Trump Open Thread: June 2017 End of the World Edition

@ guest

Ah, in my roadie days I spent a lot of time at the South Bank Centre. It’s funny, once took someone to a concert there as a regular date, and then couldn’t find the actual entrance. So used to just walking in through the loading dock at the back. If you ever want to blag I’d recommend that, no-one ever asks what you’re doing there. One time not only did some guys turn up to nick the grand piano from the Festival Hall, they got security to help them get it in the lift.

@ guest

I’m from Yorkshire; it’s the principle.

Another one that works (and I was surprised, but it does) is just to walk up to the back door as a pair. Before anyone asks you for a pass or anything just point to your colleague and say “It’s ok, they’re with me”

@ newt

Ooh, is that where it’s from? Full of great advice that series. I quite often carry a towel around with me.

On an unrelated note, I took my pet lizard to the pub last night. The landlord said “He’s a bit small isn’t he?”. I said “Yeah, he’s my newt.”

(I’ll get my coat)

Ooh, Katie Hopkins is apparently about to be ‘sacked’ by the Daily Mail. The official reason will be ‘by mutual agreement’. That’s less to do with ethics in journalism and more to do with all the libel payouts the Mail has had to indemnify her for, but still, good news.

@alan: Yes, that one turned up in Mostly Harmless. Although people might have been using it before then. To bring us back on-topic, I’m fond of Trillian’s many explanations for presidential stupidity:

…pretending to be stupid just to get people off their
guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone
else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually
didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid

Also in Trump news, and relevant to UK readers — squiggly red lines (the FBI use those too, right?) now connect Nigel Farage to the Trump/Russia investigation.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/01/nigel-farage-is-person-of-interest-in-fbi-investigation-into-trump-and-russia

@Alan;

libel payouts the Mail has had to indemnify her for, but still, good news.

Yeesh, cognitive impairment’s acting up again, I read that as “liberal payments the Mail has had to identify her for”… and I thought, what, George Soros is paying Katie Hopkins? … to what? To shut up???

If I was a Democrat president and the republicans behaved like that towards me …

They behaved far, far worse towards Obama for eight Godfucking years and exactly zero Rs began voting D because of it. The brogressive party jumping we’re seeing has nothing to do with how meeean we’re being to the poor innocent monsters and everything to do with how the media normalisation of Nazism has made them feel safe enough to reveal their true colours. You’re blaming the victim.

If anything, the Ds are being way too fucking forgiving. Spineless bastards need to stop talking about doing something and start actually doing something; self-congratulatory tweets don’t stop civil wars.

@SFHC
Thank you. That was pissing me off way too much for words.

Speaking of striving to stave off what would be certain disaster if left unopposed – good luck to all UK Mammotheers who are campaigning/contributing/phonebanking/writing/doorstepping/doing what we can to get the tories out on June the 8th!

There are almost too many anti-tory points to raise (the Nolan report on forcing NHS trusts to sell off assets into private hands at knock-down prices is only one of the relatively recent to emerge).

fuerza, not long to go now and every bit counts!

Once upon a time, the city your humble Jivesy was born and raised in elected a hard-drinking crack mayor. He smooth-talked his way into office with the help of a split ballot while offering to “stop the gravy train” and “respect the taxpayer”, empty buzzphrases that drew on suburban resentment for the city core following a particularly unpleasant garbage collector strike. He bumbled his way around the mayorship, offering nonsensical policies that typically involved privatization (when he wasn’t goofing off coaching football) until a video turned up that offered evidence that he smoked crack. Subsequent drunken stupor videos and racist impressions made him a minor celebrity, with even that strapping young Jimmy Kimmel fellow hosting his antics. Meanwhile, that mayor was embroiled in an expense scandal and eventually fessed up to smoking that crack, leading city council to strip him of most of his power. Eventually, the hard-drinking crack mayor got cancer and died, leaving the city with one of the last red Torys in existence.

