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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Crude masculinity is used as a group status marker by white working class males. By calling Trump "A Man" he isn't just commenting on Trump's supposed masculine traits, he's saying that Trump belongs to his in-group and is therefore more likely to fight for his interests.
It's the standard reason people support tyrants worldwide.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.
I think we've talked about that a ways back. In spite of being an "elite" by most reasonable definitions, white working class people are still able to identify with him because of his overall crudeness. In some ways I suspect he represents what they wish they could be, and this is bolstered by the fact that they feel Trump understands them and wants to fight for their interests.
Time will tell how long that illusion will last.
That quote about needing a "man" in the white house didn't surprise me at all. First, I see it regularly. Also, during the election, Full Frontal interviewed a woman in rural Pennsylvania who was complaining about the very attitude—she's a mechanic and frequently gets customers who ask for men—before telling the correspondent without subtlety or irony that women should not be in the white house. Then she was surprised when the correspondent asked if the same didn't apply to being a mechanic.
I really brought up the contrast because GA would probably be the ultimate test of whether a bipartisan strategy would ever work again in this climate. If Trump isn't enough to break the tribal solidarity of the GOP when the Dem candidate should have bipartisan backing and the red field is becoming openly awful, then there's all the evidence one needs to go full zerg rush.
Turn out the blues, swamp the reds.
edited 20th Feb '17 6:23:22 PM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our livesApparently, penis-having is that all important quality in a president. It is also, apparently, the only thing a guy from one of Trump's biggest strongholds could think of as a defence for him.
What particularly bothers me about the quote isn't merely the obvious exclusion of the idea of a female president (eg, Hillary), it's the implication that the previous president somehow doesn't qualify as a man as well.
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.Oh, there's so many ways that could go. Obama was the Anti-Trump. He compromised. Trump only compromises because he's an idiot who says what he says in stupid, laughably disprovable ways where he can't truly support them without losing all face, so he backpedals while deluding himself into thinking it was his plan all along anyway. Or he throws somebody else under the bus. "I lied? What the Hell? I saw it on Fox News! They lied to me."
Trump's a bully, and Obama wasn't. Even when he was exasperated it was more like, "Oh come the fuck on, people. You should be better than this" rather than "You're the enemy and no one should ever listen to you!" The rest of it's obvious. Trump's always been rich, Obama started from nothing. Trump's white, Obama looks like both his parents could have been black.
I would actually say the unspoken piece is that the White House needs a real man. That's basically Trump's entire personal image: that he is the physical embodiment of Toxic Masculinity. He puts out every ugly male stereotype that we're expected to live up to.
By contrast, it's a very popular dogma among Conservatives that Obama - and Democrats in general, really - was a limp-wristed, ineffectual whiner who was too weak to get anything done. And so now here comes Conan the Trumpbarian to wave his mighty penis and shatter the barriers of political turmoil that Obama couldn't.
Now, that dogma is in turn fed by racism. It's just that there is a middle step there. Don't discount the effects of Toxic Masculinity on Trump's public image. There are a lot of toxic attitudes that feed into the GOP. They're basically snake oil salesmen, where the snake oil in question is a fleeting self-image.
edited 20th Feb '17 6:50:29 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.You might think no one would be stupid enough to defend Milo Yiannopoulos by pointing the finger at others.
That's right, boys. Mondo cool.President Obama wasn't dominated by his ego and actively avoided harming those he didn't have to (at least in how he chose he words). Both are cardinal sins in "manliness."
The implications are all the worse. It certainly shows how much combating toxic "masculinity" has to go.
edited 20th Feb '17 7:07:03 PM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our livesSince people like myself may have missed it: Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria is being considered for ambassador to France.
(And he was also maybe going to sell the Marlins to the Kushner family, but they apparently decided that was one too many conflicts of interest, even for them.)
Did you honestly think he would? The man who campaigns on fighting the establishment has a mandate from his followers to torch the establishment and get rid of the old talent. If he could actually build a government of the people he personally knows without them all jumping ship, he would be firing people left and right and replacing them with his hand-picked henchmen as we speak.
Maybe this is an opportunity for the rest of the world (which sadly includes Russia and China) to actually run circles around the US and exploit it for four years without Trump noticing? A poorly run foreign department is never a good thing, for any nation. Look what happened in the Cold War when the US fired all its Far East/South East Asia experts during the Red Scare....
MAGA my ass.
