(I may have misparsed your full position there a bit so, if that's the case, my apologies. I think you can figure out the sort of person I was replying to, and they are out in droves around here, caulking the seams of their echo chambers instead of thinking about the future and trying to build a better platform.)
Also... sort of... shame on that arrogant MINORITY who treat MAJORITY of the country as deplorables, sexists, misogynists, racists, xenophobes.
Look around. Deplorable is a judgement call, but the majority of people are sexist, misogynist, racist xenophobes. Nobody wants to believe that they could be any of those things, so they don't look inside and actually figure out which of those beliefs are based on some bullshit programming from early in their formative years. If you don't think you were programmed with any sexist, misogynist, or racist data when you were developing, you're not thinking. These ideas have been pervasive in our nation since before day one.
And you think articulating that so clearly doesn't make you a loudmouthed xenophobe? You're othering like a motherfucker, my friend. It's sorely tempting to pick at this scab a little, see if we can compare and contrast some of your feelings towards the conservatives in this country with the feelings a lot of us liberals (and conservatives) have towards the conservative versions of Islam and political Islamism, but right now I think we've more important fish to fry:
Unreasonable fascists/racists/whatever are going to do their thing. They weren't the kingmakers in this election any more than they were in 2012. I was astonished at the number of former Obama supporters I knew who voted Trump, and I'm in a major swing state.
I am a *huge* misanthrope, don't get me wrong, but there is a time and a place for misanthropy. In particular, it should never be used as an excuse to stop thinking, an excuse to throw up your hands and say "well, I guess the problem is just that there are too many goddamn racists in this country!" (This coming after EIGHT YEARS of Obama, Jesus Christ, do you even listen to yourself?)
The Democrats were handed this election on a silver platter. They chose to be smug, condescending assholes about it and so this is their reward. I feel some grim satisfaction here, with some pinpricks of hope that things on either side of the aisle may indeed radically change (perhaps for the better) in the coming years... but it's mostly outweighed by dread. I am annoyed. If you want a specific annoyance, I'm pretty annoyed at the prospect of losing my shitty (but still much better than nothing) Obamacare insurance. And I really do direct most of my ire at people like you, and at the Democrat party establishment.
It's not that you're worse than the GOP, but that I expected more from you. The racists were going to do their thing and the dumbasses were going to do their thing. Everyone knew that. This was the easiest election in the world to win, and we told you over and over and over exactly how it needed to be handled, which was basically "See Brexit? See that condescending, fear-mongering pro-status quo bullshit they tried to do there? DON'T DO THAT." And we were ignored.
But no, just keep the badmouthing right on up, keep the echo chamber sealed. God forbid we start planning to try to turn this thing around in 2020.
That's something I tentatively acknowledged elsewhere... you don't automatically win that point but yes, it may a bit more complicated than I at first implied.
*That said*, if we wanted to continue down this rabbit hole I'm reasonably confident we will find plenty of horrifying things confirming my general thesis. What of the tendency all across Europe, Sweden included, for the police to try to keep secret the ethnicity of a murderer or rapist? Do you think that might also skew our view of reality just a bit? Someone in Sweden beheaded a mother and son in the middle of IKEA not too long ago, and the police tried to actively hide the fact that that person was in fact a recent "refugee".
I've never once in my life listened to the gibberish coming from the NRA. However, I *have* attempted to purchase a stock-configured Saiga-12
Yes, yes - you "win" thanks to a goalpost shift. Once you've finished wandering off into that topic of whatever regulations your state or county has how about we get back onto those American made and paid for guns that are shooting at people we are allied with.
If you'll care to check, the original goalpost was American made *and in American hands*, so I'm pretty sure you're the one moving the goalpost there.
I've already criticized Iraq and, in past threads, expressed strong reservations about giving guns to any group in that area other than perhaps the Kurds, so in some sense we may be in furious agreement there... but that doesn't excuse the sloppy anti-Western hand waving, the speech that the right and now the alt-right use to motivate and energize their base. Trump himself managed to criticize Iraq (in his incoherent fashion) repeatedly, but leftists always seem compelled to mix this criticism with a strong dose of anti-Western self-flagellation and exaggeration. That was my broader point there. No goal post move was involved at all; I just wanted to illustrate how and why this shit goes to hell in a handbasket so that maybe in four years it won't happen again.
Is it not quite clear how that all ties into the gun thing? Fine: gun nuts at least have a consistent position that isn't based on hysterical misunderstandings of the issues involved (it tends to be based on plenty of *pedestrian* misunderstandings, don't get me wrong.) The topic of gun control reform, which I am strongly in favor of, is on the left completely dominated by the clueless. Like you, it seems.
whatever regulations your state or county has
Did you notice I referenced "ATF" and "import" there? These are all federal issues, not local. A few years back (and probably today; I'm not sure), you could not buy/import a factory-condition Saiga-12 without paying someone living stateside to re-mod it back to stock condition AFTER the import. So before the shotgun can be imported, they had/have to remove the pistol grip (decreasing controllability of the weapon, particularly if you're momentarily carrying it one-handed) and turn the nice responsive trigger into a shitty long-pull one, meaning that any quick or panicked shots are much more likely to miss. Missing one's target is, in my opinion, also a safety issue at core. Also, all of this modding and re-modding more than doubled the price tag of the gun. (Incidentally, yes domestic semi-auto shotguns are easy to find, but I strongly favor the Saiga's removable mags for safety reasons, if nothing else.)
This is far from unusual. The ATF is routinely involved in this sort of harebrained hair-splitting. For example, you can't put a pistol grip (second handle) on a gun under a certain size without paying a $500 ATF tax and having it reclassified as an AOW. And the Clinton-era "assault weapon" ban was a pile of cringingly stupid nonsense (mostly banning other safety features. Or do you believe that being burned by your gun barrel, or blinded by muzzle flash at night, are good things?) that most gun control activists of today still cling to and refuse to recognize as nonsense for no reason except that they think they can make the right look bad for having refused to re-introduce it after it expired.
Ok, well, then I only differ with you on the intellectual part. It's the wrong concept to go with. They needed more intellectualism. They couldn't morally go the route of the emotional.
No no, that too is almost exactly what I've been saying. The right is much, much better at irrational and semi-rational emotional carpet bombing than the left. I don't say that the left should pull punches or play nice, not at all, but they can't afford to be sloppy about it the way the right is sloppy. They punched the man on his strong points. Repeatedly. Calling someone a bully (or Hitler, for that matter) at the very least carries some implication of efficacy, of getting things done, when in reality it he was just blathering.
