Idiocracy

[herman]

Would you rather they remained hidden in the woodwork and weeds?

Vs. being given seats of power in the government? Yeah, probably.

Touch?, touch?.

As much as this election result (and subsequent use of the Constitution as a butt wipe) has been depressing/horrifying, I'm the kind of person that would prefer to try to make the best of the hand dealt. Is there a greater unifier and mobilizer than a common enemy?

 

[L K]

Would you rather they remained hidden in the woodwork and weeds?

Vs. being given seats of power in the government? Yeah, probably.

Touch?, touch?.

As much as this election result (and subsequent use of the Constitution as a butt wipe) has been depressing/horrifying, I'm the kind of person that would prefer to try to make the best of the hand dealt. Is there a greater unifier and mobilizer than a common enemy?

Yeah I mean I think the dirty underbelly was perfectly exposed when Trump became a viable candidate.  We didn't need him to win.

 

[herman]

Speaking of this dirty underbelly:
http://gizmodo.com/reddit-says-goodnight-to-alt-right-community-1791895544

 

[iwas11in67]

It was one or two people who were at a BLM event.

Also, to be clear we can't even really say as a fact that it was a BLM event. We literally just have a video of a random, unknown person shouting into a microphone in front of other random, unknown people.

That's a good point - it's not as if the Daily Caller is the most reputable news media:

...and the Neo Nazi paper is a reputable news outlet?

Sorry I have a different viewpoint.

 

[louisstamos]

It was one or two people who were at a BLM event.

Also, to be clear we can't even really say as a fact that it was a BLM event. We literally just have a video of a random, unknown person shouting into a microphone in front of other random, unknown people.

That's a good point - it's not as if the Daily Caller is the most reputable news media:

...and the Neo Nazi paper is a reputable news outlet?

Sorry I have a different viewpoint.

Breitbart?  They're in the bottom right corner.  Which means in terms of of partisanship, it's "Conservative Utter Garbage/Conspiracy Theories" and in terms quality, they're under "sensationalist/clickbait."

They're right where they're supposed to be.

 

[harps64]

It was one or two people who were at a BLM event.

Also, to be clear we can't even really say as a fact that it was a BLM event. We literally just have a video of a random, unknown person shouting into a microphone in front of other random, unknown people.

That's a good point - it's not as if the Daily Caller is the most reputable news media:

...and the Neo Nazi paper is a reputable news outlet?

Sorry I have a different viewpoint.

Breitbart?  They're in the bottom right corner.  Which means in terms of of partisanship, it's "Conservative Utter Garbage/Conspiracy Theories" and in terms quality, they're under "sensationalist/clickbait."

They're right where they're supposed to be.

This chart is a joke.

 

[Kin]

...and the Neo Nazi paper is a reputable news outlet?

Nobody is citing them as a reputable news outlet whose reporting is solid. What's being said is they're a reliable source for how Neo Nazis feel about things.

 

[herman]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLFe-cDxGxY[/youtube]
Transcript
This is funny because... nope.

https://twitter.com/GrainneMaguire/status/826868300856586241
www.twitter.com/GrainneMaguire/status/826868300856586241

It's funny because it's true.

 

[McGarnagle]

This chart is a joke.

Really? I thought it wasn't all that far off.

 

[bustaheims]

Really? I thought it wasn't all that far off.

It is, unless, of course, you rely on one of the more extreme sources for your info, in which case, you'd probably see it as fake news.

 

[mr grieves]

Would you rather they remained hidden in the woodwork and weeds?

Vs. being given seats of power in the government? Yeah, probably.

Touch?, touch?.

As much as this election result (and subsequent use of the Constitution as a butt wipe) has been depressing/horrifying, I'm the kind of person that would prefer to try to make the best of the hand dealt. Is there a greater unifier and mobilizer than a common enemy?

Mobilizer, no -- can't beat a common enemy.

But unifier? Well, around what and for how long? By 2006, everyone was unified against Bush, but once he was gone in 2009, folks lost the thread. A lot of the things I thought undergirded opposition to Bush (resistance to: torture, spying, expansive state power, austerity, centering finance, etc) sort of weren't thought to be a problem once he was gone, though those things all lived on or weren't purged from the system. 

Unifying around opposition to a particular villain doesn't really prefigure sustained political success.

 

[Heroic Shrimp]

Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer on SNL.  Watch it before it's taken down by NBC:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-10jAuijtI[/youtube]

 

[CarltonTheBear]

That's incredible. Amazing work too by McCarthy to not break during any of that.

 

[Heroic Shrimp]

That's incredible. Amazing work too by McCarthy to not break during any of that.

Not only did I howl through the whole thing last night, but then also when watching it again this morning, I had to pause it every time I wanted a sip of my coffee for fear of spitting it out.

 

[Redleaf]

Here's what really happened at The Donald's inauguration...

