With Trump pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement like the huge idiot he is, today seems like a good time for another Trump open thread.
Have at it! No trolls or Trump fans.
Categories
Trump Open Thread: June 2017 End of the World Edition
@sunnysombrera
Fair enough ?
Are progressives really switching sides because we’re too mean to Trump? The only time I’ve seen people say that is online and I find it hard to trust their sincerity. I don’t think the BernieBros (not all Bernie Sanders supporters, just the ones that acted like assholes and decided to support Trump or stay home out of spite) were really progressives at all. I think they were people who just jumped on a trend. Or some of them were probably just trolls. Similar to those trolls we get here who claim they were neutral and seeking both sides of the story but now they hate feminism because we’re just so mean. It was quite obvious that they were anti-feminists in the first place.
Meanwhile, out in the “real” world, I’ve seen a lot of people who were left leaning but fairly apathetic actually caring about politics. Also a lot of neutral types who can’t stand Trump. If my senator, Al Franken is catching any heat for his strong opposition to Trump, I’m not seeing it. Other than from people who are strong Republicans and already hate him.*
The Democrats have had a strategy since the late 70s of triangulating instead of embracing progressivism. They’ve been the ones to embrace reaching out across the aisle. It’s accomplished nothing. The only major progressive victory in my lifetime, marriage equality, came from the courts, not congress. The ACA, while better than nothing is too pro insurance industry and not socialist enough to count it as a major progressive victory. Although it was a victory. Even the more minor victories, like Lily Ledbetter required a supermajority to pass. It’s about damn time the Democrats started actually opposing Republican fuckery. As SFHC said, they’ve still got a ways to go on this front but they’re finally starting to get it. I was so pissed off watching the Dems roll over again and again for George W Bush. They don’t seem quite so willing to do this for Trump. People are not inspired to follow a Democratic party that is perceived as the same as Republicans.
That perception doesn’t come from Hillary Clinton being a fake progressive while Bernie Sanders was the real progressive. She actually had a lot of progressive positions (by US standards anyway) and was very different from Trump. But because the Democratic party has devoted decades to trying to cater to big business and an ever decreasing share of the population that are truly swing voters, people could not be convinced otherwise. If the party wants to do well in midterm elections and be assured presidential victories in the future, it’s going to have embrace left-populism. FDR did so and he was hands down the most beloved president of the twentieth century.
* Funny story. I went to a bar with a couple of guys I had been working on the 2014 elections with on election night. By this time, Franken had long since been declared the winner of his reelection bid. Some Republican dude a couple seats over, a middle age white man of course, was whining about it. He said “Democrats would vote for Hitler if he had a D after his name!” It was just too hilarious that this guy was comparing a senator who is not only progressive, but Jewish to Hitler. It just highlights how absolutely ridiculous right wing “thought” is. They can’t explain how progressives are actually like Hitler. They just know he’s regarded as a villain by most people and so since they don’t like liberals, they must be just like him. Meanwhile, they’re the ones who embrace racism, authoritarianism and war mongering and are way closer to Hitleresque than progressives are.
To add to my tl;dr.
Even though Americans tend to be seen as loving capitalism and hating socialism, FDR proudly proclaimed that he welcomed the hatred of capitalists.
http://youtube/IjSTQwamo8M
The word socialism is tainted here, but if the Dems would actually use socialist rhetoric without using the word “socialist” and follow that through with action, they would be more popular. Of course, unlike FDR and for that matter, Bernie Sanders, they need to update it for the 21st century with a hell of a lot more intersectionality. Something that Hillary Clinton definitely did better than Bernie.
The Tea Party even appropriated some socialist rhetoric and people ate it up.
Americans are afraid of the word socialism, but they don’t actually like capitalists. Democrats have forgotten that.
ETA: What am I doing wrong that YouTube never, ever embeds?
