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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
After doing some a little bit of reading I find it curious what a mish-mash the Republican party platform is.
It's a chimera of Ayn Rand's economic philosophy, social conservatism, jingoism and anti-intellectualism. Like, just taking bits and pieces from different things that actually don't go super well together.
It's funny to me: is most of the Religious Right aware that many Republicans deify a pro-choice atheist who thought christianity was a joke, or do they just not care?
Romney and up until he became an independent, Mc Mullin were two of the only people who could honestly call themselves actual conservatives or something resembling reasonable politicians and not part of the GOP's death cult (as Julian put it) because they at least somewhat respect the will of the people by refusing to overturn Obergefell. Not only that, but they also at least partly respect the scientific establishment: Romney accepts evolution and Mc Mullin accepts climate change. Mc Mullin also accepts the problems african-americans are facing with the police, etc.
edited 7th Dec '16 8:20:41 PM by Draghinazzo
Some of that is politicians on the fringe toeing the line to get a seat at the table; and some of that is simply in for a penny, in for a pound of flesh. The leftovers from pre-2008 Republicans which did not buy into the Tea Party found themselves either primaried or sidelined, and even the most influential like Mc Cain lack the push to do anything differently. Then there are the rest, who buy into one part of the platform and consider the remainder an insufficient deal breaker, knowing their other options are third party or go voiceless.
edited 7th Dec '16 8:28:49 PM by ViperMagnum357
@Trash Jack: If you don't have anything nice productive to say, don't say anything at all.
Seriously though, I am just sick of the rampant pessimism and doom&gloom that about half of the tropers in this thread have adopted by now. Accepting that things are going down the shitter is one thing. When your own country literally becomes an anime, (albeit a very good one,) you know you're fucked in the ass. But that doesn't mean we should just lie down and act like the world has literally ended either. For one thing, no matter what happens, as long as we're still alive, then at least that's something in and of itself to comfort us. Of course, one might bring up the literal nuclear option, but as has been pointed out to me, (thanks various tropers; you know who you are,) there are many, many, MANY reasons why this is a very unlikely outcome. Climate change is a far more likely end-of-the-world scenario, and at least in that event, we'd probably still have several more decades left before our time would be up. So long as we've still got our lives, we can make it through regardless of any shit we get put through.
That said, things aren't going to be pretty in the upcoming years, and most of us have accepted that. But now that we have, it's time to at least try and do something about it rather than sitting on our asses. Did everyone in Nazi Germany or under the Reich's thumb just sit down and let Hitler lord it all over their bad selves? Not really, no. I'm not saying we need to form a literal La Résistance, at least in the traditional sense, but even putting up some sort of a fight is better than doing nothing at all. It doesn't matter if it doesn't win the war; what matters is showing that we won't go down without a fight, and you've already got people doing just that. But it seems like some of the people in this thread have already just given up and called it quits without even giving it a shot. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm sick of just giving in to fear and despair. It's time to stand up; to focus on where we go from here and how we get there. Because that has to be better than the alternative.
edited 7th Dec '16 10:18:06 PM by kkhohoho
The moment we give in to despair and just accept that this is the new normal — that's when the autocrat and his cronies win.
The next four years (at least) are going to be rough. We can't pretend that they won't be bad by thinking "Hey, maybe Trump won't be so bad and we just need to give him a chance!" Giving him so many chances and lowering the bar so much — grading him on a goddamned curve — is one of the reasons he won the election.
But it's not over yet. Not by a long shot.
Disgusted, but not surprisedIt's a small comfort, but there's definitely something liberating about not having to defend "my side's" policies — because none of them are from my side. And I won't have to have that desperate, pleading, uphill conversation where I try to convince some dumb-as-a-brick voter to think of everything that's at stake, because these people already spat in our faces. I'm upset at them, and I'm tired, and I'm ready for them to live under Trump's lash and suffer because of the monstrosity they've created.
I've never been a fan of American exceptionalism, but I hate having to experience just how terribly mediocre we really are.
"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."I am indeed in the process of crossing the Despair Event Horizon, but turning back is a lot harder than just deciding it's my duty to some vague ideal to believe something else. I need solid evidence to believe things can improve, and right now I have precisely zero, for reasons I've already stated. I can't simply choose a belief because I think there is some utility in its potential ramifications.
And since we will, in all likelihood and by this thread's own admission, be extinct or at least fighting wars over food and water in the next few decades, what good does it do to fight back at all? What's the point in "showing we won't go down without a fight" if we're all destined to go down anyway, and no one will be around to remember us? There's no measurable benefit.
It's a surreal experience, living in the end times.
How dare you disrupt the sanctity of my soliloquy?A few pages back someone mentions Trump giving governors certain positions, could he actually be trying to work around term limits? The Republicans have a lot of governors mansions up in 2018 and many of them are term limited, but the term limit won't apply to a Republican inubent who's just taken over form a governor Trump and appointed elsewhere.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranTrumpgrets has been very cathartic for me mostly because of those reasons.
