If you still have energy after this rather exhausting week in Trump news, here’s an open thread for you! No trolls or Trump fans.
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Leaving on a jet plane: Another Trump open thread because holy crap what a week
Uuuuuggghhh…my husband had to rain on my parade! He told me that, in Saudi Arabia, the Cheeto would be served steak and potatoes.
I should’ve realized his dietary preferences would be catered to.
@abars01 I imagine Teddy will claim that Trump’s impeachment has revealed the corrupt heart of Washington. Cernovich will claim that willed he got Comey fired by thought alone. Milo and Forney will blame feminist and their refusal to put out for this.
On reditt there will be much whining and gnashing of teeth. Someone there will claim this is the start of the collapse of Western civilization.
Like at least one of the other commenters around here, I’ve been writing songs to express my frustration at the whole thing. Like this song, “You’re Fake News”, on an album consisting of songs I’ve written in the last few months:
https://amontrealpaul.bandcamp.com/track/youre-fake-news
https://amontrealpaul.bandcamp.com/album/interesting-times
Cohen: any gigs coming up? I don’t go to quai des brumes often enough.
Depression, anxiety and trouble psychologically handling important tasks caused trouble and college over the last decade of my life. The Trump dominated election coverage started right when I gave up on finishing my degree. I finally got a job when he was elected, but panic attacks and lateness forced me to quit shortly after, about the time of the inauguration. My disabling psychological issues have nothing to do with him, but the timing!! Watching the political process fly out of control just as my life was doing the same. I escape into video games all day and Trump supporters have alternative facts. I can’t respond rationally to important tasks because they are important, and the people hit hardest by recent poverty vote republican.
Of course it is not just Trump himself, the republican part at large is behaving in a deplorable way. There is massive, ridiculous hypocrisy and disregard for democracy. They are glued to the party line, and obsessed with stopping the other party. I don’t think it was always this bad, but the current republican leadership wants to control washington more than anything, more than enabling democracy, defending conservatism, or making America great again. In a twisted way, I hope they find that not only was the Trump campaign talking to the Russians, but that the republican leadership was conspiring with them and anyone else who could help them seize power. It would seem consistent with their recent behavior, and would finally give reason to remove them, and make people see the importance of political engagement.
Unfortunately my current mental state makes it difficult to pick up the phone and call a psychotherapist, let alone a politician. 2017 is supposed to be the year I heal. Washing is falling apart far faster than I can pull myself together. See you in 2018 hopefully…
@Joel. No, the collapse of Western civilization began when people had to be told how to buckle seat belts on airplanes.
@Hesster. You could assume most people were decent because there wasn’t a forum for the indecent ones to show themselves. Yes, there was the John Birch Society and the CPUSA, but you had to make a conscious decision to cross a line to go there. And there were editorial pages where the village idiots hung out. As Claudius said at the end of “I, Claudius,” “Let all the evils that lurk in the mud hatch out.”
To any British readers: Sure, you could burn Washington in 1814, but where are you now that we really need you?
Whoops, the troll posted in the troll-free thread. How unfortunate.
@Steven Dutch
Caught up in a snap General Election of our own right now. And do you really like the idea of British troops deployed as peacekeepers in your country ? After the years of defence cuts they’ve faced, they’d have to scrounge bullets and gasoline/DERV from you.
I agree with almost everything said in this thread by our regular posters.
I’m just so exhausted and depressed by this entire shitshow that I plain don’t have the energy to even address it.
Keep on keeping on, people. I still hope we’ll get through this, even though I have no idea what we’re going to get through to.
@QuantumInc: hugs if you want them. I hope you can sneak around your depression and make that call when it isn’t looking. I’m not saying much but I’m listening.
Collapsing into an irrational Brexit hole of our own making, with dangerously autocratic, stupid and cruel leaders who seem to be getting away with it only because, unlike Trump, they have mastered the art of keeping their mouths shut.
Oh gods, my crappy Rep is thinking about trying to replace my good Senator. Why couldn’t he try to replace the bad Senator? It will be a delight to keep my promise and campaign for my good Senator, though.
@QuantumInc
There are sites that will send free faxes to your Senators/Reps for you.