You get a certain number of horrified people extra-motivated to visit the polls to cast their vote against him, sure. But at the same time, you make many intellectuals a lot more tepid. These people may not be incredibly numerous but they are or were the mavens and bulwarks of the left... so, this approach alienates them a little bit, reduces their energy level and makes them a bit more prone to head-shaking (but it doesn't drive them to support Trump, by and large.)... you're doing that, AND you're making the Trump lovers love him even more, and the fence-sitters think "well, at least he's going to get things done!" when really that is far from certain.
I'm afraid I can't take you at your word. Do it now. Take the chance.
Sorry, but you sound way too much like another AC who was pestering me a few weeks back. I no longer waste my time on lengthy replies to ACs, or taking requests (like a musician) from them like that. Part of the intellectualism of the left you claim to favor should be a willingness to look past this sordid tendency towards identity politics. It shouldn't matter to you whether or not I'm one of you. If it does matter, if you're going to insist on making this all super-tribal with no room for nuance... well, good luck trying to convince anyone in 2020.
Also, at least when it comes to these specific candidates I think already did so repeatedly in this thread. I'm not going to be exhaustive about it, but you'll notice for every criticism of Hillary I've generally given at least five of Trump.
Really, you shouldn't make up statistics. But all of that was shown in the ads I did see.
Good for you. I've been mostly living in a swing state and the overwhelming majority of ads I've seen either involved obvious character assassination approaches (the man says thoughtless and odious shit--yes! Everyone knew that already!) or criticizing the stuff that he had already walked back, stuff the GOP was condemning, stuff even the conservative members of the supreme court would vote against.
Average people aren't geniuses, but they are pretty good at those "best of a bad situation" things and a very common heuristic, one that the Democrats utterly failed to understand, is to quickly eliminate the issues that aren't likely to matter, even if it they did make Trump look pretty shitty. Like I said elsewhere, I knew multiple women who voted for him (Women who had previously voted for Obama.) None of them cared in the slightest that the man once called Rosie O'Donnell a fat pig, and on this specific point they were entirely correct. It doesn't matter!
As for the Left, nope, they needed to be less moderate, and more intellectual.
That's actually exactly pretty much what I was getting at. Sorry for any confusion. I've not been remotely sober since roughly 2 am. Not every "extreme" left cause is a good one, obviously, but I'm certainly no fan of the Clintonian or Blue Dog approach, if that's what you're getting at.
Yeah, about that, let me know when you're going to stand up to the rightwingers needing to figure some things out. They've called Obama a dictator, like Hitler, and Stalin, and you've never even twinged about it.
Oh, I did. I may not have bitched for quite as long about it, mostly because it seemed like a lost cause. I expect better from leftists. Always have; always will. (Probably.)
For one thing he promised people a physical wall, many of the idiots who voted for him expect just that, a concrete wall and if you think the coyotes will ever give up you are dumber than a bucket of bricks if that is even possible.
I repeatedly, *repeatedly*, before and after the election said that a physical wall was fucking stupid and also that I did not and do not support Trump. The stubborn polarized thinking here is really staggering. Have you been acting like this for an entire year? No wonder Hillary lost, if it was mainly people like you fighting for her.
The coyotes will absolutely give it up if they don't have a single successful run for, I don't know, 5 years. Particularly if America or Mexico can imprison them after they've been caught (not the ordinary people they're carrying, obviously.) I don't really have the words at the moment to describe how dumb you must be to assume a group of people would keep trying something if there was a zero chance of success. You think they could possibly escape a fleet of camera drones (toss in a few satellites as well) combined with competent and reasonably large rapid response teams?
There is still the issue of smuggling through existing road checkpoints, true, but this generally falls outside of the "wall" approach (be it literal or an intelligent surveillance-heavy pseudo-wall), and there are some other measures that can be taken there.
Even if Bill Clinton stands accused of raping somebody how does his transgression rub off on his wife and make her an unfit presidential candidate?
Because, for the last time, she very strongly hinted that he was going to play an active an important part in her administration. She said something to the effect of she was going to have him fix our economy! What the hell do you think that implies: That he'd be dressing up as a Salvation Army Santa? Or that he'd likely be in her cabinet?
The vileness of Pence rubs off on Trump; thus, the vileness of Bill (however intense that might be) rubs off on Hillary unless she chose to close that avenue that she herself brought up... which she didn't.
You stand here willing to overlook the fact that Donald Trump is a misogynistic ass hole
I don't "overlook" it. I didn't vote for Trump. I've been outspoken against him for some time. But I've made it a point to try to argue with leftists that their tactics here have been ALL WRONG. You've been making the man look way too competent, way too powerful, when you should have been hammering home how spineless he was.
If anybody is a 'naive simpleton' here it's the one who thinks victims of sexual assault should 'get over it'.
Dunno who you're talking about, but that's obviously not me. I explicitly said that criminal justice should be orthogonal to politics. That certainly means that no one should give a rape victim any shit just because someone is rich or powerful... but it also means that, if there's no likely conviction or compelling situation that *just happened*, hyperbolic innuendo and accusations should not derail politics (and indeed, they don't any more! I'm not even arguing the normative on this point; I'm just telling you like it is... and yet you somehow want to drag us back to the 90s, back to a point where the entire world is supposed to come to a screeching halt because Juanita Broderick said Bill Clinton raped her years and years and years before.)
Yes, probably the worst case scenario is Trump turning out to be a spineless puppet for Republicans... like some secret love child of George W. Bush and Howard Stern. I myself voiced this fear repeatedly around here over the past few weeks.
Now, if you assholes had actually made his weakness, his idiocy and his spinelessness central issues in your campaign against him, instead of centering 95% of your criticism on hyperbolic and sometimes irrational examinations of his other character flaws and the supposedly dangerous ideas that Trump himself (and also no one in the GOP establishment) never took seriously...
My mother voted Trump, my own mother for fuck's sake. When asked for a justification, one gets a long stream of "yes it's true that X, but...."s. Overall, she was naive and deluded in her decision making process, and like most people she overlooked the very dire possibility that Pence or other bits of the GOP establishment might end up running everything, but here's the one point she didn't miss: Trump isn't a super serious person, and his words were never meant to be dissected. I saw flyers in the mail bemoaning the fact that he once said Rosie O'Donnell is a pig. But guess what? Turns out that my mother, a person who voted for Obama twice, doesn't really give a shit about what he called Rosie O'Donnell. And why the hell should she?