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/blogs/compost/wp/2017/01/24/the-true-correct-story-of-what-happened-at-donald-trumps-inauguration/?client=safari

 

[herman]

Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer on SNL.  Watch it before it's taken down by NBC:

Reddit's got our backs
http://streamable.com/etn5v

 

[CarltonTheBear]

Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer on SNL.  Watch it before it's taken down by NBC:

Reddit's got our backs
http://streamable.com/etn5v

If you watch this again with the knowledge that Trump is reportedly butt-hurt over Spicer being played by a woman it's 100x more funny.

 

[bustaheims]

Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer on SNL.  Watch it before it's taken down by NBC:

Reddit's got our backs
http://streamable.com/etn5v

If you watch this again with the knowledge that Trump is reportedly butt-hurt over Spicer being played by a woman it's 100x more funny.

He's going to explode when Rosie plays Bannon!

 

[herman]

He's going to explode when Rosie plays Bannon!

https://twitter.com/Rosie/status/828792995591888896
www.twitter.com/Rosie/status/828792995591888896
And when Baldwin and Rosie make out after... with Chris Christie kind of standing in the background, mouth agape.

Word on the newswire is that Trump signed the EO to get Bannon on the NSC but didn't know that was in there (because he didn't/can't read) and is now miffed. I think the best way forward for the Resistance is to turn the two of them against each other (and in turn, against the GOP).

My read on the situation is that they're both playing each other, and they know it. Bannon is grooming Trump with effusive compliments and feeding his paranoia and has all the strategic ideas to change public opinion (propaganda). Trump is wielding Bannon as a threat to the Republican base. He is already bristling at the #PresidentBannon attention and will probably start to undermine Bannon's influence.

 

[hockeyfan1]

An interesting article in attempting to explain the Trump victory, Clinton vs Trump supporters, and the why and wherefore as it stands:

For many Americans, Hillary Clinton personified the corruption and self-dealing of the elites. But Trump?s election wasn?t just a rejection of Clinton, it was a rejection of politics as usual. If the media and political establishment see Trump?s first couple of weeks in office as a whirlwind of chaos and incompetence, his supporters see an outsider taking on a sclerotic system that needs to be dismantled. That?s precisely what many Americans thought they were doing eight years ago, when they put a freshman senator from Illinois in the White House. Obama promised a new way of governing ? he would be a ?post-partisan? president, he would ?fundamentally transform? the country, he would look out for the middle class. In the throes of the great recession, that resonated. Something was clearly wrong with our political system and the American people wanted someone to fix it.

After all, the Tea Party didn?t begin as a reaction against Obama?s presidency but that of George W Bush. As far as most Americans were concerned, the financial crisis was brought on by the excesses of Wall Street bankers and the incompetency of our political leaders....Americans who felt the system was rigged against them and they wanted But change didn?t come.

What they got was more of the same. Obama offered a series of massive government programmes, from an $830bn financial stimulus, to the Affordable Care Act, to Dodd-Frank, none of which did much to assuage the economic anxieties of the middle class. Americans watched as the federal government bailed out the banks, then the auto industry and then passed healthcare reform that transferred billions of taxpayer dollars to major health insurance companies. Meanwhile, premiums went up, economic recovery remained sluggish and millions dropped out of the workforce and turned to food stamps and welfare programmes just to get by.

Part of Obama?s appeal was that he promised to end the unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, restore America?s standing in the international community and pursue multilateral agreements that would bring stability. Instead, Americans watched Isis step into the vacuum created by the US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. They watched the Syrian civil war trigger a migrant crisis in Europe that many Americans now view as a cautionary tale. At home, Isis-inspired terrorist attacks took their toll, as they did in Europe. And all the while Obama?s White House insisted that everything was going well.

Amid all this, along came Trump. Here was a rough character, a boisterous celebrity billionaire with an axe to grind. He had palpable disdain for both political parties, which he said had failed the American people. He showed contempt for political correctness that was strangling public debate over contentious issues such as terrorism. He struck many of the same populist notes, both in his campaign and in his recent inaugural address, that Senator Bernie Sanders did among his young socialist acolytes, sometimes word for word.

In many ways, the 2016 election wasn?t just a referendum on Obama?s eight years in the White House, it was a rejection of the entire political system that gave us Iraq, the financial crisis, a botched healthcare law and shocking income inequality during a slow economic recovery. From Akron to Alaska, millions of Americans had simply lost confidence in their leaders and the institutions that were supposed to serve them. In their desperation, they turned to a man who had no regard for the elites ? and no use for them

...populism of this kind can be dangerous and unpredictable, But it doesn?t arise from nowhere. Only a corrupt political establishment could have provoked a political revolt of this scale. Instead of blaming Trump?s rise on racism or xenophobia, blame it on those who never saw this coming and still don?t understand why so many Americans would rather have Donald Trump in the White House than suffer the rule of their elites.

Full article:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/05/trump-not-fascist-champion-for-forgotten-millions