US Politics, September 2018: having a nervous breakdown

actually rvw has just given an all-time amazingly understated description of POTUS

(a str8 white male who finds the situation worrisome, distressing, and more; causing some to suspect he has a codependent or otherwise dysfunctional relationship to "the news")

esp the str8 white male

idk was with em til this

I wouldn't compare any issues I have to people going through far more, but I find that when I'm down now it's a bit worse due to an ambient, chattering unease that's in the air in our u.s. of a.

New thred imo

so i do have to ask - what is the supposed benefit of this gaslightig?

or if you prefer, “nothing to fear but fear itself” hardmanni g

Lunch otm. You don't have to be directly affected to be distressed, if your politics is rooted in empathy for the downtrodden.

That can go too far of course - ask me some time about vicarious traumatization among animal rights activists, for example.

But you can be a straight white dude and find plenty to worry about w/r/t the current regime. Maybe it's not coming for you, but you know it's coming for people you care about. And that is not nothing.

hardmanni g

quality dn material

One time a particularly racist Trump fan neighbor I’ve never met chimed in on a NextDoor thread about Trump and—directly replying to a dude who was worried about things happening and talking around other non-white people and women—said “don’t worry — you’ll be fine.”

The atmosphere has made me feel ill at ease perpetually And what’s happening to some people around here is terrible. There was a fruit vendor who disappeared for a month via ICE and it took the entire community raising money and making noise to get him temporarily out of custody (and back to friends and family who had little notion of where he was.) I suspect he was a lucky one.

i live in a small town that was just raided by ice. i'm not facing lockdown and deportation because of my "citizenship" but it's not like the 9 people who disappeared haven't had a ripple effect in the community, affecting everyone negatively in some way. i get the impulse to call people out when it seems like they're overdoing it based on their social standing but that seems like crossing a boundary in a bad way or what tlg said is gaslighting. you never know how someone is really being affected by all of this. i'm a white gay cis-presenting man so my job or my ability to walk outside in the street isn't being overtly threatened but i'm two generations down from a horrible abuser who is in many ways like trump, so i've had to block out his words/appearances as much as i can because it can honestly be a little triggering psychologically and it will set my day on fire if i'm not careful.

Great post.

i really do have trouble understanding how the present circumstances are causing acute, direct psychological harm to ilx pundits, esp the str8 white male.

Up until February 2017 I used to work for a book publisher who specialized in ESL courses designed to help adult non-English speakers to learn English as their children learned English in grade school. Great folks to work for - I I had been with them full or part-time for almost eight years. One of the few times that a tech job didn't cause me to feel like I was part of the problem. Post-election, almost every school in the border states froze or eliminated the budgets for ESL programs because publicly-funded programs to help immigrants became radioactive.

Is it acute psychological harm? I dunno - I guess I was fucked up by getting laid off and back in the hellscape of being a developer in his 50s who's competing in the job space against 20 year old sociopaths. I feel worse for my friends with the publishing company - they had to put it in stasis.

An assertion Wednesday by a white Republican gubernatorial candidate that Florida voters can't afford to "monkey this up" and vote for his black Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum, was widely viewed as a "dog whistle" to rally racists.

If it was a dog-whistle — the GOP candidate denies any racial intent — a jungle music-scored robo-call that has circulated in Florida is more akin to a bullhorn.

If nothing else, the minute-long audio clip is a clear sign of how quickly racism — subtle in some cases, overt in others — has entered the contest to determine who will lead Florida.

"Well hello there,” the call begins as the sounds of drums and monkeys can be heard in the background, according to the New York Times. “I is Andrew Gillum."

"We Negroes . . . done made mud huts while white folk waste a bunch of time making their home out of wood an stone."

The speaker goes on to say he'll pass a law letting African Americans evade arrest “if the Negro know fo' sho he didn't do nothin'."

It is unclear how many people heard the call.

wtf

map <3

How hard is it to figure out the origin of a robo call? If this came from the de santis campaign that should be exposed.

Never mind

A disclaimer at the end of the robo-call says it was produced by the Road to Power, a white-supremacist and anti-Semitic group based in Idaho.