There's a laundry list of valid reasons to fear a Trump presidency, but absolutely none of them involve comparing him to Hitler. (Trump is a clown; Hitler was serious long before people paid him much attention.) And I really hope that mainstream leftists in this country can figure this out before 2020 rolls around.
I'm listening to you grossly misunderstand the situation
I.e. you refuse to read my past 2-3 posts, or even skim them intelligently. You're talking utter nonsense even if we utterly ignore the minimum wage debate.
(The alternative to minimum wage that I favor, and the alternative that anyone even remotely intelligent should favor, is some sort of percentage, graduated wage subsidy / reverse income tax of some sort. That accomplishes the same positive effects of a minimum wage--peoples' effective wages are a lot higher--but without encouraging employers to do all kinds of horrible things, not the least of which is mistreat their undocumented Latino employees. Is it still too unclear for you? Consider this as a very rough proof-of-concept: no minimum wage, but the government matches, at a 200% level, the first $5 or so that you earn. So your employer pays you $2; you get $6. Your employer pays you $5; you get $15. Something along those lines, though there are plenty of niggling details to consider here.)
Some of this should've been past tense, btw. I haven't stayed abreast of these things but I don't recall Obama renewing the Clinton-era "assault weapons" bans.
I've never once in my life listened to the gibberish coming from the NRA. However, I *have* attempted to purchase a stock-configured Saiga-12, and that was a good education of the absurdity of the current anti-gun legislation and movement.
Otherwise? You just see random people railing about how it is what the liberal fools want.
Um, go read the legal definition of "semi-automatic assault rifle", a fantasy term dreamed up by anti-gun nuts that no military in the world uses, because an assault rifle is by definition automatic (or at least select-fire.) Why are barrel shrouds banned? Why are pistol grips banned, taxed, or (in the case of important weapons like the Saiga) weirdly discriminated against by the ATF? It is very, very, very obvious to anyone who has studied this issue at any length that this is a simple and sad psychological fearmongering game wherein people try to ban scary looking "militarized" black guns, while grudgingly sparing wooden Elmer Fudd type guns.
-3 Overrated so far, yay. Keep modding me down, assholes. It's definitely much more pleasant to lazily working on keeping your echo chamber intact, as the alt-right grows stronger and stronger, instead of listening to or engaging with someone like me who is a leftist and does desperately want to save this country.
And the American taxpayer gets to pay for a wall that the US border guard has explicitly stated would be utterly, utterly useless.. happy, happy, joy, joy.
I thought I made this clear but I guess I need to reiterate: not a physical wall. Cameras and a rapid response team will do just fine. It will be semi-expensive, but this only needs to be funded heavily for a few years until the coyotes give up and people stop trying to come over by the millions (because they know they're going to be stopped.)
A happy side effect is it might also further reduce the influence of the already-diminishing DEA, once the SE drug runners suddenly find their trade nigh-impossible. (I'm against the war on drugs, by the way, but I'm not so stupid as to oppose literally everything that might be done to fight that war. Diminish some of the gangs, take the violent element out and the pro-legalization movements will only continue to grow.)
I find it interesting that the only way you can find to justify Trumps misogyny is to attack Hillary Clinton's husband.
I find it interesting that you can't get over the fact that Bill Clinton, an accused rapist, was Hillary's husband. I find it interesting paid attention to the fact that you completely gloss over her statements that were very strongly hinting that he was going to be put in a place of significant power in her administration. You appear to think that because she chose to marry (and not divorce) this man, she should be completely exempt when she implies she'll be giving him enormous power in this country. By contract, as an egalitarian feminist, I believe that all women should face the consequences for their decisions, without any undue shame or coddling. If her campaign wanted to play the misogyny card against Trump and have it stick, she probably should have divorced Bill, or at least made it clear that he wasn't going to be involved in her administration in any way.
I don' really care what Bill Clinton has done, none of that excuses Trumps misogyny.
I don't excuse any actual misogyny that Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Jullian Assange, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or Anthony Weiner may have been engaged in. My view is simple: if they are guilty, lock them up. If witnesses are truthful but recalcitrant, let's try to push back on this bullshit mixture of slut-shaming and discouraging women from defending themselves, and maybe make it a bit easier to report a sexual assault while we're at it.
Failing that--if they're not in prison--they're politicians. Politics can and should run orthogonal to criminal justice (except to the extent that we probably should not elect people are have been, or probably will be, convicted.) This sexual scandal shit ran its course a long time ago. I'm over it. I'm over it when it's used against either leftists and rightists. And I'm over it when it's cynically used against women, like Lena Dunham. It should be clear by now that most of the country is over it. We were over it before Bill even left office.
Move on. Stop trying to hijack the conversation. It makes you look weak, really weak; it makes it look like (to a naive simpleton) maybe Donald Trump has some good points after all, because all his opponents have are some conveniently resurfaced sexual assault allegations and some jokes about his hair/penis/skin/hands/name.
It's a continuing starter until the minimum wage is raised.
Are you even listening to yourself talk? You just strongly implied that we need illegal immigration because (implicitly) that's the only way to get cheap enough labor, and now you've said that you want to jack up the minimum wage an even stronger incentive to cheat on the minimum wage and *fuck over* all of those Latinos struggling to earn a living here. (I should re-emphasize, at this point, that I am broadly I'm broadly pro-amnesty, which means giving Latinos minimum wage and social services protections.) This is catastrophic coherence failure on your part. Would you care to try again? What do you favor and why?
Another discussion entirely, but a point I can't resist commenting on: No, minimum wage must not be raised. It should be very slowly phased out in favor of direct assistance programs, including but not limited to a "reverse income tax" or similar form of wage-subsidy. The minimum wage is why it's so hard to get/keep a low-end job in this country. I'm suspicious of a lot of shit economists say, but this is literally Economics 101 here. Price floors fuck everything up. If poor people don't have enough money then give them more money. Directly. None of this market manipulation bullshit that gives employers all kinds of perverse incentives to hire illegal labor and/or treat their legal minimum-wage employees like shit.
The demand for guns will be met with or without American interventionism; that was my main point there.