@WWTH-senpai
Er, try copying the url from the url bar of your browser. I generally paste Youtube links from my Windows 10 desktop PC and that works. Don’t use the generated URL youtube gives you to share videos with, that doesn’t seem to work, and don’t use the Youtube app if you’re on mobile.
Sorry to double post, but
That sums up the totality of American culture, I think.
Also, today Lord Domhnall’s Arch-Duke, Skeletor, formally declared war on Mother Earth, or Jord, as we Asatruar call her.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/mike-pence-climate-change-us-vice-president-paris-agreement-issue-left-for-some-reason-donald-trump-a7769081.html
@wwth
You need to include the “.com/watch?v=” section of the web address. like so youtube dot com /watch?v=id code for video.
Policy of Madness:
Agreed. The Christian churches played a major role in propping up slavery, especially in teaching slaves (who were forced to attend) to accept their lot.
What’s surprising, though, is that those churches were not only not fundamentalist, but as Evangelicalism evolved (from which Fundamentalism later sprang), it came down more on the abolitionist side.
Weirdly, there’s literalism and there’s literalism. Jews and Christians were “creationist” for millennia, in the sense of casually taking Genesis at face value, but prior to the 19th Century there were no viable alternative ideas. Only after science developed evidence of evolution and an old earth were Christians forced to choose between the two. The concept of “literalism” was only articulated after Christians started adopting various non-literal ways of reading the Bible in order to accommodate new information like evolution.
But I wasn’t saying Christianity wasn’t enlisted to support slavery: it certainly was. I’m saying that it’s an anachronism to put that on fundamentalists, which are a particular sect that didn’t exist yet and that was actually abolitionist in its early days.
The slaveowners were mostly Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian, and all three denominations split into “northern” and “southern” branches over whether or not they supported slavery.
If you think this, then we have no common ground on which to have a discussion, because this is absolutely untrue. Biblical scholarship in which the Bible was assumed to be true but not literally true is way older than the theory of evolution. There are so many contradictions and so much bizarre shit in the Bible that “this isn’t a literal history of the world” occurred to people a hella long time before Darwin went on his trip. It’s not like nobody noticed that there are two creation stories in Genesis before the 19th century. The idea that they have to be reconciled because they are both literally true is the relatively new concept here, not the idea that the Bible is allegory.
Okay, I can buy that.
Really? How do you figure that?
I have to say that reading all the news and watching a bit of cable news is really refreshing. American cities and states, along with dozens of countries, have just told the great deal-maker that they’ll ignore him and make deals that don’t include him. (As if he ever had any chance of simultaneously renegotiating 190+ deals in the first place.)
The mayor of Pittsburgh was pretty peeved that Trumpelthinskin used his city in his speech. He points out that 1) Pittsburgh voted 80% for Hillary, 2) Pittsburgh has reinvented itself from an old-fashioned, dying-on-its-feet steel city to a modern “new economy” city – and cleaned up its air and water along the way. Which is what the whole of America needs to do to stay relevant and prosperous into the future.
Even more interesting, he said that he was one of 61 mayors of American cities who went along to the Paris conference and signed up to the principles in the agreement. I just loved seeing all those town halls and parliaments and important monuments around the US and the rest of the world lit up with green spotlights. The idea that California and other states & cities will negotiate directly with a cooperative Canada and Mexico to get things done while little grumpy Donnie sulks alone on the side-lines in his self-imposed isolation is a picture that appeals to me.
Up yours! to Trump and we’ll get along just fine – you’ll be left eating our dust.
WWTH-
“Americans are afraid of the word socialism, but they don’t actually like capitalists. Democrats have forgotten that.”
Yes. Very well said.
“Are progressives really switching sides…”
Probably not hard-core progressives, but moderates probably more so. Democrats have been losing ground at the local level for years. And that is partially because of Democrat’s classism and arrogance towards the electorate itself, and not because the Dems are mean to Republican buffoons in government.
