America under Trump - Year One: January 2017 to ... January 2017

Fuck this guy, fuck this administration, fuck this unwanted and obvious occupation.
Let's keep the conversation going.

doesnt sound like a dialogue tbh

It's not like he reads responses to his tweets.

I'd certainly welcome dissenting viewpoints! I think most of us would.
The conversation I have in mind is less one with the occupying administration and more among everyone else about how to best (non-violently) obstruct it.

There's a separate thread for that

I do not welcome dissenting viewpoints. By which I mean if you are pro-Trump, you are anti-me, and I would have to be a moron to welcome people who are against my existence into my life.

I'm unlikely to fault anyone for violent obstruction tbh.

yes i'm all for this not becoming a defend the indefensible thread xp

The crux is probably the idea that further dehumanizing the other side to the same degree they dehumanize you might be totally justified but will also mean worse things down the road given the trajectory it creates.

this shit again, really?

Feedback loop

new thread please

Uh. Just speculating! I certainly hope something finally goes wrong for President elect Magoo

Humanizing Republicans and respecting their views has not worked out particularly well for liberals and progressives over the last 20 years.

Yeah I wasn't arguing for it myself, was just pointing out that nothing seems like a good route forward

i'd draw a line between those who are actively part of the problem and those who are passively part of the problem and may just need to be properly acquainted with what that problem is, but that's a personal choice.

my main point is that if you want this thread to be something other than "white dudes searching for a way to reassure other white dudes that things will be okay intermingled with existential wailing", starting out with "I wish the people who voted for Trump were more active in these threads" is not a good way to start

The only way to slow down the machine or change its direction is to inject energy that obstructs or deflects it. The fact that the machine has the weight of the government behind it, able to use both law and tax revenue to fuel its course, means one hell of a lot of obstructive energy will be required.

^ To which I'd add that there will be a lot of defeats, but getting discouraged over them won't help a damn bit. Just like being stuck in a crappy job, you have to get up and face the same crappy facts every goddamn day and still keep going.

The extent to which people have been legitimately victimized by forces beyond their control is worthy of sympathy and attempts at understanding and rectifying the underlying problems. The extent to which some of those victims made the conscious decision to cast a vote for a hateful rich mentally-ill bully is the extent to which my own personal sympathy and understanding kinda dry on the vine.

yeah 'we need to sympathize w/ and better understand trump voters' is just self-flagellation. I don't think the gop won because they spent 8 years 'understanding obama voters'.

can i talk about a movie i just saw? it was called "tangsir" and it came out in '73 or '74 as part of the iranian new wave. it resonated with me because it was so much a reaction to systemic injustice, in this case the injustice of the shah, but that reaction was to my western eyes pretty horrifying. the hero of the movie was kind of straightforwardly what we would today call an "islamic terrorist". this was a useful movie to watch because in resistance you can get a little bit unsure about where exactly the line is, there's a tendency to ask "is our resistance going to bring about another iran, another syria?" and based on what i saw in tangsir, yeah, probably not, if only because nobody is going around telling people that god told us to kill certain people in the name of justice.

https://www.thenation.com/article/congressional-resistance-to-trump-begins-now

already seeing a lot of Republican members of the House coming out of the woodwork to whine about this, which I suppose is a good sign for us

guessing they're hoping everyone forgot about their much-applauded plan to delay a Supreme Court justice for 4 years

I lost respect for my pro-Trump friend when he cried about rigging prior to the election and didn't give two shits when he later heard about Russia intervention. Just shows you that people have their candidate and don't care about the facts. How can you work with people like that?

You can't. So you work around them.

^^^

it's okay to have enemies

yeah most Trump voters I know don't believe the Russia story one bit, chalking it up to sour grapes, straight up saying the FBI and CIA and all the other intelligence agencies "can't really know" or whatever

how shocking that those same people were 100% convinced that there was something damning in those Hillary emails though

There's a thing I've been mulling over that I'm sure has been said a thousand times by now about how people like that are increasingly rejecting the idea of expertise because, in an era when literally everyone can broadcast their thoughts to the world with no effort whatsoever and has instantaneous access to all of the information from forever, everyone is an expert. Because dumb people misunderstand what expertise is. And dumb pseudoexperts always have to voice their dumb pseudoexpert opinions because and basically only because outlets exist that allow them to do so. But basically 99.9% of opinions are worthless and pointless and based on very little in the way of information and certainly not expertise. Like that percentage I whipped up just now? Total bullshit that I completely pulled out of my ass. Everybody needs to shut up and also to stop listening to everybody else.

