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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3002 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: President Donald Trump.

FLOTUS!

(source)

We survived Bush II. We'll survive this.

"Remember, politics aside, no matter the outcome we're all neighbors. That's something worth holding onto."

-rd95





weewooweewoo  ·  3002 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I can't wait for tits and beer leftism to come back to the internet. A united community where high schoolers can hate Republicans because they're old, stupid, and too religious. One where Klienbl00 hits r/bestof every single week on reddit and identity politics step aside for the working man! M'ladies and gentlemen, we're entering a new golden age.

I don't know man, I feel like a lot of my identity has been shattered. Filipino / American, debate geek, psychology and political science graduate because I wanted to know why and do all I could do to get people to understand each other and interact, a la if you can't dream for each other, you're dreaming against each other fucking naive little shit I am. Fucking Duerte / Trump / Brexit / the fact that our lives are 10,000 more complex than our parents because of globalization. Fucking trying to juggle all of the microcosms I inhabit because I naively believe in some moral good in being able to handle the cognitive dissonance in communicating all across a spectrum of ideas. Fucking wanting to understand how other people understand each other - the marketplace of ideas will eventually solve... / I can demonstrate that we're all more similar than we think / a house divided will not stand.

My education is like that SMBC comic where the physicist is falling off a cliff and solves when she's going to die.

I just feel like tomorrow I'll have to start again, anew. My ideas about people are too kumbaya, I need to grow up.

kleinbl00  ·  3002 days ago  ·  link  ·  

blush

Although fuckin' A there's no point in saying anything on Reddit anymore. Average age is 16 and they have the attention spans of squirrel-

I still believe people are basically good. I've decided more of them are ignorant than I estimated, but ignorance can be fixed.

weewooweewoo  ·  3001 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I still go there out of habit. There's something to the fact that its the world's biggest forum, but I never comment or contribute anymore for the same reasons.

steve  ·  3002 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    We survived Bush II. We'll survive this.

I keep repeating this and other calming sentiments to myself. Please keep repeating these sentiments to me. As calm and positive as I was yesterday... trying to convince determinedkid to relax.... I'm the one having slightly panicked emotional response this morning.

    We survived Bush II. We'll survive this.

    We survived Bush II. We'll survive this.

    We survived Bush II. We'll survive this.

checks and balances.

checks and balances.

checks and balances.

[googles "immigration to Canada"]

bioemerl  ·  3002 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Trump isn't the bad part.

Republican house

Republican senate

Republican courts

That's the bad part.

kleinbl00  ·  3002 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Cynically speaking:

We now have a chief executive who has spent his whole life surrounded either by people he pays or who adore him because of an image others have cultivated for him. He has no experience with legislation, no experience with negotiation, and his go-to problem solving strategy is "sue the shit out of them until they give up."

He will be leading a house, a senate and a judiciary that do not respect him. He is, figuratively speaking, Frankenstein's Monster, a golem of their own creation that has risen up and struck down all attempts to manage and control him. That he ran as a Republican speaks more to the default allegiances of the information-deprived groundswell that elected him than it does of his policies; Trump is effectively done with rallies for a good long while and has successfully won a long and tawdry path of daily briefings and decision making.

His camp is currently adjusting to the reality that they need to try and run the country. They've burned a lot of bridges and their figurehead is fundamentally unfit to rule. That's not as big of an issue as people make it out to be - Reagan was demonstrably senile for the last three years of his presidency and GWB was incurious and detached from the process. But both presidents were surrounded by operatives and insiders with party experience going back to Nixon. Trump will have Christie, Guliani and a bunch of media flacks.

Regardless of the outcome of this election, whoever won would have inherited the same intractable mess of partisanship and disapproval of the electorate in general. The real question is which party is in charge of it and which is in opposition to it? Had it been Clinton, she would have had the advantage of 30 years of down'n'dirty backroom politics to count on. Trump? Of the people he's known for 30 years, only one or two of them are still talking to him.

A clinton landslide would have been less messy but it still would have been frustrating. A Trump landslide?

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.

-Robert Graves, I, Claudius

________________________________________

There are groups that will be heavily fucked by a Trump presidency. If you became reliant on Obamacare since its introduction you're fucked. If, on the other hand, you hadn't had health insurance before, congratulations. You don't have healthcare again. Coyote? Guess what? Your job just got harder. But really, those were the only two policies Trump had: build a wall, repeal Obamacare, "make America great again." All other legislature is going to come whispering in, and it'll probably end up on Mike Pence's plate. And he doesn't have the mandate Trump does.

Liberal policies all over the country got enacted. Citizens United was opposed nearly everywhere. Minimum wage boosts hit in four states. Marijuana is now legal in what? 6 states? I'm too lazy to look it up but those beatniks over at RAND calculated back in 2010 or so that if California were to legalize marijuana, the Mexican cartel system would collapse.

Look - there's a bored billionaire about to take the white house. And everybody has to deal with him. But only one side has to be nice to him. Jason Chaffetz can spew all day long about how Hillary Clinton is going to be investigated regardless of the outcome of the election but at the end of the day, he's an elected official and has to do what his constituency wants lest he land on his keister.

We know one thing this electorate wants: something else. One side gets to guess what that is. The other side gets to say "you're doing it wrong" for four years.

I know which I'd rather be.

b_b  ·  3002 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The parallels are becoming scary, too, as it looks like Clinton won the popular vote.