Criticism of our foreign policy decisions, especially the Iraq War, are a different matter entirely
expensive high quality US guns
Which is a net plus for world security, if true. If we're talking strictly about small arms here: The more money wasted on "high quality" guns, the less money that can be spent on perfectly serviceable AK / AR clones and 9mm weapons, not to mention the less money that can be spent on ammunition. Fourth generation warfare doesn't really need fancy weapons; just a lot of them, and a lot of bullets to go in them.
One of the most laughable parts about mainstream leftist anti-gun rhetoric is the insistence on gun prioritization. Guess what, assault rifles were effectively banned in the 1980s! Everything since then has been ignorant, cringe-inducing nonsense about black guns looking scarier than wooden guns, or safety / controllability features (flash suppressors, barrel shrouds, pistol grips) being demonized as "militarized." There are several compelling cases the left could make regarding gun reform, but instead they usually choose to exhibit an arrogant ignorance that almost puts the right to shame. Almost.
You're still supporting a wall? It's a shit idea which won't work. Even if you think it's desirable to stop people crossing the border illegally because you don't think farms should have enough labor to avoid having their produce rot, you should still be against a wall on the basis that it's not going to stop people. They will go under it. They will go over it. They will take it apart and build homes out of it and other people will go through the holes.
I put "wall" in quotes for a reason. Not a literal wall. The sane version would obviously be surveillance with sufficient rapid response personnel. It's fairly arid down there; I tend to suspect a camera of sufficient height would be able to spot people from a hundred miles away. It's even easier at night, when the landscape grows cool and cars and bodies stick out on IR like sore thumbs.
Expensive to deploy at first, but then after a few years they start to realize that almost no one is getting through, the revenue streams for the coyotes dry up, the social patterns in Northen Mexico begin to shift (including, hopefully, a significant diminished in drug-funded organized crime, although the vast amount of tourism from America makes this questionable) and we can slowly scale back the surveillance and rapid response forces to something cheaper.
because you don't think farms should have enough labor to avoid having their produce rot,
There are fifty different replies to this, but basically arguing that our economy *requires* cheating on minimum wage is a non-starter. The question of how many legal immigrants to allow is a separate one. Yes yes, if you're in favor of continued massive immigration it's politically easiest to just try to keep it easy to illegally slip over the border, but this is a not a good long term strategy. It really, really isn't.
Like I've said elsewhere, the framework for a compromise is obvious: good border security (entirely reasonable and healthy) in exchange for "path to citizenship" amnesty (entirely reasonable, healthy and humane.) For the sake of keeping this issue at least semi-managable, the question of how much legal immigration we should take needs to be decoupled from the equation. Short answer is no, our agricultural system will not collapse overnight if this happens even in a worst case scenario... though they may well have to start planting different crops. And good on them if they do! As a broad principle, I'm all for cheaper, more easily farmed food that has a lower carbon footprint (requiring lots of manual human effort invariably involves a significant carbon footprint.)
That might be a valid point, given some of the grumblings I heard around the Assange thing. Never had time to look into it, though.
Still--as I hope you'll forgive me a tiny bit of bigotry (not racism, bigotry. It's ok to be bigoted, to some extent, against *conservative* Muslims. That's quite different from being bigoted against Arabs or South Asians) if I postulate that this still isn't going to look pretty if/when the stats are re-parsed. After all, it wasn't that long ago that it was revealed Swedish police were covering up the fact that the man who beheaded a mother and son in Ikea was a recent Muslim immigrant. And if we move outside of Sweden for a moment, there's also that whole Rotherham... thing, which seems to have been the result of self-flagellating versions of leftism mixing with a particularly depraved and weakly variety of policing by consent.
I don't disagree that the Democrats aren't really leftists, especially not with an eye for the global view, but:
The Green party is our only real left-wing party,
The Greens are nutters, though. I tentatively support them to the extent that I support any third party, in the hopes that it will eventually bring about electoral reform... but I don't particularly want to see us elect a president who argues that wifi should be restricted or banned because it hurts our brains.
Except a gaff is not a policy position. His "racism" boils down to anti-immigration from Mexico and anti-immigration from Muslim Nations.
Now, we can't have a religious test for entry (obviously) but it is horrible, horrible leftist masochism to continue to imply that the floodgates should be opened for all countries equally. Stockholm had become the rape capital of Europe even before the Syrian refugee crisis ballooned, largely on the backs of the massive numbers of third world and largely Muslim (and yes that does matter, because Islam correlates to misogyny even more than Christianity does) people they had invited in. Trump is a either a psychopath or a moron (I tend to think the latter) about this, but the left didn't give us a good, strong, loud alternative.
His other anti-racism thing is strongly "supporting" the police. A pretty obnoxious thing to do, given the need for reform in this country. But still... not really the same as proposing racist legislation. Not really the same, when you think about it. If you're honest with yourself.
Keep the caricatures in check. Keep it positive. Reform the left. Help forge an alt-left. Stop pretending the main problem stems from gaffes. Stop pretending the main problem is that women from decades ago are suddenly making accusations (didn't everyone get sick of this like, 15-20 years ago? On the left in particular??)
And stop pretending that the biggest issue right now is that the fascists are taking over. The large majority of my extended family voted Trump, even though most of them voted Obama not once, but twice. And most of them live in a swing state.
To the extent that they proposed solutions, Bernie's were worse.
Only a relatively small number of issues. If you could have disabused him of a couple bad economic ideas, and convinced him to compromise his leftist tendencies a little by allowing America to become a tad more isolationist (instead of the mainstream self-flagellating left's opinion that we should only be isolationists in the context of never fighting anyone ever), he could have been one of the greatest presidents we ever had. A big "if", perhaps, but not nearly as big as the "if"s surrounding Trump.
Bernie's hideous NYC accent sounds snobbish repels most of the rest of the country.
What the fuck? Trump has a hideously cliched NYC accent. Bernie has perfectly normal and kinda charming Jewish-American accent.
I really don't like it when people casually throw around racism or antisemitism charges but thats... I don't know, that does honestly worry me a tad if you think Bernie's accent sounded hideous and snobbish.
The DNC's failure started long before that, they should not have attempted a coronation.
Can we get some kind of crowdfunding campaign for this? Every Democrat who would be willing to tattoo "We should not have attempted a coronation" on their foreheads should instantly receive $100,000 for their campaign funds.
The promise of not doing that (even if it was a baldfaced lie flying from the mouth of a man who can rarely be bothered to even listen to himself speak) is largely what won him the election. The big questions now are how will the disenchantment over the next four years unfold, and who the hell are they going to run against him in 2020?
