Trump's America, March 2017: Using His Inside VOICE

Living in DC any desire to Get Involved is immediately tempered by the realization that you are surrounded, literally, by people doing it professionally at a national and sometimes global level, and also there's no voting legislative representation to fight for or with, so biggest shrug ever - unless you mean to go into the Involved For Six Figures And 70+ Hours/Week subset which I'm not ready to do personally

yeah that makes sense

meanwhile: a friend of mine is a run-of-the-mill immigration lawyer in new mex and, being one of the few ppl that does her job in a sparsely populated state, is completely overwhelmed by ppl treating her like the biggest ever expert --- i get the sense that it's not too difficult to assume a lot of clout just by getting to work in areas without really anyone doing much

if sean spicer would try to be less passive-aggressive defensive i might grow less worried about russia hacking the 2016 US presidential election in favor of his tax-returnless and combover-ed boss

i feel like massachusetts is kind of its own thing already. and i like that about it. and i am definitely a fan of romneycare.

i do have irrational south and midwest fear. fear of a white rural planet. christian fear. i'm working on it though.

(well, not entirely irrational in some ways (given recent events) but irrational in the sense that i would never travel down south in a million years...)

All other facts and context aside, Spicer is seriously like the worst spokesperson for anything that I've ever seen. He's like a McDonald's employee who gets exasperated every time somebody has the temerity to order a hamburger. FIELDING PROVOCATIVE QUESTIONS IS YOUR JOB, DO YOUR JOB OR GTFO.

and it illustrates, for me at least, how 1) urbanization and 2) the internet - among plenty of other phenomena - has made the idea of geography as the primary unit for political mechanisms like benefits, voting, etc feel increasingly antiquated and almost bizarre

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Monday, March 13, 2017 8:18 AM (three hours ago)

yet votes & culture are still breaking along the same regional lines ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Spicer's entire job is to defend the indefensible, plus he's probably been ordered to be an aggressive dick to anyone who comes off as critical. I'm not sure how he can field a provocative question without exposing the administration as a sham.

Defend the Indefensible: the Sean Spicer Story

contenderizer, look at votes for hillary by district? is what i'm saying.

or on a larger level, what many people in europe have asked of me: if the american president is like president of the world how come we don't get to vote for him

Conway is better at Spicer's job than Spicer is, and she's not even all that good. You don't even have to defend the indefensible, just spin and filibuster and tu quoque all over everyone's ass until they're too exhausted to press the issue. Yelping like a trapped rat just makes you and everyone you represent look as guilty as you probably are.

I am 100% for breaking up the United States into smaller countries.

good idea. that way instead of one wall we can have a whole bunch of walls, all over the country, with immigration checkpoints all over the place. you will need a passport and clearance to go anywhere. yes. what a great idea.

I've removed bookmarks for all the political threads but due to location feel the need to say: fuck Steve King

Earlier this year I decided to widen my horizons and started reading the website of the Sioux City, Iowa newspaper with an eye to subscribing for a while, not to hate read, but to see what perspective people are coming from.

Here's the thing: the framing and viewpoints, even just in how local events, business, and crime are reported, are skewed. And not to a national conservative narrative, but to a local lens that dramatically out of touch with the local reality, let alone how local and national politics intersect. There's very much the "small local town tries to hold its own" narrative, but even the Sioux City area isn't as small as what they're portraying!

It's difficult to relate to or speak about the area without falling into the narrative trap -- I'm not from there, and some of the basic assumptions about how things work start to show cracks under examination. So the half-baked narrative about small town people who can't find jobs versus immigrant-heavy industries like meat processing becomes this conspiracy about undocumented people working.. where, exactly? for corporate entities that have to have a social security number to check payroll? for large hog operations owned by the wealthy people who benefit the most from Trump policies? So it's either corporate beneficiaries cheating the system, or local monied interests using illegal labor practices, but the narrative never touches those issues, or investigates if they are issues and not paranoid fantasies used to explain how immigrants are living there.

