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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I think this is one of those "things have to hit rock bottom for people to change their views" situations.
My brother has an Alex Jones app on his smartphone. Says a lot right there, that he got a fucking app. There are others like him out there.
Anyway, I'm noticing that there's like 4 different flavors of right-wing in the US: religious right, racist right, corporate right, and libertarians. All of them have representation to some degree or another in the Trump administration. And they look set to get a large chunk of what they want, each.
If they ruin things for the dumbasses who voted for them to the point where it's impossible to blame it on the left, would that wake many of those people up? It's kinda like how addicts deny they have a problem until the problem ruins their life. People in general are like that. Think long term, and be optimistic: these morons could end up bringing the center-left back in a big way in the same way that religious oppression in Western Europe led to the lack of religiosity seen in those countries today.
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It's really not very difficult to be smarter and more realistic than that. I recently overheard a couple of Trump supporters saying things like: "Oh, he's like your best friend, he'll do anything for you." No stupid, that's just his con artist's persona working its charms on someone gullible enough to believe it.
Trump is the biggest clown ever to wear an orange wig. (But that metaphor would be doing a disservice to clowns — entertainers who actually make you feel good and don't try to swindle you.)
edited 5th Dec '16 8:38:31 AM by pwiegle
This Space Intentionally Left Blank.
x4: I think the first hundred days of Trump are going to be a roller coaster ride of international scandals. Internationally, it'll probably setting into a stable mediocrity, with foreign government's adapting to the administration's brainlessness, but it will never be good. Domestically, though, America is totally boned.
edited 5th Dec '16 8:39:11 AM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."@Bonsai Forest: That assumes that there is a point where even die-hards will admit fault. On top of the fact that Trump has given angry people full authorization to act on their worst impulses, the people who follow him and other terrible Republicans almost religiously. They have seen their fortunes die under Republican rule for so long and reject the idea of taking "handouts" from Democrats that they have created a highly effective system of twisted logic to keep from having to admit being fooled. They have low expectations of government, so Trump's corruption is waved off. They either agree with or simply don't feel personally offended by Trump's bigotry and sexism, so that's not going to get them. They have already taken in a sense of victimhood and distrust for anyone different or "liberal," so they ignore the many warnings they received and regard news of negative effects as just lies to manipulate them. Hell, if anything, they deeply enjoy that so many are afraid or being harmed by Trump or his supporters as revenge for their own self-inflicted perpetual fear.
Combine all that with a massive propaganda wing, deep authoritarianism/xenophobia in the culture of many states that rejects anyone straying from the traditional consensus, severely limited education, some very genuine problems with inequality/poverty, and a media so obsessed with making money that they will always equate brazen lies and right-wing extremism with truth to find a very powerful engine for self-destructive denial.
That's not even getting into the classic totalitarian tactics of demonizing education manufacturing new, scarier "Enemies" to fight as justification as we've seen so many times in Republican-ruled eras. This is a group of highly manipulable people that will always be preyed upon by parasites like Trump or other corporate hacks, so their outsized influence is just too valuable for those oligarchs to ever risk getting a clue. The lies are only going to grow more brazen from here on and they will be desperate to keep these people too angry to think.
I'm not sure that Trump will be able to take us entirely to banana republic levels, but there is no way in Hell that the Republicans won't gleefully ignore and protect corruption at lower levels. Corporate corruption is only going to shoot through the roof as our government is sold off piece-by-piece.
edited 5th Dec '16 9:00:24 AM by Geostomp
"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all" Futurama, Godfellas
Well, if anyone could get even people this willfully ignorant to stop lying to themselves and turn against him, it would be Trump. The man is almost as good at failing bigly as he is at conning people (which is what usually sets up his failures later). The problem is, what sort of a failure would be big enough to piss off even his base? I have a disquieting feeling we're going to find out, and it's not going to be fun for anyone.
edited 5th Dec '16 9:06:06 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised"he's like your best friend, he'll do anything for you"
I think this is most honest impresion of Trump this guy have, which explain very well why he was able to played them as well: he is a sitcom chararter a this point therefore he have protagonist inmunity and a HUGE jerkass dissonance
" I think the first hundred days of Trump are going to be a roller coaster ride of international scandals. Internationally, it'll probably setting into a stable mediocrity"
Pretty much, is fandumb will get more defensive once they see the swamp king in all is glory.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"![]()
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Not Banana Republic levels of corrupt, but systemically corrupt in a way that's going to be extremely difficult to get rid of.