Slashdot Mirror
(I may have misparsed your full position there a bit so, if that's the case, my apologies. I think you can figure out the sort of person I was replying to, and they are out in droves around here, caulking the seams of their echo chambers instead of thinking about the future and trying to build a better platform.)
Also... sort of... shame on that arrogant MINORITY who treat MAJORITY of the country as deplorables, sexists, misogynists, racists, xenophobes.
Look around. Deplorable is a judgement call, but the majority of people are sexist, misogynist, racist xenophobes. Nobody wants to believe that they could be any of those things, so they don't look inside and actually figure out which of those beliefs are based on some bullshit programming from early in their formative years. If you don't think you were programmed with any sexist, misogynist, or racist data when you were developing, you're not thinking. These ideas have been pervasive in our nation since before day one.
And you think articulating that so clearly doesn't make you a loudmouthed xenophobe? You're othering like a motherfucker, my friend. It's sorely tempting to pick at this scab a little, see if we can compare and contrast some of your feelings towards the conservatives in this country with the feelings a lot of us liberals (and conservatives) have towards the conservative versions of Islam and political Islamism, but right now I think we've more important fish to fry:
Unreasonable fascists/racists/whatever are going to do their thing. They weren't the kingmakers in this election any more than they were in 2012. I was astonished at the number of former Obama supporters I knew who voted Trump, and I'm in a major swing state.
I am a *huge* misanthrope, don't get me wrong, but there is a time and a place for misanthropy. In particular, it should never be used as an excuse to stop thinking, an excuse to throw up your hands and say "well, I guess the problem is just that there are too many goddamn racists in this country!" (This coming after EIGHT YEARS of Obama, Jesus Christ, do you even listen to yourself?)
The Democrats were handed this election on a silver platter. They chose to be smug, condescending assholes about it and so this is their reward. I feel some grim satisfaction here, with some pinpricks of hope that things on either side of the aisle may indeed radically change (perhaps for the better) in the coming years... but it's mostly outweighed by dread. I am annoyed. If you want a specific annoyance, I'm pretty annoyed at the prospect of losing my shitty (but still much better than nothing) Obamacare insurance. And I really do direct most of my ire at people like you, and at the Democrat party establishment.
It's not that you're worse than the GOP, but that I expected more from you. The racists were going to do their thing and the dumbasses were going to do their thing. Everyone knew that. This was the easiest election in the world to win, and we told you over and over and over exactly how it needed to be handled, which was basically "See Brexit? See that condescending, fear-mongering pro-status quo bullshit they tried to do there? DON'T DO THAT." And we were ignored.
But no, just keep the badmouthing right on up, keep the echo chamber sealed. God forbid we start planning to try to turn this thing around in 2020.
That's something I tentatively acknowledged elsewhere... you don't automatically win that point but yes, it may a bit more complicated than I at first implied.
*That said*, if we wanted to continue down this rabbit hole I'm reasonably confident we will find plenty of horrifying things confirming my general thesis. What of the tendency all across Europe, Sweden included, for the police to try to keep secret the ethnicity of a murderer or rapist? Do you think that might also skew our view of reality just a bit? Someone in Sweden beheaded a mother and son in the middle of IKEA not too long ago, and the police tried to actively hide the fact that that person was in fact a recent "refugee".
And in the UK, of course, we had that Rotherham business...
Yes, yes - you "win" thanks to a goalpost shift. Once you've finished wandering off into that topic of whatever regulations your state or county has how about we get back onto those American made and paid for guns that are shooting at people we are allied with.
If you'll care to check, the original goalpost was American made *and in American hands*, so I'm pretty sure you're the one moving the goalpost there.
I've already criticized Iraq and, in past threads, expressed strong reservations about giving guns to any group in that area other than perhaps the Kurds, so in some sense we may be in furious agreement there... but that doesn't excuse the sloppy anti-Western hand waving, the speech that the right and now the alt-right use to motivate and energize their base. Trump himself managed to criticize Iraq (in his incoherent fashion) repeatedly, but leftists always seem compelled to mix this criticism with a strong dose of anti-Western self-flagellation and exaggeration. That was my broader point there. No goal post move was involved at all; I just wanted to illustrate how and why this shit goes to hell in a handbasket so that maybe in four years it won't happen again.
Is it not quite clear how that all ties into the gun thing? Fine: gun nuts at least have a consistent position that isn't based on hysterical misunderstandings of the issues involved (it tends to be based on plenty of *pedestrian* misunderstandings, don't get me wrong.) The topic of gun control reform, which I am strongly in favor of, is on the left completely dominated by the clueless. Like you, it seems.
whatever regulations your state or county has
Did you notice I referenced "ATF" and "import" there? These are all federal issues, not local. A few years back (and probably today; I'm not sure), you could not buy/import a factory-condition Saiga-12 without paying someone living stateside to re-mod it back to stock condition AFTER the import. So before the shotgun can be imported, they had/have to remove the pistol grip (decreasing controllability of the weapon, particularly if you're momentarily carrying it one-handed) and turn the nice responsive trigger into a shitty long-pull one, meaning that any quick or panicked shots are much more likely to miss. Missing one's target is, in my opinion, also a safety issue at core. Also, all of this modding and re-modding more than doubled the price tag of the gun. (Incidentally, yes domestic semi-auto shotguns are easy to find, but I strongly favor the Saiga's removable mags for safety reasons, if nothing else.)
This is far from unusual. The ATF is routinely involved in this sort of harebrained hair-splitting. For example, you can't put a pistol grip (second handle) on a gun under a certain size without paying a $500 ATF tax and having it reclassified as an AOW. And the Clinton-era "assault weapon" ban was a pile of cringingly stupid nonsense (mostly banning other safety features. Or do you believe that being burned by your gun barrel, or blinded by muzzle flash at night, are good things?) that most gun control activists of today still cling to and refuse to recognize as nonsense for no reason except that they think they can make the right look bad for having refused to re-introduce it after it expired.
Ok, well, then I only differ with you on the intellectual part. It's the wrong concept to go with. They needed more intellectualism. They couldn't morally go the route of the emotional.
No no, that too is almost exactly what I've been saying. The right is much, much better at irrational and semi-rational emotional carpet bombing than the left. I don't say that the left should pull punches or play nice, not at all, but they can't afford to be sloppy about it the way the right is sloppy. They punched the man on his strong points. Repeatedly. Calling someone a bully (or Hitler, for that matter) at the very least carries some implication of efficacy, of getting things done, when in reality it he was just blathering.
