lichens and moulds that live in icesheets.

There’s also the post-meteor, post-dinosaur period 65ish million years ago. Every land based critter of any substantial size (or speed of metabolism needing constant nutrition) died off for lack of food and shelter in fairly short order. But there were lots and lots of other survivors. Little tiny scuttling (but not too fast) things – mammal precursors, marsupial and monotreme oddities, small dinosaurs and reptiles, proto-bird critters, lots of worms and beetles as well as various food sources – not much development of grasses, let alone flowering plants at the time. Ferns, fungi, other things that grew slowly and were already adapted to low light, low nutrient environments. So long as an animal was capable, like many reptiles nowadays, of surviving and reproducing while not consuming any nutrients for lengthy periods, then they could survive and eventually evolve.

Some people think that the kangaroo reproduction strategy of mating when a healthy male is available to mate with – but not starting the development of the foetus until there’s enough fodder and water available for the mother to sustain both herself and the developing offspring – is a pre-existing feature that allowed whatever came before kangaroos to survive that period. But whatever they were, they weren’t the size of a big red, more likely to be restricted to the size of a rat-vole-weasel and to shelter in burrows and hollows.

Remember, everything dead or alive is, or becomes, food for living things at some point. So if we’re talking about killing every living thing on land, we’ll be killing trees shrubs grasses as well as all the insects, fungi, slimes, moulds, reptiles, amphibians, mammals and birds. Some adaptable critters will survive more or less everything you can throw at them – rats for instance. And there are about 50 million species of bacteria and the same number of fungi – in soils alone. So long as they’re not ploughed up and exposed to radiation from the sun, they’re pretty hard to kill. Certainly you couldn’t kill all soil life. The other environment of course is water, both fresh and ocean waters.

We could certainly kill off ourselves and many of the plants and animals we rely on for food along with lots of other valuable-ugly-strange-beautiful living things. But we’d be very hard-pressed to kill everything.

@Alan
Unrelated, but I thought you might find it amusing that a bunch of Trump supporters keep whining on FB about how Clinton once defended a child rapist in court.

@sparkalipoo: thanks for the post about the economics of Trump supporters. I’d bought into the theory that his support was mostly rural poor. Learning is good.

@Kupo: The point I’ve seen them harp on about is that she laughed in an interview about the case several years ago. Someone else posted a link to an analysis of that interview, which made it clear that she was laughing at specific oddities of the case, rather than at the victim, but Trumpists keep saying, ‘she defended a child rapist and then laughed at his victim!!!!’

Its an election year. Facts are optional /s
(that last was meant to be funny/sarcastic)

@Kupo: thank you for what you had to say about the post I was getting hot and bothered by above. It’s lear that the majority of the community read it the same way you were, which tells me I was rather badly misreading the intent.

@WWTH: hmm, you may have a point. In any case, a white man posting on a site dedicated to mocking racist misogynistic arses probably shouldn’t be trying to make anything about himself. And you are definitely correct that it isn’t the task of anyone here to educate me. Thank you for taking the time to make the attempt.

@Dali

Oh, it totally was, but I’ll take inexperienced over malevolently incompetent any day

Now, if only the Republican candidate weren’t somehow both…

Don’t blame me man, I didn’t do it

The Establishment: the Illuminati for people who wanna be taken seriously ?

@Axecalibur: I’d never thought of comparing ‘Establishment’ to ‘Illuminati’, but you’re totally right. Thanks.

So, essentially, it’s less “plausible Illuminati” and more “aristocracy without the rows of motheaten ermine”.

@Dali

Which is to say that there is a certain pool of people who are defined as ‘qualified’ for various high appointive and even elective offices, and this pool of people is very homogenous

*nods*

the U.S. has a well established class system with very little mobility, and also a caste system based on race and ethnicity

*more nodding*

So now a bunch of people have decided that #RepealThe19th is so ridiculous it must be a false flag operation by the Clinton campaign to convince women to vote for her. Congrats, MRAs. Your position is so ludicrous that even non-conspiracy theorists think a conspiracy theory makes more sense than you believing what you actually believe.