ResistBot
Fax Zero for Congress
Fax Zero for Senate
I hope one of these help!
@Betrayer
Let’s not lose perspective here. The point of Republicans is to make ‘others’ suffer, after all. If they suffered from Fox, imagine what their targets have had to put up with…
@Hesster
You could assume it, but it wasn’t any more true then than it is now. Which is why we are where we are, in fact. A bunch of ostensibly decent people decided we needed to give nazis a chance, and act like mass murder was a valid policy position (many ostensibly decent actually support mass murder in general, and only object when it’s local to begin with, but that’s another matter). These are the same group of people (and in many cases the same actual people) who protested outside integrated schools in the 60s and 70s.
At this point, I generally assume everyone is an asshole until they can prove otherwise to me.
My assumptions are very rarely wrong.
Good perspective on the “Russia thing,” from people who are definitely more to the right.
@Dali
Re: Schools
Apropos of nothing…or, perhaps, tangentially related, this reminded me of something.
Look at this.
This is the image that sparked a large set of ‘hilarious’ memes. Ostensibly, it’s supposed to be funny because haha, he can’t spell Bon Appetit, and while most people act as though they’re laughing WITH the dude, in actuality it seems to me more like they’re laughing at his egregious lack of education, and, of course, he’s black so it’s even more funny because black people can’t into english, amirite???!!
Let me preface this by saying I have a slight neurosis about expressing myself in the most legible and comprehensive manner possible. I don’t have a college education yet people constantly remark about my oddly large vocabulary. I speak more or less exactly as I write here to you, to the point where people in online gaming lobbies (who are probably doofuses) ask me if I’m a robot or attempting to be sarcastic by using ‘all dem big words’.
I gained this ability by reading a great deal of books, often over and over again. I am the sort of person who re-reads a book many times if I like it. I read very quickly and can finish books that people often describe as too thick or too long in a day or so without much effort (the whole idea of reading requiring great effort is a strange one to me, and is similar to someone telling me they have to think about how the breathe), but I digress.
Returning to the Bone Apple Tea dude…all I see there is a child that fell between the huge crevasses in the US education system. That, right there, is all the proof you need to see that our schools are damaged beyond repair. It’s not funny to me; it just tells me that our country is falling apart at the seams.
And you don’t need me to point this out to you when we have grown fucking adults running around saying science don’t real, vaccines make you homosexual, space don’t real, and the Earth is flat.
All of that has been caused by the collapse of our educational system, brought on by US Republican spending cuts and their sustained attack on our educational system.
A brief aside: I don’t like to criticize other black people for how they speak or write because it’s considered gauche. It is considered an attempt to suppress their culture, and, anyway, just because I’m a hack writer who is extra conscious about her command of the English language doesn’t mean I have to go stifling other people with my particular obsessions.
So I was hesitant about complaining about Bone Apple Tea dude. Maybe that’s his thing. Maybe I’m wrong to be upset about him saying Bone Apple Tea. I accept this possibility.
Moving on.
Because children are not taught the truth about Nazi Germany, it is now considered cool to be a Nazi and “BUT DID HOLOCAUST REAL!?” is considered acceptable discourse.
This, again, is directly the fault of the collapse of the US Educational system.
As I have mentioned before, I did actually study life in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and such.
I have always wanted to see Yad Vashem – the Holocaust Museum – up close. I think people should be forced to look at it, just to really understand what they’re getting into when they post pictures of frogs and anime girls dressed up as Nazis putting people in gas chambers.
I understand quite clearly that Nazi Germany was not quite just an epic meme. It was totally awful. When you get into the specifics of what happened to people under Hitler, it becomes glaringly obviously.
I am afraid the damage has already been done, in the US at least. I feel like how the people who witnessed the Dark Ages felt, or like Roland in the Dark Tower series – the world has moved on. This is our reality now: BONE APPLE TEA and “DID HOLOCAUST REAL? IS SCIENCE REAL?”
A story:
I started using the Internet since the late 1990s.
Back then, people wrote long BBS/Newsgroup posts as a rule. This was decades before Twitter and 150 characters became the norm.
I grew up on forums where long posts were the de facto standard of communicating.