The nature of Trump is that he and his company fails at businesses but he goes unaffected. So Trump can fail at governing and by all probability will, but he probably won't be affected much from his electorate who want someone to "shake things up".
That is why I say focus on the majority of Clinton-voters/3rd Partyistas, suppressed and undecided. Leave the Trump voters to the wolf whose mouth they are going to gleefully dive into, and which could be wide enough as Fenris as it devours stuff.
Apparently he's elected Ben Carson as Urban Housing Chief...well joy.
P At Mccory has conceded.
Roy cooper is officially North Carolina's governor.
edited 5th Dec '16 9:25:25 AM by TacticalFox88
New Survey coming this weekend!One victory at a time, comrade. This and the DAPL are about the only good news in the last few weeks.
Hopefully with a Democrat governor there might be a way to block and maybe roll-back voter suppression there. There also needs to be decisive action taken to halt this evil crap
in the same state.
Now Cooper just has to endure years of nothing but vetos and overrides, since repubs still hold most state offices. Still surprised he conceded, was looking like a certainty that he was gonna take it to the legislature. Guess he figured his reputation was tarnished enough already?
edited 5th Dec '16 9:33:57 AM by carbon-mantis
More likely he had a good look at which way the counts were trending and decided to cut his losses before attacking from a different angle. Mccrory twisted a legislature in his pocket to the breaking point, so this suggests this was as far as he could have gotten without opening himself to serious pushback.
edited 5th Dec '16 9:38:40 AM by ViperMagnum357
Trump advisors aim to privatize oil-rich Indian reservations
Now, a group of advisors to President-elect Donald Trump on Native American issues wants to free those resources from what they call a suffocating federal bureaucracy that holds title to 56 million acres of tribal lands, two chairmen of the coalition told Reuters in exclusive interviews.
The group proposes to put those lands into private ownership - a politically explosive idea that could upend more than century of policy designed to preserve Indian tribes on U.S.-owned reservations, which are governed by tribal leaders as sovereign nations.
The tribes have rights to use the land, but they do not own it. They can drill it and reap the profits, but only under regulations that are far more burdensome than those applied to private property.
"We should take tribal land away from public treatment," said Markwayne Mullin, a Republican U.S. Representative from Oklahoma and a Cherokee tribe member who is co-chairing Trump’s Native American Affairs Coalition. "As long as we can do it without unintended consequences, I think we will have broad support around Indian country."
Like real life cartoon villains
New Survey coming this weekend!I laughed when Trump said he condemned bigotry at his first "thank you" rally. The guy ran his platform on bigotry and put someone in his cabinet that is from a website that runs on white supremacy. Actions speak louder than words, Trumpy.
God... it's been less than a month since he won and I'm already sick of him.
How can you do things "without unintended consequences" when your aim is to go against a century of precedent.
You know Richard Nixon was the guy who did a lot of pro-Native American policies and put into effect
and reversed a lot of the abuses. It's weird but Republican Presidents, first Ulysses Grant and then Nixon, have been more helpful to Native Americans than Democrats (at least until Obama asked the Army Corps to investigate/deep six the DAPL).
Now Trump is going to take even that away from them.
Vox says
that Trump won't be able to do much to reverse the DAPL on his own.
This decision is certainly a major setback for Energy Transfer Partners, which claims it has already lost $100 million from delays in the pipeline. In a statement, the company denounced the decision as a “purely political action,” noting that the Army Corps had previously granted the company every permit it needed.
It’s possible that the companies behind the pipeline could ask federal courts to enjoin (or block) the Army Corps’ decision in the coming days, says Carl Tobias, the Williams Chair in Law at the University of Richmond. Back in September, the DC Circuit Court sided with the companies in refusing to block the pipeline via injunction.
Another looming question is how Donald Trump might respond when he finally gets into office. Trump has said he’s in favor of finishing the Dakota Access Pipeline, but today’s decision won’t be easy for him to overturn through executive action alone.
“If one agency makes detailed fact findings about how a project is not in the public interest, the next administration can’t just come in and rip it up right away,” Jan Hasselman, an attorney at Earthjustice who is representing the Standing Rock Sioux, told me on Friday. “They could seek to undo it, but it would be subject to judicial review.”
edited 5th Dec '16 11:28:34 AM by JulianLapostat

Trump's team setting sights on pillaging Native reservations
.
Privatizing reservations (and therefore permanently destroying the concept of tribes as quasi-independant entities) to allow oil companies to rape the lands for profit. Spearheaded by a Cherokee
who's regarded by many others as a greedy quisling note
edited 5th Dec '16 8:45:03 AM by carbon-mantis