But national politics are never examined except through this lens, and the unspoken, accepted narrative of local politics is very much an us-versus-them where "them" is people who can't possibly understand the "real locals." And I've fallen to this narrative, as have national writers when they drop into a city and report on what people say and not the reality they're living in.

oh fwiw I threw up my hands and walked away from reading Sioux City news because of said narrow lens. It's just so weird and frustrating.

oh as an addendum: in order to have enough people in the district (the gerrymandering isn't _bad_ but probably exists), Steve King's area includes one of the state universities. friends living in that county are very unhappy to be in his district, since we're talking about an area that stretches from all the way in the northwest (SC being on the South Dakota/Nebraska/Iowa border) to the county just above the state capital area, where the school is. I'd imagine international enrollment in the sciences/engineering are still high, making it weird

Yes, a logical extension of breaking up the US into various diff. countries is that every country will build a wall. If I can't travel to Mississippi or Arkansas easily, so be it.

hey, pplains deserves the right to leave and return from his state without undue burden

i'm good w/ breaking up the states. going to be a lot of red state refugees though. which hey, i guess could be an economic boon.

i do have irrational south and midwest fear. fear of a white rural planet. christian fear. i'm working on it though.

ive been down here my entire life - mostly rural growing up, mostly urban since college - and i've got it, too. not really doing a whole lot to work on it though. fuck these garbage people. p tired of being expected to empathize with them and their insane bigotries. and while that may unfortunately scan as classist af i'm very much talking about the wealthier trump voters (lots of my extended fam) as well.

The wealthier Trump voters are totally hiding behind all the 'deplorables'. The exact same camouflage has happened with UK Brexit voters.

all this secession talk is kind of nuts. it ignores the needs of those disenfranchised citizens that live in every state of the union who are americans unfortunately limited by the position of their birth and basically secession is openly advocating for just ignoring their plight in favor of not having to answer to trump i guess? also, maybe relevant to note that secession resulted in war last time and im not totally sure why it wouldn't this time also. maybe im just missing the sarcasm here

it's all a bunch of pointless noise, nobody is seceding from anything

Shakey is correct, and that oughta scare all of you

@meganmillersf
"I believe we are all a physical manifestation of the conspiracy of love." @CoryBooker @sxsw #corybooker #love #hope

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In Booker's case someone turned state's evidence and the others are doing 5 to 9 at Allenwood.

the secession thing is another escapist fantasy, like a third party alternative to the Democratic party, that is borne from a feeling of helplessness, defeatism, and an unwillingness to get involved.

xposts

I think, more specifically, the secessionist talk is what's commonly referred to as 'grasping at straws'. It's a thing we should all be perpetually discouraged from doing wrt politics in general and most specifically wrt our current political climate.

it is also borne from being nosefucked nonstopped by the Democrats since they took the Third Way

even ignoring the lol obviously there is no sequence of events that would allow this to happen thing, leaving all the red states to be their own totally insane superpower would be terrible for the world. we need the soothing effect of blue states. a better idea would be conquer canada, which would up the % of liberals in the country.

yeah but how else are libs gonna soak up company time on Facebook?

CBO says 24 million people will lose insurance under Trumpcare.. So ~10% of the population or so?

CBO report estimates 24 million Americans will lose health care in next 10 years under Congress' new bill

https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/115th-congress-2017-2018/costestimate/americanhealthcareact.pdf

how many will be hurt by terrorist attacks on american soil, though?

Depends, does the new bill count as a terrorist attack?

lol @ cross-post & cbo releasing the report at 4:20 :)

wow I did not think it was going to get savaged this hard

lol

any tax is a terrorist attack iirc

well, if we are all vaporized, insurance will be cheaper for survivors

GOP going all in on "murdering constituents to reduce the deficit" I see

this news won't make the slightest bit of difference.

...unless Dems make GOP legislators pay at townhalls

dunno why I put that in scare quotes

xp

...unless Dems make GOP legislators pay at townhalls

the whole reason Ryan wants this bill passed *before* the next recess is so this doesn't happen.

Holy shit...

leaving all the red states to be their own totally insane superpower

They wouldn't be a superpower, though; they'd be a corrupt, failed (and mostly landlocked) petro-state.

what's the word for someone who would rather cut taxes on rich people than provide health care to poor people?

Republican.

conservative

probably worth noting that all those abandoned red states are where a majority of black Americans live and an enormous percentage of other non-white demographics

the blue state white utopia is probably NAGL to be pushing

not really landlocked, given half the Atlantic coastline and the entirety of the the Gulf and the Mississippi feeding into it

xp yeah, crut made that point upthread but it bears repeating

we worship an awesome god in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states

always curious what happens to the nuclear arsenal in these "let's break up the u.s." scenarios.