I swear to god he has some kind of ancient Egyptian curse. There is always, always one of these whenever something happens. He stole an amulet from a tomb or some shit.
I swear to god he has some kind of ancient Egyptian curse. There is always, always one of these whenever something happens. He stole an amulet from a tomb or some shit.
When you plunder the tomb of an ancient social media magnate from 2003, searching through the abandoned CRT monitors and tangles of ethernet cables, accidentally activating an artifact that will allow you to use social media to gain incredible power, but at a terrible price.
The pact is sealed. Your tweets shall be written in blood.
High pressures over time deep within the internet have led to the crystallization of pure butthurt which can be explored in the cyber-cave linked below:
these people are not mentally well
they need some degree of an intervention because no, being a part of a “resistance” should not come at the expense of your own mental health
Trump is memetic SCP confirmed.
I think this dust-up on transgender soldiers will actually burn some of Trump’s political capital.
I’ll let you in on something about his power - previously, a lot of these things where he got the media all fired up over something, he had at or near majority support from the actual citizens or it was something most people outside of politics just don’t care about.
This one’s gonna be a lot narrower. The opposition will be able to get some actual traction out of it.
(Note: Rehashing things I’ve said before, definitely a late-night rant)
I still find the fact that 46% of the country decided to vote for Donald fucking Trump of all people for President to be completely baffling at a gut level.
How could anyone possibly have been comfortable voting for such an obviously mean, selfish, low-IQ, inexperienced, incoherent, authoritarian, and unserious person? How could otherwise educated, moral, rational people, have voted for this man (as many otherwise well-educated, moral, and rational Republicans did)? I still feel like I live in a bad satire of America rather than the real world.
Even if I grant every critique of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and I try to inhabit the mindset of a person with conservative policy views, and I concede all the frustration with the cultural left that many on the right feel, I still don’t see how there is even a contest between which one would be preferable to run our military, our diplomacy, and our nuclear weapons. Like shouldn’t basic respectability and competence trump all else when the other candidate completely fails on those metrics?
I feel a deep shame whenever I think about the fact that such a horrible man is the face of my nation. I didn’t feel that way about Bush, I would not have felt that way about McCain or Romney.
Something is rotten about the right in this country, something so rotten that they all thought that somehow Trump was a lesser of evils choice. There were signs of this rot earlier: the rise of Fox News, talk radio, and Breitbart, the crazier elements of the Tea Party (Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Todd Aiken), the radicalization of Republicans in Congress and state legislatures, but it wasn’t clear until Trump how deep the rot went.
The left is by no means perfect, not even close, and if this were another time with a more normal President I’d be more comfortable focusing more of my time on that. But there really is no equivalence between the left’s dysfunction’s and the right’s. Right now there really is something truly different, something scary, something very big and uniquely bad going on with the right at a systemic, sociological level that I don’t really understand no matter how much I obsess about it, at least at an emotional level.
Half the country was willing to accept authoritarian rhetoric. Half the country was willing to accept incoherence and stupidity and lying. Half the country was willing to accept meanness, endorsement of sexual assault, and racist rhetoric. Most Republican voters are not authoritarians, racists, sexists, liars, or mean, but they didn’t mind voting for it at all.
That’s terrifying.
I want you to imagine that there was a group within your country that had been mass kidnapping kids for sex trafficking with more or less impunity, for years.
The police refused to do anything about it. The politicians not only claimed it wasn’t happening, but celebrated bringing more of that group. The media gaslit you and said it wasn’t happening.
In fact, when you raised objections, you were sent for ideological retraining.
Of course, I’m not talking about the United States.
But suppose someone in the United States did know about such a thing happening. And the same cycle of “but it isn’t real” was being used by the same ideological groups to claim that what happened in another developed country was impossible, that it would never happen, and certainly wasn’t happening there and could not possibly happen here.
Approximately how many layers of “FUCK YOU” would they want to send those ideological groups as a message? Why on Earth would they care about those groups’ criticisms when said groups are a bunch of lying hypocrites?
Quite frankly, if you’re actually baffled that they could put Trump in the Whitehouse, you don’t understand Trump voters as well as you think you do.
And those Very Serious People that Clinton was the representative of? Clinton wanted even more involvement in Syria than Trump has so far actually provided. She said as much right before he missile striked that airbase, and we all know that the MSM would have been chanting “YASS, QUEEN, SLAY! #STRONGWOMEN” the whole time.
I didn’t vote for Trump, but the Serious People have worn down the value of being perceived as serious. If we get through to 2020 with no new big wars, I’m going to chalk it up as a victory.
Oh Em Gee! Trump tweets a stupid edited gif that could have even been slightly funny on reddit or tumblr (but not exactly endorse- or reblog-worty) and every newspaper and TV station on the planet makes a story out of it.