You get a certain number of horrified people extra-motivated to visit the polls to cast their vote against him, sure. But at the same time, you make many intellectuals a lot more tepid. These people may not be incredibly numerous but they are or were the mavens and bulwarks of the left... so, this approach alienates them a little bit, reduces their energy level and makes them a bit more prone to head-shaking (but it doesn't drive them to support Trump, by and large.)... you're doing that, AND you're making the Trump lovers love him even more, and the fence-sitters think "well, at least he's going to get things done!" when really that is far from certain.
I'm afraid I can't take you at your word. Do it now. Take the chance.
Sorry, but you sound way too much like another AC who was pestering me a few weeks back. I no longer waste my time on lengthy replies to ACs, or taking requests (like a musician) from them like that. Part of the intellectualism of the left you claim to favor should be a willingness to look past this sordid tendency towards identity politics. It shouldn't matter to you whether or not I'm one of you. If it does matter, if you're going to insist on making this all super-tribal with no room for nuance... well, good luck trying to convince anyone in 2020.
Also, at least when it comes to these specific candidates I think already did so repeatedly in this thread. I'm not going to be exhaustive about it, but you'll notice for every criticism of Hillary I've generally given at least five of Trump.
If that's really your position, then you're a goddamn Nazi-lover.
Really, you shouldn't make up statistics. But all of that was shown in the ads I did see.
Good for you. I've been mostly living in a swing state and the overwhelming majority of ads I've seen either involved obvious character assassination approaches (the man says thoughtless and odious shit--yes! Everyone knew that already!) or criticizing the stuff that he had already walked back, stuff the GOP was condemning, stuff even the conservative members of the supreme court would vote against.
Average people aren't geniuses, but they are pretty good at those "best of a bad situation" things and a very common heuristic, one that the Democrats utterly failed to understand, is to quickly eliminate the issues that aren't likely to matter, even if it they did make Trump look pretty shitty. Like I said elsewhere, I knew multiple women who voted for him (Women who had previously voted for Obama.) None of them cared in the slightest that the man once called Rosie O'Donnell a fat pig, and on this specific point they were entirely correct. It doesn't matter!
As for the Left, nope, they needed to be less moderate, and more intellectual.
That's actually exactly pretty much what I was getting at. Sorry for any confusion. I've not been remotely sober since roughly 2 am. Not every "extreme" left cause is a good one, obviously, but I'm certainly no fan of the Clintonian or Blue Dog approach, if that's what you're getting at.
Yeah, about that, let me know when you're going to stand up to the rightwingers needing to figure some things out. They've called Obama a dictator, like Hitler, and Stalin, and you've never even twinged about it.
Oh, I did. I may not have bitched for quite as long about it, mostly because it seemed like a lost cause. I expect better from leftists. Always have; always will. (Probably.)
For one thing he promised people a physical wall, many of the idiots who voted for him expect just that, a concrete wall and if you think the coyotes will ever give up you are dumber than a bucket of bricks if that is even possible.
I repeatedly, *repeatedly*, before and after the election said that a physical wall was fucking stupid and also that I did not and do not support Trump. The stubborn polarized thinking here is really staggering. Have you been acting like this for an entire year? No wonder Hillary lost, if it was mainly people like you fighting for her.
The coyotes will absolutely give it up if they don't have a single successful run for, I don't know, 5 years. Particularly if America or Mexico can imprison them after they've been caught (not the ordinary people they're carrying, obviously.) I don't really have the words at the moment to describe how dumb you must be to assume a group of people would keep trying something if there was a zero chance of success. You think they could possibly escape a fleet of camera drones (toss in a few satellites as well) combined with competent and reasonably large rapid response teams?
There is still the issue of smuggling through existing road checkpoints, true, but this generally falls outside of the "wall" approach (be it literal or an intelligent surveillance-heavy pseudo-wall), and there are some other measures that can be taken there.
Even if Bill Clinton stands accused of raping somebody how does his transgression rub off on his wife and make her an unfit presidential candidate?
Because, for the last time, she very strongly hinted that he was going to play an active an important part in her administration. She said something to the effect of she was going to have him fix our economy! What the hell do you think that implies: That he'd be dressing up as a Salvation Army Santa? Or that he'd likely be in her cabinet?
The vileness of Pence rubs off on Trump; thus, the vileness of Bill (however intense that might be) rubs off on Hillary unless she chose to close that avenue that she herself brought up... which she didn't.
You stand here willing to overlook the fact that Donald Trump is a misogynistic ass hole
I don't "overlook" it. I didn't vote for Trump. I've been outspoken against him for some time. But I've made it a point to try to argue with leftists that their tactics here have been ALL WRONG. You've been making the man look way too competent, way too powerful, when you should have been hammering home how spineless he was.
If anybody is a 'naive simpleton' here it's the one who thinks victims of sexual assault should 'get over it'.
Dunno who you're talking about, but that's obviously not me. I explicitly said that criminal justice should be orthogonal to politics. That certainly means that no one should give a rape victim any shit just because someone is rich or powerful... but it also means that, if there's no likely conviction or compelling situation that *just happened*, hyperbolic innuendo and accusations should not derail politics (and indeed, they don't any more! I'm not even arguing the normative on this point; I'm just telling you like it is... and yet you somehow want to drag us back to the 90s, back to a point where the entire world is supposed to come to a screeching halt because Juanita Broderick said Bill Clinton raped her years and years and years before.)
Yes, probably the worst case scenario is Trump turning out to be a spineless puppet for Republicans... like some secret love child of George W. Bush and Howard Stern. I myself voiced this fear repeatedly around here over the past few weeks.
Now, if you assholes had actually made his weakness, his idiocy and his spinelessness central issues in your campaign against him, instead of centering 95% of your criticism on hyperbolic and sometimes irrational examinations of his other character flaws and the supposedly dangerous ideas that Trump himself (and also no one in the GOP establishment) never took seriously...
My mother voted Trump, my own mother for fuck's sake. When asked for a justification, one gets a long stream of "yes it's true that X, but...."s. Overall, she was naive and deluded in her decision making process, and like most people she overlooked the very dire possibility that Pence or other bits of the GOP establishment might end up running everything, but here's the one point she didn't miss: Trump isn't a super serious person, and his words were never meant to be dissected. I saw flyers in the mail bemoaning the fact that he once said Rosie O'Donnell is a pig. But guess what? Turns out that my mother, a person who voted for Obama twice, doesn't really give a shit about what he called Rosie O'Donnell. And why the hell should she?