Nowadays, everything is very strange.
Writing what would have been considered a short forum post – two paragraphs – gets people shouting at you “BISH WHY U RITIN A FUCKIN NOVEL ????? LOL DIS BISH RITE HURR” in Youtube and Facebook’s comment sections.
Twitter outright fucking forces you to pare your thoughts down to one tiny line. Twitter is a fucking crime against humanity, I swear to God. I instinctually hate that site. It is the antithesis of everything the old Internet was.
I have issues coming to grips with the fact that people are just now using the Internet and Twitter’s 140 characters are the norm for them.
I don’t know. I’m probably just becoming a bitter old woman who is no longer ‘with it’, as they say.
My point?
The failure of the US School system spells doom for this country. We have killed ourselves. We has met the enemy and he is we.
In Roald Dahl’s book “Boy”, he recounts his mother as saying that the British School is a great and magical thing that allowed a tiny island kingdom to rule the world.
She was right. Rome conquered because of her schools as well. The Greeks made their mark on the world for similar reasons. There is a reason why we know about Pythagoras, Archimedes, Plato, and Anaximander.
The moment the United States stopped placing emphasis on educating its citizens, it signaled the beginning of the end for us.
We can save ourselves, perhaps, if we turn this around, but it must happen quickly.
Last post on this, I promise.
There are Nazis on one of the MLP fanfiction sites I frequent, and it’s like…you motherfuckers used to burn books. You are violently opposed to everything we stand for. Why are you here?
That’s the odd thing about Nazi Germany. White supremacists like to bellow about how cultured and intelligent they were, but they also fucking burned books and killed teachers and professors.
That is so violently anti-intellectual that you really can’t reconcile these actions with the idealized view White Supremacists have of Nazi Germany as being this hyper-intelligent pinnacle of civilization that would have brought the Earth into a sci-fi galactic age.
Yes, I have read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and absorbed his similar fears to mine, by the way.
@Fran
They’re absolutely laughing at him, not with him, for both racist and classist reasons
It me.
See, that’s the thing; the U.S. educational system was always like this; or rather, it was formerly much, much, much worse. There was a brief time in the mid-20th century when a larger number than usual of working-class whites got a pretty good education, which is now looked back on as a golden age because the state of America has always really been the state of White America. That’s one of the things that brought about white flight, into swarms of newly incorporated suburbs who were then separate property tax district; and in the US, schools are funded by local property taxes.
To be perfectly honest, until you explained below, I had not the first idea what the intended meaning was.
Hah. It’s always September on the Internet…
It is worth noting that only a very small percentage of Britons have ever gone to the schools in question…
@ fran
All your points are, as always, interesting and valid.
But as to the original caption, assuming it’s not just an autocorrect thing, is it a mistake anyway? There’s a bit of a British thing for deliberately mis-pronouncing foreign phrases. At parties you may well be offered “Horses’ Doofers” for example.
Might he not just be doing that?
Key points:
Harris says he’s aware of unreleased tapes of Trump using the n-word during a break on The Apprentice.
Trump apparently fired Comey when he thought the investigation shifted to his finances re: Russia on Kushner’s advice. So the issue might be Trump’s financial connection to Russia rather than direct collusion.
@Alan
The thought occurred to me, which is why I mentioned that he might just have been snarking a little to amuse others.
Given the fact that we now inhabit a world with people who seriously say Holocaust Don’t Real and Moon Landing Was Faked, however, I can’t be sure anymore.
I have to go exercise, but I invite your thoughts on the matter.
@Alan
I have encountered this in British writing, and had the same problem there.
@Dalilama
That’s true. Back then there was social pressure that made most avoid voicing their shitty views in public because those views would come back to haunt them. Now it seems they take vocal pride in being an asshole, and they’re supported by other assholes. I’m not sure which is worse, the people with shitty views who hide them but work to support them or the loud, belligerent shitheads who constantly attack others.
I’ve heard people say it’s because Obama made it acceptable for conservatives to come out as racists, but honestly I think the belligerent tone has been going on in right wing media at least since the Clinton years.
I’ve heard people call hors d’oeuvres “ervy dervies” before.