Basically kinda just feeling like unearned confidence (which 99.9% of confidence is) needs to be stamped into the dirt and replaced with constant self-doubt and -reflection.

YouTube clip upthread from seven years ago with Megyn Kelly and Naomi Wolf. Not sure if they've kept in touch over the years.

Getting lost amidst Russian talk is the number of voters bounced from rolls in three swing states because of shady cross checks. That's a bigger problem for 2016 elections than hacktivities by intelligence agencies. Aren't most developed nations doing things like that?

Kellyanne Conway and Naomi Wolf, that should read.

Oh--and wrong thread.

There's a thing I've been mulling over that I'm sure has been said a thousand times by now about how people like that are increasingly rejecting the idea of expertise because, in an era when literally everyone can broadcast their thoughts to the world with no effort whatsoever and has instantaneous access to all of the information from forever, everyone is an expert.

Gove: Britons 'Have Had Enough of Experts'

Guessing Conway benefits a lot from Shock Doctrine analysis.

this isn't specifically about Trump, but is interesting on the idea of wisdom of experts vs wisdom of "the people" imo:

http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2016/12/elites-or-people.html

Both can sometimes go wrong. Experts are prone not just to professional deformation (pdf) – the tendency for perceptions to be warped by their training – but also groupthink. For example, the replication crisis – which is by no means confined to psychology – suggests that peer review fails to weed out poor academic research and might even enhance groupthink.

What’s more, pretences to expertise can often merely be a desire for wealth and power, as Alasdair MacIntyre wrote:

The realm of managerial expertise is one in which what purport to be objectively-grounded claims function in fact as expressions of arbitrary, but disguised, will and preference. (After Virtue, p107)

But on the other hand, we know that the people are often wrong about basic facts, are terrible at understanding connections between economic phenomena, are misinformed by a biased media, and prone to countless cognitive biases.

Rather than always side with the people or always with elites, we should abandon grandiose generalizations and ask in each specific context: who is most likely to be right here – the elite or the people?

Or the elite can also engage in the self-doubt-fest I propose. Humility and the acceptance that one can and might be wrong can go a long way, imo, and doubly so wrt people who are highly-trained within their chosen field.

http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/files/2017/01/Smug-Pilots.jpg

the "russian intervention" is being blown completely out of proportion and, frankly, functions as a screen to prevent a clear view of what went wrong with the HRC campaign in specific and the D party more broadly

^^^

xp as someone pointed out on twitter, that cartoon confuses politics for technocracy, which is seductive but a surefire losing strategy

I'd argue that the reaction has been, if anything, understated but that it's the proposed effect on the HRC campaign which has been wildly overstated.

russian nationalism is bad

putin's foreign policy is bad

the vulnerability of civic/gov't institutions is bad

julian assange really hates hillary clinton

russia did not "hack the election"

xp OL yeah i'd agree with that

The hacking wouldn't have had the impact it had without an overly-credulous US media making a mountain out of their molehill and an overly-credulous citizenry uncritically lapping it up.

raiding private emails and sifting them out to confreres for maximum misleading dissemination... is bad!

but wikileaks didn't tip this election. if any single person did (who isn't hillary clinton or donald trump), it was james comey

i mean, if you read the press it's hard to keep straight that we had two "email hacking" scandals at the same time

btw happy new year everyone

it's hard to isolate whatever effect wikileaks had, it probably had some minor effect and every minor effect ended up tipping the election. the russia hacking stuff is important because:

a. it delegitimizes trump's election. we need to be doing this constantly and from every direction.
b. it helps limit his ability to pal around w/ a dictator. obv he's still going to do it, but this does make it look even worse.
c. regardless of how many voters changed their minds because they hated podesta's risotto recipe, the russian government was able to take over an american news cycle at will. this wasn't even the first example of foreign governments using hacking + american free press to achieve some goal (north korea and sony) and it won't be the last.

I don't think the Podesta emails swung things a whole lot, but the "DNC screwed Bernie" thing definitely moved the needle some. I don't know any Bernie voters who went Trump but I know a lot of them didn't bother to vote at all.

the russia thing seems to me like something of a redo of the hanging chad squad back in 2000. i had no patience with this line of argument back then, but surprisingly i'm much more okay with the sequel.

in 2000, as in 2016, the democrats ran a shit candidate in a shit fashion. all of the "hanging chad" bullshit was just that, bullshit, but it didn't detract from honest analyses of their candidate's failure because nobody is motivated to fucking do that anyway. a serious moral reckoning is only going to come if people start kicking the bums out, get involved and primary these assholes.

he talks bonkers nonsense and his record is horrifying

feelings of relief at his nomination are a sign of normalization of trump's terrible decisions

― Karl Malone

this is very OTM, Gorsuch is a dangerous lunatic who only looks good when compared to even more dangerous lunatics.