In other news, the Orange House says that a second travel ban is coming. This one will explicitly exclude those with green cards, but other than that it looks like its the same totally not racist ban. Its also phasing into effect more slowly.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/20/politics/trump-new-executive-order-immigration/index.html
I think the ACLU and co are ready for round 2.
edited 20th Feb '17 8:01:18 PM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Taking the most optimistic spin on that, the economic and social resolutions that the former nonaligned states tended to push might go through the UN without effective opposition.
We might even see new trading networks and viable South-South cooperation emerge once Trump completes his Sakoku.
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The Problem is, without affecting Green Card Holders, I don't think there is a legal reason to declare this law Unconstitutional. You can hate the law for moral reasons (which I would and do), but legally speaking, this is within the President's power, unless I've missed a law somewhere that says the President can't do this.
As much as I want the ACLU to win, and Trump to not ban people just from coming from War-ravaged Nations, he has the power to do this. I'm not saying we shouldn't or can't protest this, because we can and absolutely should, but I don't think the ACLU could win in a court of law this time.
I was at the gym tonight and Bill O'Reilly was on TV, basically excusing Trump's "press is the enemy" comments by arguing we don't have a free press anymore because most of the press leans left and ifso facto, opposing viewpoints are not tolerated. Yeah, damn those "liberal" reporters calling out blatant lies, how dare them!
To think, I used to be a fan of that guy back in high school.
edited 20th Feb '17 9:39:57 PM by speedyboris
My counterargument would be that the chief job of reporters is to report the facts, and it often seems to be the case that the Right's positions don't align with the facts, which Trump then takes to extremes.
And that's me being nice about it.
Oh God! Natural light!Fox News seems to position itself as the last bastion of unbiased news, from what I can tell.
This is, of course, at odds with their actual content.
edited 20th Feb '17 10:11:35 PM by KarkatTheDalek
Oh God! Natural light!Crossed from the Terrorism thread out of sheer relevance.
NYT: Ivanka Trump Calls for Tolerance After Threats on Jewish Centers
The tweet was Ms. Trump’s most vocal foray into a public discussion and was made over an issue her allies say she feels personally.
The message was posted after Ms. Trump wrote, and then deleted, an earlier one moments beforehand.
Ms. Trump converted to Judaism before marrying her husband, Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, putting her in a position to be a prominent voice at a moment when a number of anti-Semitic episodes have taken place around the country. Her previous substantive effort in the White House involved convening a women’s business council, an event she helped create, when the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, visited the president.
On Monday, 11 separate bomb scares were called into Jewish community centers around the country. They were the latest in a string of such threats since the start of the year.
“Since the beginning of this year, we’ve seen four waves of these threats — we’ve never seen that before,” said David Posner, the director of strategic performance at the JCC Association of North America. Just one community center reported such a threat in all of 2016, he said.
The centers threatened on Monday were in Albuquerque; Birmingham, Ala.; Buffalo; Chicago; Cleveland; Houston; Milwaukee; Nashville; St. Paul; Tampa, Fla.; and Tulsa, Okla. Like the earlier threats, they were deemed hoaxes, but not before several of the centers were evacuated as a precaution.
Mr. Trump has been criticized as slow to condemn anti-Semitic comments, and his candidacy was hailed by white nationalists and white supremacists throughout 2016.
On Thursday, at his first lengthy news conference alone as president, Mr. Trump was asked by a reporter for a Jewish magazine how the government plans to respond to the increase in such anti-Semitic incidents. The president responded angrily, saying the question was “insulting” and that he was the “least anti-Semitic person in the world.”
In addition to Ms. Trump’s statement, the Trump administration addressed the issue more directly on Monday.
“Hatred and hate-motivated violence of any kind have no place in a country founded on the promise of individual freedom,” Lindsay Walters, the White House deputy press secretary, said in a statement. “The president has made it abundantly clear that these actions are unacceptable.”
Also on Monday, the police in University City, Mo., near St. Louis, were investigating vandalism at a Jewish cemetery where dozens of headstones were damaged, according to reports.
Many cemeteries have sustained vandalism, and the police have not said whether they believed the episode in University City was motivated by anti-Semitism. Even so, Gov. Eric Greitens said on Twitter that he was “disgusted to hear about the senseless act of desecration,” issuing the kind of condemnation that Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, had urged of all politicians.
“We look to our political leaders at all levels to speak out against such threats directed against Jewish institutions, to make it clear that such actions are unacceptable,” he said in a statement about the bomb threats.
The Rebirth of a Nation . . .

But obviously they're going to spin it into a "gay people are depraved" narrative.
edited 20th Feb '17 6:26:53 PM by Pseudopartition