It's in human nature to be fallible and ignore things we don't like (lord knows I'm guilty of being intellectually lazy or ignoring problems in my own life), but it's sort of dumbfounding that people are surprised Trump goes back on say, jailing Clinton when he goes back on like every other thing ever. Politicians may flip-flop to some degree, but Trump is on another level.
I'd hope that this would serve as a lesson that electing a "political outsider to drain the swamp" is nothing but a childish anti-establishment fantasy, a scream, but I know that a lot of people certainly won't.
edited 7th Dec '16 9:39:42 PM by Draghinazzo
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Because we should do what we can while we can? Living for today and all that jazz? Honestly, if I thought there was no point to doing anything, then I might as well have just ended it already. But as they say, while there's life, there's hope.
edited 7th Dec '16 9:37:28 PM by kkhohoho
Look at it this way: there are ill-doers all over the world, at home and abroad. Are you gonna bend over for them just because ill-doers are right here? Why should you let them take responsibility for your own life? Because that's what we all face: responsibility for ourselves, because we owe it to ourselves.
If we always rely on others to dictate how we feel about ourselves, we'll probably always be miserable.
I don't think I made my point very well, but it's how I feel and I'm not taking it back.
Do not obey in advance.Excellent posts kkhohoho
Even if people feel like they're powerless to do anything to make the world a better place, well, it's not like the chance of things getting better is actually at zero. I get why you guys are upset, don't get me wrong. I'm no Pollyanna. But you can try to do something about it, and with luck you'll actually be able to accomplish some change. 'Tis better to try and fail than to never try at all.
And I have enough personal experience to know that marinating in negativity and letting yourself be too consumed by despair can cause you to do or say some really reckless and harmful things when with a less pessimistic outlook that time could be better spent on not doing things that will ultimately hurt yourself or the people you care about.
edited 7th Dec '16 10:18:04 PM by AlleyOop
Even if it would come just shortly before a theoretical doomsday scenario where the world is irrevocably destroyed due to climate change or whatever, I would get so much catharsis out of the Electoral College being dismantled because it's completely unacceptable that a candidate could win the popular vote by over 2 million and still lose.
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Anyways, the main reason I haven't completely lost faith is because of a point Ambar made earlier about how a country with a strong culture of democracy has at least that going for it. Whatever other problems you guys have faced over the years your political system has remained comparatively stable.
My own country (Brazil) doesn't really have a strong culture of democracy. To put an extremely long and complex story short, since becoming a Republic we've pretty much gone from oligarchs choosing presidents through voter intimidation to a series of coups and dictatorships with small periods of legitimate democracy in-between.
We're probably going to be even more fucked than you guys in 2018 because in all likelihood we're going to elect someone even more bigoted than Trump and Pence combined, who lionizes the extremely cruel and horrific military regime we lived under backed by the CIA and has literally every horrible position on anything you could imagine and is frighteningly unhinged. He's pretty much promised to dissolve Congress if he were elected and I have no doubt in my mind he will likely do so if he gets into office.
I have no illusions about his autocratic regime lasting forever even in spite of all this, and I feel even better about you guys' chances of getting out of this eventually.
A lot of people are in for extremely bad times, though.
edited 7th Dec '16 10:38:21 PM by Draghinazzo
"It's about official. Hillary beat Donald by 4 million votes in California. So double his votes."
I feel proud that I can take some credit for that.
Voter turnout was actually up in California. Huh. I wonder which states had higher/lower turnout and how that contributed to the overall lower turnout this election.
Same.
We need a million of those Californian voters to move to Texas and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Arizona.
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Heh, maybe the rising costs in housing will prompt that many people to move to swing states.
I'm also feeling pretty good about voting for HRC in California. First time I voted, too.
The GOP didn't waste the opportunity the loss of the Voting Rights Act gave them, that's for damn sure.
edited 8th Dec '16 12:33:00 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedA US District Judge has ordered that the Michigan recount be stopped
. Stein can still appeal this, though. She's filed a lawsuit in federal court for a Pennsylvania recount as well.
Still a more productive "dude I fucked up" reaction than anything TYT has shat out so far.
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot

You can't just assume this will all blow over. Look at Reagan. He was gone in eight years, but only in the literal sense. He's very much alive and well even today, and his masterful bamboozling of the average American remains an inoperable tumor on our political culture.
Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that our voting public is relentlessly, hopelessly stupid. We have a huge list of doomsday scenarios just waiting to occur or already occurring, endless corruption, clandestine trade deals being hammered out at the behest of CE Os, and a systematic destruction of the livelihoods of millions of people...and yet, the best way to motivate our electorate is obviously to scream "get the brown people out."
You can see minorities. You can't see climate change. Out of sight, out of mind- a perfect fallacy for the eight-year-old mental level at which this country operates. That's not going to go away. There will be another Trump, and another, and another.
It's this kind of naivete and complacency that causes so many problems. The Democrats lost the election in large part because they assumed it was in the bag and that everyone was coming around, and they sat with their thumbs up their asses. I'll be the first to admit I don't know what the solution is (if there even is one at this point), but I will assert it starts with the rational ones among us finally realizing how absolutely monolithic and enduring this problem is.
edited 7th Dec '16 7:47:41 PM by BrainSewage
How dare you disrupt the sanctity of my soliloquy?