That sounds pretty normal to me, relative to the GOP.

none of this is normal

He is a conservative which is a step-up from the far right so-called "populist" bomb throwers who are running things in the white house rn

From what I can gather having known about this guy for like an hour

is he going to visit your office

is he going to bring God

anti-gay, pro-life, pro-corporate -- the ideal republican SC nominee!

don't want to look into anything? now you don't have to! here's the view from 30 billion feet

http://i.imgur.com/Qc49m5Y.png

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/31/us/politics/trump-supreme-court-nominee.html

clarence thomas way off in the wilderness, having spoken so little for so long that he is not unsure whether anyone else can understand him or if the language has evolved past his experience

that he is unsure not not unsure you know what i mean

Sherrod Brown already issued a statement saying "Fuck, no."

Great comment on LGM:

I would love for one Democratic Senator to ask “Sir, is your name Merrick Garland? No? Thank you. I yield the remainder of my time.”

"Sir, why are you so fucking terrible?"

also Morbs rage upthread actually v otm

i assume this was covered 400 posts ago but oh well

The Trump administration doubled down Tuesday on its commitment to transforming the nation’s border law enforcement, signaling that some of the temporary bans on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries are likely to be made permanent and elevating a deportations official to run the top immigration enforcement agency.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-trailguide-updates-1485885194-htmlstory.html

@ggreenwald
Virtually all "temporary" rights abridgments end up being permanent. The Patriot Act was "temporary" when enacted. It's now 16 years old.

this is cheering https://twitter.com/blowticious/status/826582040472645633

ty, much needed

Some detailed info here about legit rogue twitter accounts: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/resistance-from-within-federal-workers-push-back-against-trump/2017/01/31/c65b110e-e7cb-11e6-b82f-687d6e6a3e7c_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-banner-low_resistance-0909pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.81ed309556dd

TOMOBOT, why do you hate God

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

failure to strike donald trump with a lightning bolt?

EYEhategod

no Tomo

Oh, Botpaws.

pro-religion, the religion of professionals

how much does God make for a typical speaking engagement dya think

everything

the podium, the microphone, the audience, the seats, the roof, the floor

worth rereading now if you read it back in november http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/27/trump-realism-vs-moral-politics-choice-we-face/

Tombot curious what you think if something like 10% of the federal civil servant workforce attrits in the next 12 months

er, think would happen. how much of an un-fillable reduction in force would it take for absurdities to start breaking out

tombot im sorry for my overcooked take re the civil service --- been a lil intemperate lately

I feel mostly anger. There are always things to be mad about in America, but Trump's rise was die to the willful ignorance of millions of voters and the crass opportunism of Republican leaders who should know better. Not that they ever stood for anything beyond crass opportunism, but I never thought they'd be reckless enough to help a madman they know nothing about grab the reins of power. This was all so avoidable.

well, it empirically was not avoidable, it was not avoided, we only live in this universe

It was avoidable by the GOP surrendering the election to Clinton, which they were never going to do, regardless of GOP candidate.

Sorry i thought this was the thread abt if we are terrified and how much

Well, it's Feb on the East coast, we can start an all-new Trump terror thread.

Xp Ppl keep saying that abt the repubs nickn but Trump only became the GOP nom by viciously insulting everyone in the party.It's still weird to me that they recognize him as one of theirs.

Like I get that they'd alienate their base and they want their ppl on the supreme court and blah blah blah but in the end it feels shortsighted. I'd hope that if a character like Trump emerged on the Dem side the Dems would reject them.

he'll give some shit response, but i just want one senator to ask him what his thoughts are on what the republicans did last year to merrick garland.

Trump's America, February 2017: Autocratic for the People

keep the "party" going

I believe the average GOP pol is sucking up all his/her revulsion and realizing that's where the votes are. And there's also a little "well, it probably won't be that bad" and "well, if it is that bad it'll be over soon enough" and "well, it'll be horrible but at least I'll get some of my ideas implemented."

They're all such lowlifes

Heitkamp and Manchin's voting for Gorsuch would shock me.

voting

NO, rather

EU and Mexico agree to accelerate trade talks

^^ A+ trolling

"good luck angle-saxmerica"

you libtard snowflakes gonna start a february thread or does it even matter what anyone said two days ago?

look up a few posts brother

Trump's America, February 2017: Autocratic for the People