Let’s just look at Democrats that hand wave off a few people losing their jobs in the name of controlling climate change. Which may not sound so bad if you’re young, and healthy, and don’t have children to support. Or, if in the worst case scenearios around coal mines, whether you care that many other jobs will go under due to high unemployment, or that hospitals may close down. (And before anyone accuses me of hysteria, because coal is concentrated in small areas, and because the economies around coal mines are often dependent on coal, even butterfly-small job losses among coal-workers can lead to typhoon-sized economic suffering.)
I’m not a coal worker. I am a factory worker though, and while I understand that no-one is bringing back my job, no matter how loose environmental regulations get, man am I fucking sick of smug, lower middle-class liberals telling me that I’m wrong to be upset. That I should not complain. To accept that I very well could die in some premature manner, because I often can’t afford mental health care, including medication, for a disease that’s marked by impulsivity and suicidality. And I’m white. Obstinately. And the Democrats will win me all the socialism, someday. No complaining in the meantime! Planning to fix a problem in the future is the same thing as having it actually fixed in the present!
And fucking hell, thanks to the internet, half the time those smug liberals aren’t even American liberals. Must be nice to be able to look down on all the dumb Americans when you have so little to lose yourself. And yes, climate change IS an exception, because it does involve the entire planet. But fuck anyone, American or otherwise, that blows off any American’s concerns with job loss, because America does not have the support for a social safety net that most of the Western world does, and the price of that will be paid by the already economically vulnerable working class.
Fucking classist attitudes fuck fuck fuck.
Fuck off, mrex.
Pat Flynn is the guy also known as
Stephen Twindale
Tyler Roberts
Adam Rome
Just a heads up, y’all.
OH MY GOD!!! IT WORKED!!! Holy shit!!!
(For the trolls, BTW.)
The Republican party platform is literally that poor people should die because they deserve to be poor. They cheered on someone shouting “let him die!” when Ron Paul was asked what should happen to an uninsured person at a 2012 primary debate. They call poor people lazy moochers. They oppose minimum wage increases They oppose labor protections. But the Democrats are the classist ones because we realize that some job losses in the coal industry, while unfortunate are a small price to pay next to the economic and environmental destruction that are the consequences of global warming?
http://replygif.net/i/166.gif
I don’t know why you act all indignant when people think you’re a troll when you post shit like this.
It’s not classist to care about the long term. Oh, and by the fucking way, Trump is doing fuck all about jobs. As someone posted somewhere today, not sure which thread or maybe it was over at Shakesville idk, tourism is way down because everyone else in the world either hates us or doesn’t view it as safe to come here. But fuck all those people who have jobs in the hospitality and tourism industry, right? And again, as someone else noted, Carrier is already laying off people from all those jobs Trump supposedly saved.
I’m not even sure where this idea that we don’t care about jobs comes from. I’ve worked for an org that fights for labor rights in the past.
We’re just saying economic anxiety is no excuse for racism and xenophobia. Especially when you remember that white people are a hell of a lot better off economically than people of color in this country.
OMG, is the name R*N P**l still an automatic moderation trigger. Trying again
The Republican party platform is literally that poor people should die because they deserve to be poor. They cheered on someone shouting “let him die!” when R*n P**l was asked what should happen to an uninsured person at a 2012 primary debate. They call poor people lazy moochers. They oppose minimum wage increases They oppose labor protections. But the Democrats are the classist ones because we realize that some job losses in the coal industry, while unfortunate are a small price to pay next to the economic and environmental destruction that are the consequences of global warming?
http://replygif.net/i/166.gif
I don’t know why you act all indignant when people think you’re a troll when you post shit like this.
It’s not classist to care about the long term. Oh, and by the fucking way, Trump is doing fuck all about jobs. As someone posted somewhere today, not sure which thread or maybe it was over at Shakesville idk, tourism is way down because everyone else in the world either hates us or doesn’t view it as safe to come here. But fuck all those people who have jobs in the hospitality and tourism industry, right? And again, as someone else noted, Carrier is already laying off people from all those jobs Trump supposedly saved.
