The August 2019 US Politics Thread is dumb (stupid}

I went by a Popeye's twice tonight, an hour apart, and both times the drive-thru line was trailing out into the street and blocking traffic! Beat *those* numbers, Trump, you stupid asshole.

Let's be clear, having that ass would be the worst

Trump talking about his favorite Bible verse is absolutely the best comedy on the planet. You could spend your life trying to find a funnier bit and you’d die a failure. pic.twitter.com/C2XBltunkD

— Huccession: Season 2 (@TylerHuckabee) August 22, 2019

"Probably.... equal."

I love the long pause.

To be fair, the Bible is the favorite book of virtually everyone who has never actually read a book.

One of the things I find most appalling about his marks is that they got taken by a con man who puts zero effort into swindling people or pretending to give a shit. I'm surprised he's aware that the Bible is a book.

i'd love to ask him why is there even an old and new testament ?

'Well...the Old Testament was just too old, you know? So we needed a new one. So that's why we have a New Testament. Why we didn't get rid of the Old Testament when we made the new one, I don't know. But it's still a good testament. Both testaments, good testaments. Everybody always says I love a good testament and it's true, it's true.'

'My ESL teacher says I'm making great strides, that it almost seems as if I understand the native tongue I've been using for seventy years.'

i knew you'd come through

Is that the Wu Tang Clan logo on the table?

lol yeah that's a sticker on the guys tablet

I want to see him ponder all sorts of book questions he can't answer.

"So, what is your favorite part of Moby Dick?"

"Oh, I'd say ... I like it all equally."

"What are your thoughts on 'The Grand Inquisitor' in 'The Brothers Karamazov'?"

"That's very personal."

"Could you quote some Shakespeare?"

"Yes, but not right now."

"To be, or not to be--Sad!"

'Can you quote three consecutive words from the Bible?'
'No, no, they're all...they're all such great words, I don't want to single any out.'
'Or even just name one person featured in the Bible?'
'That's private, something very private and personal...I don't like to talk about it. And they're all fantastic characters, but naming them is, I feel, very disrespectful. And wrong.'
'Would you mind taking this book and just mime for us real quick what it looks like when a person reads? Like the process of a normal, literate human being scanning pages and progressing through a bound volume of printed matter.'
'No, I wouldn't be comfortable doing that, it wouldn't be fair to all of the other objects that I use in my everyday life as a functional person whose brain absolutely isn't a charred and belching ruin.'

https://i.imgur.com/ePH7WfR.jpg

Isn’t that clip from 2015?

I swear he struggled with almost the same question back then, on camera. Or did he (shocker, I know) learn absolutely nothing over the past 4 years

idk how chotiner keeps getting people to talk to him, but

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-penn-law-professor-wants-to-make-america-white-again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PX2SicPw1A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFruUe4CEQ0
"i have great relationship with god"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMr4hMoZX0w
all three of these are utterly indiscernible from parody

idk how chotiner keeps getting people to talk to him, but

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-penn-law-professor-wants-to-make-america-white-again

― mookieproof, Friday, August 23, 2019

After finishing it, I wanted to go to bed and forget it's a gorgeous Friday.

alfred, i dunno how you feel about frazier, but i thought this piece was helpful anodyne with its message of "thus have these assholes ever been"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/when-w-e-b-du-bois-made-a-laughingstock-of-a-white-supremacist

I know, I know, but this string is particularly tear-stained, foot-stompy and glorious...

Our Country has lost, stupidly, Trillions of Dollars with China over many years. They have stolen our Intellectual Property at a rate of Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year, & they want to continue. I won’t let that happen! We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019

....better off without them. The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP. Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019

....your companies HOME and making your products in the USA. I will be responding to China’s Tariffs this afternoon. This is a GREAT opportunity for the United States. Also, I am ordering all carriers, including Fed Ex, Amazon, UPS and the Post Office, to SEARCH FOR & REFUSE,....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019

....all deliveries of Fentanyl from China (or anywhere else!). Fentanyl kills 100,000 Americans a year. President Xi said this would stop - it didn’t. Our Economy, because of our gains in the last 2 1/2 years, is MUCH larger than that of China. We will keep it that way!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019

"i'm ordering these private companies to do what i say"

so many choice parts in that Chotiner piece, i particularly liked the ending:

This doorman in New York recognized me the other day, and he said, “How you doing?” And, “I hope you have a long life.” But he said to me, “I’m very disappointed about what happened to you, because I thought, when Trump was elected, we could say whatever we wanted.” And I said, “Well, obviously we can never say whatever we want. That’s called civilization.” But I was very interested in that. He said, “We are totally scripted for what we can say and what we can’t say, regardless of what reality presents to us.” This guy was a person of color. I don’t know where he was from.

He just recognized you because he knew about your academic work?

No, he knew about my whatever has been about me in the news, I guess. It’s amazing how often that happens.

I don’t doubt it.