There's a laundry list of valid reasons to fear a Trump presidency, but absolutely none of them involve comparing him to Hitler. (Trump is a clown; Hitler was serious long before people paid him much attention.) And I really hope that mainstream leftists in this country can figure this out before 2020 rolls around.
imported*, not important weapons.
I'm listening to you grossly misunderstand the situation
I.e. you refuse to read my past 2-3 posts, or even skim them intelligently. You're talking utter nonsense even if we utterly ignore the minimum wage debate.
(The alternative to minimum wage that I favor, and the alternative that anyone even remotely intelligent should favor, is some sort of percentage, graduated wage subsidy / reverse income tax of some sort. That accomplishes the same positive effects of a minimum wage--peoples' effective wages are a lot higher--but without encouraging employers to do all kinds of horrible things, not the least of which is mistreat their undocumented Latino employees. Is it still too unclear for you? Consider this as a very rough proof-of-concept: no minimum wage, but the government matches, at a 200% level, the first $5 or so that you earn. So your employer pays you $2; you get $6. Your employer pays you $5; you get $15. Something along those lines, though there are plenty of niggling details to consider here.)
Some of this should've been past tense, btw. I haven't stayed abreast of these things but I don't recall Obama renewing the Clinton-era "assault weapons" bans.
Otherwise? You just see random people railing about how it is what the liberal fools want.
Um, go read the legal definition of "semi-automatic assault rifle", a fantasy term dreamed up by anti-gun nuts that no military in the world uses, because an assault rifle is by definition automatic (or at least select-fire.) Why are barrel shrouds banned? Why are pistol grips banned, taxed, or (in the case of important weapons like the Saiga) weirdly discriminated against by the ATF? It is very, very, very obvious to anyone who has studied this issue at any length that this is a simple and sad psychological fearmongering game wherein people try to ban scary looking "militarized" black guns, while grudgingly sparing wooden Elmer Fudd type guns.
-3 Overrated so far, yay. Keep modding me down, assholes. It's definitely much more pleasant to lazily working on keeping your echo chamber intact, as the alt-right grows stronger and stronger, instead of listening to or engaging with someone like me who is a leftist and does desperately want to save this country.
And the American taxpayer gets to pay for a wall that the US border guard has explicitly stated would be utterly, utterly useless.. happy, happy, joy, joy.
I thought I made this clear but I guess I need to reiterate: not a physical wall. Cameras and a rapid response team will do just fine. It will be semi-expensive, but this only needs to be funded heavily for a few years until the coyotes give up and people stop trying to come over by the millions (because they know they're going to be stopped.)
A happy side effect is it might also further reduce the influence of the already-diminishing DEA, once the SE drug runners suddenly find their trade nigh-impossible. (I'm against the war on drugs, by the way, but I'm not so stupid as to oppose literally everything that might be done to fight that war. Diminish some of the gangs, take the violent element out and the pro-legalization movements will only continue to grow.)
I find it interesting that the only way you can find to justify Trumps misogyny is to attack Hillary Clinton's husband.
I find it interesting that you can't get over the fact that Bill Clinton, an accused rapist, was Hillary's husband. I find it interesting paid attention to the fact that you completely gloss over her statements that were very strongly hinting that he was going to be put in a place of significant power in her administration. You appear to think that because she chose to marry (and not divorce) this man, she should be completely exempt when she implies she'll be giving him enormous power in this country. By contract, as an egalitarian feminist, I believe that all women should face the consequences for their decisions, without any undue shame or coddling. If her campaign wanted to play the misogyny card against Trump and have it stick, she probably should have divorced Bill, or at least made it clear that he wasn't going to be involved in her administration in any way.
I don' really care what Bill Clinton has done, none of that excuses Trumps misogyny.
I don't excuse any actual misogyny that Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Jullian Assange, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or Anthony Weiner may have been engaged in. My view is simple: if they are guilty, lock them up. If witnesses are truthful but recalcitrant, let's try to push back on this bullshit mixture of slut-shaming and discouraging women from defending themselves, and maybe make it a bit easier to report a sexual assault while we're at it.
Failing that--if they're not in prison--they're politicians. Politics can and should run orthogonal to criminal justice (except to the extent that we probably should not elect people are have been, or probably will be, convicted.) This sexual scandal shit ran its course a long time ago. I'm over it. I'm over it when it's used against either leftists and rightists. And I'm over it when it's cynically used against women, like Lena Dunham. It should be clear by now that most of the country is over it. We were over it before Bill even left office.
Move on. Stop trying to hijack the conversation. It makes you look weak, really weak; it makes it look like (to a naive simpleton) maybe Donald Trump has some good points after all, because all his opponents have are some conveniently resurfaced sexual assault allegations and some jokes about his hair/penis/skin/hands/name.
It's a continuing starter until the minimum wage is raised.
Are you even listening to yourself talk? You just strongly implied that we need illegal immigration because (implicitly) that's the only way to get cheap enough labor, and now you've said that you want to jack up the minimum wage an even stronger incentive to cheat on the minimum wage and *fuck over* all of those Latinos struggling to earn a living here. (I should re-emphasize, at this point, that I am broadly I'm broadly pro-amnesty, which means giving Latinos minimum wage and social services protections.) This is catastrophic coherence failure on your part. Would you care to try again? What do you favor and why?
Another discussion entirely, but a point I can't resist commenting on: No, minimum wage must not be raised. It should be very slowly phased out in favor of direct assistance programs, including but not limited to a "reverse income tax" or similar form of wage-subsidy. The minimum wage is why it's so hard to get/keep a low-end job in this country. I'm suspicious of a lot of shit economists say, but this is literally Economics 101 here. Price floors fuck everything up. If poor people don't have enough money then give them more money. Directly. None of this market manipulation bullshit that gives employers all kinds of perverse incentives to hire illegal labor and/or treat their legal minimum-wage employees like shit.
Criticism of our foreign policy decisions, especially the Iraq War, are a different matter entirely
expensive high quality US guns
Which is a net plus for world security, if true. If we're talking strictly about small arms here: The more money wasted on "high quality" guns, the less money that can be spent on perfectly serviceable AK / AR clones and 9mm weapons, not to mention the less money that can be spent on ammunition. Fourth generation warfare doesn't really need fancy weapons; just a lot of them, and a lot of bullets to go in them.
