We Hunted The MammothSorry, folks. I migrained out today. (Headache seems to be fading now.) So how about an open thread? And a VIDEO SHOWDOWN? Vote for your favorite below!
VOTE! Unlike the real elections last week, there is no wrong choice here, and the results will not cause you to curl up in a fetal position on your bed for a week!
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With all the terrible things going on in the world today, it’s nice to be reminded that some things remain unchanged even in Trump’s brave new America.
The Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, I am happy to report, remains a small oasis of stability in a rapidly changing world. Reddit’s MGTOWs are the same creepy weirdos they’ve always been.
A specter is haunting Davis Aurini, the specter of thousands of Americans exercising their First Amendment rights by taking to the streets to protest the incoming Trump administration.
Hey, I made a meme, inspired by the troubles besetting Trump’s transition team.
In case you haven’t been following the issue, here are a few just slightly alarming quotes from a Huffington Post piece on the chaos.
Donald Trump’s transition team is nearing a state of stasis, causing concern among both Democrats and Republicans in Washington that his White House will be woefully ill-prepared once he is inaugurated. …
The disarray has left agencies virtually frozen, unable to communicate with the people tasked with replacing them and their staff. Trump transition team officials were a no-show at the Pentagon, the Washington Examiner reported. Same goes for the Department of Energy, responsible for keeping the nation’s nuclear weapons safe, where officials had expected members of the Trump transition team on Monday. Ditto for the Department of Transportation. Over at the Justice Department, officials also are still waiting to hear from the Trump team. …
According to several sources close to the Trump transition team and inside the Obama administration, the president elect and his staff have had difficulty finding able-minded Republicans willing to take on critical posts. One Democratic source, who like others would only discuss sensitive talks on condition of anonymity, said transition officials had been informally asking Obama political appointees to recommend Republicans to take over their jobs.
Yeah, that’s kind of what happens when you elect a dude who has no freaking idea what he’s doing to the highest office in the land.
Sleazy bigot Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart boss who Donald Trump wants as his chief White House strategist, isn’t terribly popular in Washington at the moment. But he’s getting a lot of support from the white supremacists he pandered to at Breitbart — from former Klan leader David Duke; from Richard Spencer, the guy who came up with the euphemism “alt right” in the first place; and (of course) from Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer.
Grotesque pickup artist and ironic rape legalization proponent Roosh V is thrilled to finally have someone like him on the way to the White House. That is, a fellow male human who also likes to rate women on a scale of one to ten.
One of the most perceptive analyses of Trump and his followers was written more than two decades ago. I’m talking, of course, of Umberto Eco’s oft-discussed essay on what he calls Ur Fascism or Eternal Fascism, his attempt to set forth the central features that define Fascism. I reread it today for the umpteenth time, and was struck again by its eerie prescience.
If there’s a part of you that still holds out hope that, for all his autocratic tendencies, Donald Trump will revert to a sort of political normality as president, you need to read Masha Gessen’s chilling but essential article “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” in The New York Review of Books.
UPDATE: The free offer is over, but the book is still available at a big discount at the link below.
The writer and activist Rebecca Solnit — probably best known as the woman who came up with the idea of mansplaining, though not the term itself — is giving away her book on activism and hope for free, in hopes it can help some of us horrified by Trump’s win to work through the despair and helplessness so many of us are now feeling.