Your friendly neighbourhood Jivesy accidentally contributed to the hard-drinking crack mayor’s win by refusing to vote for his weasel-faced rival and instead voted for the other Joey Pants, the former deputy mayor of the last guy who Jivesy didn’t mind too much. Your friendly neighbourhood Jivesy learned a few hard lessons that blustery October day… the biggest being not to vote based on purity, and sometimes you have to vote for a weasel-face in order to prevent hard-drinking crack mayors from upending your local politics.

Jivesy also had a hard lesson in the power of resentment. Canada’s a pretty mellow place, but if people think they’re being screwed over by “elites”, anything that makes those perceived “elites” squirm is supported, especially if those “elites” are represented by the media. And even a hard-drinking crack-mayor can maintain a loyal voting base of approximately 30% of the population that will only love him more if they consider him scapegoated by those awful reporter people. It’s the kind of thing that teaches you something about your neighbours (looking your way, Etobicoke).

If your friendly neighbourhood Jivesy has any advice for a certain country south of our border that didn’t heed the lesson of the hard-drinking crack mayor they enjoyed laughing at when it was another country dealing with it, it would be:

1) Stick to issues. When hard-drinking crack mayor-like entities drink and do crack, media beating him up over personal problems makes him look sympathetic. Nobody wants their mayors to do crack, but when your mayor is slashing transit funding and babbling about subways where none are warranted by civic planners, that’s a titch more important than what he puts in his lungs.

2) Don’t get distracted. Hard-drinking crack mayors are going to do buffoonish things. Often. Joke about it for a half hour, then remember that he’s refusing to discuss revenue streams for a cash-strapped municipality the size of Chicago.

3) Keep an eye on the next guy. Hard-drinking crack mayors have a nasty habit of normalizing non-crack using politicos with the same policies. Your friendly neighbourhood Jivesy might have voted for that clean-cut Tory fellow, but only because it was obvious the much superior candidate wasn’t going to win because she was a woman and she was Chinese. His backing dumb a one-stop subway is just the shit cherry on top of the shit sundae. If your alternative to your crack mayor is Ted Cruz… well, ’nuff said.

4) Support your local candidates. While Jives had to put up with the crack mayor for four years, his councillor was an affable young man with solid progressive politics who stood up to the crack mayor at every turn. While he’s a city councillor now, he could be mayor or maybe Premier ten years from now. Work on keeping a deep bench. It pays off.

5) Don’t think you’re an exception. America had a good guffaw at the hard-drinking crack mayor from that podunk town across Lake Ontario, just like Toronto did after having a half-decent administrator as mayor for eight years. Soon America had a crack mayor of its own, and he’s eligible for another term. Organize for your state races like yesterday. It always matters.

And everybody lived crack-fully ever after. The end.

looking at the contour map round these parts looks like the shop I work at will be regularly flooded soon. And the road out of town. We’ll be on an island a few decades later if it all goes according to the Hansen predictions. Good thing I like boats.

@A Rose for Emily

You’re talking about the formalization of these beliefs, not the origins. The oldest known instance of the use of the so-called “curse of Ham” as a justification of slavery comes from John Annius in the 15th century. He acted like it was an ancient doctrine, but it basically originated with him. The logic that Ham’s descendants are cursed to dark skin and slavery doesn’t work without Biblical literalism. Unless one believes that the flood story is literally true and that the entire human population is descended from 3 brothers, the justification that Ham’s descendants are properly enslaved just doesn’t work.

(Incidentally, the curse was actually laid on Canaan, not Ham, which shows how willing white supremacists are to twist even their Biblical literalism in the service of white supremacy.)

The story of the “Curse of Ham” as the reason slavery was A-OK spread in the 17th century alongside the Biblical literalism and inerrancy required to make that justification function, when mass-produced Bibles became widely available. Just because we didn’t use the word “fundamentalism” to describe this until the early 20th century doesn’t mean the ideas didn’t exist until that word was applied. They had existed for centuries at that point.