Trump showed poor judgement, but somehow we make a still bigger deal out of this than we probably should.
If I were Trump, I would get a cat and tweet cat pictures once a week, and the occasional cocktail recipe, just to keep people on their toes.
Confusion Politics at work.
He could probably use this to bury an executive order or firing of a staffer or something
That appears to be what’s happening in the general case of Trump Says Something Outrageous. It’s wild to watch.
There’s this massive pool of outrage to be drilled and tapped because the dumber parts of the Left and Liberal political groups have been using offense as a weapon and configured themselves for high offendability and heavy tribal signalling.
I’m hoping our Shitposter in Chief is going to exhaust some of the supply.
It’s pokemon going to be four more years
I’m giving it a 60% estimate at this time, up from 50% in the first 30 days.
I’m not really cheering it, but I’m not seeing a whole lot of lessons being learned.
Jon Stewart, John Oliver…mostly enact the pure arrogance of the liberal intellectual elite: “Parodying Trump is at best a distraction from his real politics; at worst it converts the whole of politics into a gag. The process has nothing to do with the performers or the writers or their choices. Trump built his candidacy on performing as a comic heel—that has been his pop culture persona for decades. It is simply not possible to parody effectively a man who is a conscious self-parody, and who has become president of the United States on the basis of that performance.”
@evolution-is-just-a-theorem about the strikes. Doesn’t sound exactly positive, but that narrative would have a much lower probability of nuclear war.
The general lesson here is of course that, whenever Trump distracts you with some new outrageous shit, you check what was on the news just beforehand.
“military strikes just an expensive political stunt” is the default position, and definitely more reassuring than actual military action, at least to people who weren’t hit by the missiles in question.
I get that, but there are multiple pieces of evidence given towards the default position, so I don’t think being the default position hurts it that much here. Also they did minimize the people hit, so…
“putin being able to respond sanely to provocation is the only reason we’re not in WWIII right now,” certainly sounds a little less reasonable when Trump asked for his permission before launching the strike.
Left now alternates between thinking the Drunken Master is a Master vs just thinking he’s Really Really Drunk. Anyhow, a big Russian oil deal could reduce American reliance on the middle east, lowering the likelihood of getting into dumb wars there. Chew on that, haha.
thermostatic public opinion is a bitch
@evilelitest2 Why do you think this is? With Orange’s isolationist and xenophobic plans you’d think that percentage would go down right?
The thing is, most Americans don’t even understand how trade works or what it is, so they don’t really have consistent solid opinions of it. Basically if their personal economic situation is good and the president says “Trade is good” then they like trade. If the economy crashes, then they will go “Trade was great, fucking anti trade president” if the economy does well they will say “Yes, tursn out he was right, fuck trade” most people don’t know what Trade is so their opinions on the matter will change depending on the moment
but general optimism about the economy hasn’t rebounded that much, has it?
maybe trump’s being unpopular causes opinions (such as trade skepticism) associated with him to sink as well? though i’m not sure if that’s supported by the timing of the graph there
I think Trump really is responsible for this. Eventually I want to write an SSC post presenting more evidence, but here’s some preliminaries:
Some data on immigration attitudes I cobbled together from a couple of different polls on CNN. The dashed line is a different poll than the solid line but the two polls matched pretty well when I had data for both. It looks like there’s an unusual deviation from the trend, in favor of immigrants, right when Trump started campaigning.
Ratio of people who prefer amnesty to deportation for illegal immigrants. Again, people became a lot less accepting of deportation right about when the Trump campaign started.
I think two things are going on here:
First, most people don’t like Trump - remember, he lost the popular vote to the least-popular Democratic candidate ever. These policies are associated with Trump, so now people are against these policies. It’s the same as all those Republicans who hated Obamacare but liked (the broadly identical) Romneycare. The strongest form of this is that now that the media has convinced us there’s an “alt-right” and many people are in it, everyone is tripping over themselves trying to signal that they’re not “alt-right”-ists. We’ve all read that study about “extreme protests” by now, and in a sense the Trump movement is the most extreme “protest” of all.
Second, ever since Trump started focusing on these issues, the anti-Trump media (ie the entire media except Breitbart and maybe Fox) has been going into overdrive talking about how great foreign trade is, how immigration is at the center of what it means to be an American, and so on.
This was predictable and I predicted it (see eg Part VII here). And it’s why, when the issues I care about get coded conservative (eg free speech), I keep trying to convince conservatives not to bring them up. God help us if the Culture Wars ever start centering on free speech as thoroughly as they’re centering on immigration right now.
Also, Trump didn’t promise to eliminate trade, he promised to “get better trade deals”, which may be confounding this. If they actually do something about the trade deals and this potential net flow of goods or whatever tax, the trade deficit might start to balance out, and trade would no longer be as threatening to those workers.