I’m not even sure where this idea that we don’t care about jobs comes from. I’ve worked for an org that fights for labor rights in the past.
We’re just saying economic anxiety is no excuse for racism and xenophobia. Especially when you remember that white people are a hell of a lot better off economically than people of color in this country.
Economic Anxiety™.
Kupo-
“Fuck off, mrex.”
Gee, guess that was too much.
Maybe I would fuck off if there were some factory jobs left, since I would be busy working, and knowing I can take medications. My first one was a nice union job. Paid like shit, but it got me through a nervous breakdown, and made me a lifetime Democrat.
I should qualify my rant though, it was aimed towards some, unfortunately loud, Democrats. Not all Democrats, or most Democrats. And not towards anyone in particular, either. Certainly not towards you, or any other Dems here.
And yeah, fuck Trump. Even IF he could save any jobs, who will be hurt the worst by climate change? Not him and his pals. The Republicans are the anglerfish of American politics. As many problems as I have with Dems brushing off the consequences of their policies, at least they aren’t actually trying to kill the poor.
Mmmmhmmm. Got it in one.
@mrex
Your rant may not have been aimed at me, but you’re saying you and the coal miners keeping your jobs despite the economy (not dems, but the economy) simply not supporting those jobs anymore is somehow more important than all the people who have already died and all the people who will die in the future due to climate change. Those people who, for the most part, are the most economically repressed. But fuck them, right? Your job is at stake! Fuck the lives of other people, right?
Look, I know coal miners got a shitty fucking deal in life. I come from coal miner blood. I know about debt to the company and how impossible it is to get out of that situation. But dems, while they don’t go far enough, are not the fucking problem here.
WWTH-
“Especially when you remember that white people are a hell of a lot better off economically than people of color in this country.”
White privilege may be associated with economic privilege, but it is not literally the same thing as economic privilege. In other words, white people may be better off than POC *as a class*, (mostly due to things such as inheritance and better job opportunities), but that does not mean that any one white person is economically better off than any one POC.
I mean, you don’t run up to white homeless men and yell “fuck you faker, you’re white and a man”. Because that would be ridiculous. It may be harder to see with larger groups, but it is the same idea. A poor X is literally just as poor as a poor Y.
The problem with many rural areas, is that they don’t always have the same level of infrastructure and social programs as the rest of the country. I’ve been through Appalachia visiting family, and some of the poverty in the very rural areas was stunning. Not Appalachia, but in ME uncle told me people were taking baths in the lake because they didn’t have running water, and I thought, “fuck, even when homeless I can go to the Y”. I can see why people would freak at losing their jobs, as it didn’t seem like there was much to replace them with. I mean fuck, I can’t get a job, and I live near a city.
@SFHC
“Economic Anxiety™.”
Aren’t you Australian? I could have sworn that you just posted an Australian flag when feeling patriotic the other day.
Not there’s anything wrong with being Australian, but I’m a little curious about how much first hand experience you actually have with America as it actually is and not the shit you see on TV.
I could be very wrong here.
The privilege blindness is stupendously strong with @mrex, innit?
@mrex
Yes, I’m Australian. I’m also a dual citizen who lived in the US – the rural South, even! – for many years. Not that it’d matter, because reading, listening and learning are all things that exist, but there y’go.
(Also, can I just point out that her response to me calling her a racist was “YOU’RE NOT FROM ‘MERICA”? Says it all.)
Yes.
It is indeed the fault of the Democrats that rural communities lack the infastructure and services that the Republican assholes they voted into office consistently cut funds for.
Of course it’s the Democrat’s fault.
In TopsyTurvey world.
Ugh, so true, and it makes me just want to knock my fellow Nodakians upside the head WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS CRAP?
Maybe they’ll wake up now that the farm bill is in danger? Pffft. Even our State legislature is solid red…