Really disturbing in any case

what about the democrats who made robocalls saying Desantis was an idiot? there are fine folk on both sides

It's not libel if it's true though is it?

It’s not racist to say deSantis is an idiot.

Really good summary of the feels happening over this Labor Day weekend, imo:

We’re living in a time that is lacking any sense of normalcy. I can’t speak for other people, but to me it feels like at any moment this could all fall apart, the country could fall apart, the world could go to war. I think about the fact that the president unapologetically praised Neo-nazis on television and I feel like running around outside screaming at the top of my lungs. I don’t understand how that–if nothing else–didn’t effectively mean the end of his presidency. A lot of this feels unreal to me. A lot of feels like a nightmare I can’t wake up from. And I’m someone who is largely spared the deliberate cruelty of this administration.

Our president is an illiterate reality TV star with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and can’t stand normally. I’m freaking. People are freaking. So perhaps that explains why some people thought “Hey, that guy gave Michelle some candy. That’s nice.” Trump would never give someone candy; it would never occur to him. Other people largely don’t exist to him except as bit players in his life. It was a profoundly normal moment in a moment of deep, deep, scary weirdness.

normals defending deep deep scary weirdness with no visible reservations (or professed support!) is def part of issue. Either there are many more deep deep scary weirds, or norms are far more defective than I can handle.

read you some hannah arendt

xp a little from column a, a little from column b

i'd say mostly column b.

U ain't never had a prez like me

Yup Arendt is great advice but I was hopin for more normal norms fewer empowered sociopaths as post ww2 period expired. Maybe i’ll Reread some...

that’s what they hoped for after wwi iirc

More Please: https://www.newsweek.com/david-hogg-ted-cruz-trump-billboard-beto-orourke-senate-texas-stadium-1101369?amp=1

This kid

fucking love that guy

Did this get posted here yet?

4chan nerds are photoshopping David Hogg to look female, calling him Daisy, and then having sexual fantasies about their Daisy Hogg memes. I feel like this is some... new, uncharted form of self-own pic.twitter.com/UkbYERuhan

— Michael Edison Hayden (@MichaelEHayden) August 28, 2018

Like, I enjoy many things about the internet but if you're asking if I would support its wholesale deletion I'd probably have to say yes.

long live the new lunch

like everything else to do with 4chan, that makes me want to kill myself

From the Alt-Right thread (Re: Daisy Hogg)

it's a shitty transphobic joke that doesn't need amplifying

― aloha darkness my old friend (katherine), Tuesday, August 28, 2018 1:19 PM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

missed opportunity for September thread title:

It’s always interesting to read the full transcripts of Trump interviews. For example, here he is seemingly referring to 9/11 as “a tiny period of time with a bullhorn.” https://t.co/fn1FbBm2uq pic.twitter.com/jDs7ueEDfP

— Gabe Fleisher (@WakeUp2Politics) September 2, 2018

I like this thread title because it always makes me think of Nervous Breakdown by Black Flag

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2018/09/01/mollie-tibbetts-father-common-decency-immigration-heartless-despicable-donald-trump-jr-column/1163131002/

Make no mistake, Mollie was my daughter and my best friend. At her eulogy, I said Mollie was nobody’s victim. Nor is she a pawn in others’ debate. She may not be able to speak for herself, but I can and will. Please leave us out of your debate. Allow us to grieve in privacy and with dignity. At long last, show some decency. On behalf of my family and Mollie’s memory, I’m imploring you to stop.

I’m sure tankie reprobates like Simon H. can figure out some years from now why that didn’t make them choice up.

*choke* and as someone who’s been to enough funerals it’s fucking boring to politically Weekend Bernie the dead.

Skip commenting on the ritual; do the good work and dredge up the policy/vote/quote reasons why you hate/love the dead

Let them live a little longer or don’t

I like this thread title because it always makes me think of Nervous Breakdown by Black Flag

Greg Ginn would be a worse president than Trump

Keith or Chuck would fuckin' rule tho

this is the first time I've been called a tankie, how exciting

tankie kindly

u must be hungary for more

Ginn probably voted for Hat Gary Johnson

add tankie to "neoliberal" and "cuck" to the list of words I never heard or saw for most of my life and then every day for the past couple years