One of the most laughable parts about mainstream leftist anti-gun rhetoric is the insistence on gun prioritization. Guess what, assault rifles were effectively banned in the 1980s! Everything since then has been ignorant, cringe-inducing nonsense about black guns looking scarier than wooden guns, or safety / controllability features (flash suppressors, barrel shrouds, pistol grips) being demonized as "militarized." There are several compelling cases the left could make regarding gun reform, but instead they usually choose to exhibit an arrogant ignorance that almost puts the right to shame. Almost.
You're still supporting a wall? It's a shit idea which won't work. Even if you think it's desirable to stop people crossing the border illegally because you don't think farms should have enough labor to avoid having their produce rot, you should still be against a wall on the basis that it's not going to stop people. They will go under it. They will go over it. They will take it apart and build homes out of it and other people will go through the holes.
I put "wall" in quotes for a reason. Not a literal wall. The sane version would obviously be surveillance with sufficient rapid response personnel. It's fairly arid down there; I tend to suspect a camera of sufficient height would be able to spot people from a hundred miles away. It's even easier at night, when the landscape grows cool and cars and bodies stick out on IR like sore thumbs.
Expensive to deploy at first, but then after a few years they start to realize that almost no one is getting through, the revenue streams for the coyotes dry up, the social patterns in Northen Mexico begin to shift (including, hopefully, a significant diminished in drug-funded organized crime, although the vast amount of tourism from America makes this questionable) and we can slowly scale back the surveillance and rapid response forces to something cheaper.
because you don't think farms should have enough labor to avoid having their produce rot,
There are fifty different replies to this, but basically arguing that our economy *requires* cheating on minimum wage is a non-starter. The question of how many legal immigrants to allow is a separate one. Yes yes, if you're in favor of continued massive immigration it's politically easiest to just try to keep it easy to illegally slip over the border, but this is a not a good long term strategy. It really, really isn't.
Like I've said elsewhere, the framework for a compromise is obvious: good border security (entirely reasonable and healthy) in exchange for "path to citizenship" amnesty (entirely reasonable, healthy and humane.) For the sake of keeping this issue at least semi-managable, the question of how much legal immigration we should take needs to be decoupled from the equation. Short answer is no, our agricultural system will not collapse overnight if this happens even in a worst case scenario... though they may well have to start planting different crops. And good on them if they do! As a broad principle, I'm all for cheaper, more easily farmed food that has a lower carbon footprint (requiring lots of manual human effort invariably involves a significant carbon footprint.)
That might be a valid point, given some of the grumblings I heard around the Assange thing. Never had time to look into it, though.
Still--as I hope you'll forgive me a tiny bit of bigotry (not racism, bigotry. It's ok to be bigoted, to some extent, against *conservative* Muslims. That's quite different from being bigoted against Arabs or South Asians) if I postulate that this still isn't going to look pretty if/when the stats are re-parsed. After all, it wasn't that long ago that it was revealed Swedish police were covering up the fact that the man who beheaded a mother and son in Ikea was a recent Muslim immigrant. And if we move outside of Sweden for a moment, there's also that whole Rotherham... thing, which seems to have been the result of self-flagellating versions of leftism mixing with a particularly depraved and weakly variety of policing by consent.
The Green party is our only real left-wing party,
The Greens are nutters, though. I tentatively support them to the extent that I support any third party, in the hopes that it will eventually bring about electoral reform... but I don't particularly want to see us elect a president who argues that wifi should be restricted or banned because it hurts our brains.
Except a gaff is not a policy position. His "racism" boils down to anti-immigration from Mexico and anti-immigration from Muslim Nations.
Now, we can't have a religious test for entry (obviously) but it is horrible, horrible leftist masochism to continue to imply that the floodgates should be opened for all countries equally. Stockholm had become the rape capital of Europe even before the Syrian refugee crisis ballooned, largely on the backs of the massive numbers of third world and largely Muslim (and yes that does matter, because Islam correlates to misogyny even more than Christianity does) people they had invited in. Trump is a either a psychopath or a moron (I tend to think the latter) about this, but the left didn't give us a good, strong, loud alternative.
His other anti-racism thing is strongly "supporting" the police. A pretty obnoxious thing to do, given the need for reform in this country. But still... not really the same as proposing racist legislation. Not really the same, when you think about it. If you're honest with yourself.
Keep the caricatures in check. Keep it positive. Reform the left. Help forge an alt-left. Stop pretending the main problem stems from gaffes. Stop pretending the main problem is that women from decades ago are suddenly making accusations (didn't everyone get sick of this like, 15-20 years ago? On the left in particular??)
And stop pretending that the biggest issue right now is that the fascists are taking over. The large majority of my extended family voted Trump, even though most of them voted Obama not once, but twice. And most of them live in a swing state.
To the extent that they proposed solutions, Bernie's were worse.
Only a relatively small number of issues. If you could have disabused him of a couple bad economic ideas, and convinced him to compromise his leftist tendencies a little by allowing America to become a tad more isolationist (instead of the mainstream self-flagellating left's opinion that we should only be isolationists in the context of never fighting anyone ever), he could have been one of the greatest presidents we ever had. A big "if", perhaps, but not nearly as big as the "if"s surrounding Trump.
Bernie's hideous NYC accent sounds snobbish repels most of the rest of the country.
What the fuck? Trump has a hideously cliched NYC accent. Bernie has perfectly normal and kinda charming Jewish-American accent.
I really don't like it when people casually throw around racism or antisemitism charges but thats... I don't know, that does honestly worry me a tad if you think Bernie's accent sounded hideous and snobbish.
The DNC's failure started long before that, they should not have attempted a coronation.
Can we get some kind of crowdfunding campaign for this? Every Democrat who would be willing to tattoo "We should not have attempted a coronation" on their foreheads should instantly receive $100,000 for their campaign funds.
My guess is gloat then fuck everybody.
To be fair, that's what everyone has always done.
The promise of not doing that (even if it was a baldfaced lie flying from the mouth of a man who can rarely be bothered to even listen to himself speak) is largely what won him the election. The big questions now are how will the disenchantment over the next four years unfold, and who the hell are they going to run against him in 2020?
I think it was satire, but you never know. Poe's Law, and all that.