And people say revealing things. I have people coming up to me and saying, “Why are academics trying to turn this country into the country we just tried to get away from?”

xxp i would temper any enthusiasm for the dubois debate piece with a codicil that frazer's "just walking around thinking about things and letting the friendly guy from Reunion know that _I_ want him to move here" framing device is a little cringey, but the meat of the article is worth invoking.

from mookie's link, I am seeing further proof that bigoted people no longer feel the need to pretend to speak eruditely when defending themselves and are perhaps quasiconsciously slipping into trumpspeak when farting out opinions:

One thing that’s quite striking is there is essentially no science being done in a place like Malaysia. No science, no technology coming out. I consider that very closely related to the lack of commitment to empiricism, the lack of a cultural practice of attention to evidence, rigor, analysis, facts. They all work together, so I think that when we say colonialism, do they mean that if it weren’t for colonialism, Malaysia would be Denmark? Does anybody really believe that, honestly and truly? I think it’s a nonstarter. There are countries with terrible geography that are at the top of the charts. Israel has terrible geography. They are a leader in science, in innovation, in technology, in drug development, in medicine. Geography, I think, is a nonstarter, and the people, I have heard through the grapevine, that the people who have pushed geography, they don’t really believe it either. O.K.? I won’t give you my sources. So what else is there?

bro you hired him

....My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019

This doesn't feel like a purely solo Trump tweet, but then who is telling him to order various companies to do his ridiculous bidding?

well the dow just dropped 400 points off this shit

What I find really interesting—and it’s incredibly under-studied, frankly, that’s one of my points, that people don’t seem very interested in this topic, and you would think it would be absolutely vital—is how do big Swiss people produce little Swiss people? How do little Swiss people become big Swiss people? Because we do associate a certain profile, a certain type, a certain set of priorities and orientations and behaviors and beliefs to Swiss people. Swiss people are radically different from, let’s say, Somali people or Indonesian people, on average. We’re not talking about individuals here. We’re talking about a distribution, right? So let’s get that straight. People have a lot of trouble thinking about distributions and generalizations.

I’m Jewish. Why are Jews so Jewy? How did that happen? Why do French women, at least until recently, look so French? I mean, what is going on?

Has Amy Wax ever heard of confirmation bias

Look at the big boy, issuing his very serious orders over Twitter! Such a big and important boy, yes he is! Who's a big boy? Who's a big boy?

The level of cognitive function on display in that Amy Wax piece left me asking the question, 'are you capable of assembling a sandwich without assistance?'

What's the point of being Chosen One if you can't order companies around on Twitter?

good morning!

I'm spitballing here but it's just possible that the cumulative frustration of reckoning with everyday tasks that so many of us take for granted (like, say, remembering how to open a door or how many arms should go through a shirt sleeve) contributes to making Trumpists such vicious little shits.

went for a walk yesterday and swear to god three different people (all three people of color mind you) came up to me and said “Why are academics trying to turn this country into the country we just tried to get away from?” i'm pretty sure it's part of the lyrics to Old Town Road but whatever, it's the hit jingle that's sweeping the nation!

And I guess, to be really crude about it, you would use Trump’s succinct phrase: Why are there so many shithole countries? Of course the moment you say that, people just get outraged: Oh, my God, you are a racist for saying that. And that, of course, lets them off the hook; they don’t have to answer the question, which is convenient.

People do get outraged about that. You are correct.

I have asked many sophisticated, knowledgeable people that question, and I have never gotten anything close to a plausible answer, because of course any answer has to be subject to the strictures of political correctness. I have had a couple of really smart people, people on the left, say, to me, Hey, you have a point: we don’t have an answer, and we are not allowed to think about it rigorously and realistically because there is a code of things you do say and things you don’t say.

What is your answer?

I don’t have one. I mean, my answer is this term “culture,” which consists of so many different things, from top to bottom, so many different aspects of the society. It is this very complex amalgam that holds people back on all sorts of levels. And I am not an anthropologist, I am not a political scientist. I just think that is where the answer lies.

trump's algorithm processing program has become so weirdly fast and immediate that it's now like some kind of uncanny valley violation. the robot is not sentient. the programming has gone from "the causation loop is clear to observers with 15 seconds worth of thought" to "even trump idiots cannot not see this immediately."

After reading that piece I believe we must all be professors.

We're all gonna feel awful once Amy Wax's neurologist finally detects that softball-sized tumor in her brain.

And now having read Chotiner's interview with Bill Owens I believe we must all be reverends.

have asked many sophisticated, knowledgeable people that question, and I have never gotten anything close to a plausible answer

even an uncouth dilettante like me knows about "Guns Germs & Steel"

left me asking the question, 'are you capable of assembling a sandwich without assistance?'

wow, leave the lex out of this

I have asked many sophisticated, knowledgeable people that question, and I have never gotten anything close to a plausible answer

This stupid asshole and his stupid friends and associates have never heard of colonialism? More likely they heard about it and immediately forgot about it.

she spends 75% of the time rolling her eyes at the choice of words, refusing to acknowledge that these words exist, and have viable definitions that apply to the real world and current events.

aimless, give the interview a read, but here's her answer for you:

I think colonialism as an explanation is just a nonstarter. Colonialism came very late on the scene. It took advantage of these discrepancies in sophistication and modernity, in advancement in technology, in science. One thing that’s quite striking is there is essentially no science being done in a place like Malaysia. No science, no technology coming out. I consider that very closely related to the lack of commitment to empiricism, the lack of a cultural practice of attention to evidence, rigor, analysis, facts. They all work together, so I think that when we say colonialism, do they mean that if it weren’t for colonialism, Malaysia would be Denmark? Does anybody really believe that, honestly and truly? I think it’s a nonstarter.

well i've read enough