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The Next President

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I'm not necessarily saying people aren't motivated by positive things, or that only two extremes exist (despite those extremes getting the most attention), just that anger is a more effective motivator.  Obama could not have won if he didn't tap into the frustration the american people had with their government.  Look at all the post Brexit interviews, many from people who regret their vote, and you find their reasoning was that they wanted the establishment to feel their voice, and the same is true for Trump's support and in some respects Obama's support before that.  I have a number of friends who supported Trump, most of which are fully aware he's an unmitigated asshole but didn't care because they angry about Benghazi or emails or some other blown out of proportion scandal.  I don't think it's possible to win an election in the modern age, or at least in the modern US without tapping into the anger and frustration of the electorate regardless of one's sympathies to those feelings.  Like I said before you could put C'thulu on the ticket and 40% of the population would vote for him based on whether there was an R or D next to his name. It's really about winning those 10,-20% of voters who end up swinging the election one way or another, and in terms of being helpful, what could be more helpful than winning?  Even back as early as Adams' presidency after Washington mudslinging has been present in the background of the electoral process, while virtue is paraded publicly.  I know I'm coming off brash here, and I apologize for any offense i might be causing, it's just that I'm incredibly frustrated with my liberal leaning friends who insist that an institution and process like politics, marked by deception, enmity and defamation literally since it's inception can be won nicely.  It simply can't, it never has been, and while I wish those things weren't true, people outside of particular circles couldn't give less of a shit about winning by the high road.  This election should have been the easiest thing in the world for Democrats, they just weren't willing to be honest about the process or their position in it.

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2 hours ago, Twig said:

lol what

 

Yeah, I'm not happy about it. It's so short-sighted, but there were TV ads that showed ratlike politicians struggling to get into a large safe containing your money and they couldn't. Thanks, Amendment 4! It's hard to argue against that imagery, even if Missouri is an under-funded state, especially on its roads and school, and governments need taxes to operate.

 

45 minutes ago, itsamoose said:

Obama's campaign, while defined as hopeful and along racial lines in most respects, still had a large portion of it that was a backlash to the previous administration.  Clinton on the other hand found herself selling more of the same, which doesn't really work in a country as distrustful of it's institutions as the US.  Imagine how different the response to Clinton would have been if her message had been that she was fighting the establishment her entire career, she'd been stymied at every turn, made to support things that were wrong because of the culture of Washington, and finally sought the office of the president because she was tired of politics as usual and wanted to finally have the influence to flip the system on it's head.

 

One of the interesting things I read, courtesy of staying in touch with people at my Midwestern alma mater, is why Iowa went for Trump despite doing very well under Obama, with the lowest unemployment in the nation. Iowa is prosperous, by post-2008 standards, but polls and interviews show that Iowans don't feel prosperous, partially because the recovery has been gradual enough that they aren't able to assign it any agency and partially because enough of them know people in Kansas, Wisconsin, or Michigan who aren't still doing well and make any good times feel like a fluke. Sure, Brownback and Walker are really to blame there, but I think a lot of people (liberal elites included) vote for presidents as wish-fulfillment and Obama's slow, growing prosperity just wasn't enough for some people.

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35 minutes ago, itsamoose said:

I'm not necessarily saying people aren't motivated by positive things

Basically, though, every call to action, every pointing out of an existing problem, everything except boosting the status quo is something that can be portrayed as 'angry'. That's a lot of why the stereotypes of angry feminists, angry black women, etc exist -- because whenever these people point out very real systemic problems, regardless of the actual tone they use in doing so, it is regarded as anger. And, furthermore, that anger is regarded as a 'negative' emotion. Anger and hope aren't mutually exclusive, though: Anger and hope exist together, because both want things to be better. So, yeah, you can't run a successful campaign now without agitating for change, because the status quo is fucked. And no matter how nicely you fight for change, it's gonna look like anger, and maybe in some sense it is.

 

There's nothing to aspire to in the mindset that prefers serenity over actual human life and justice. That is not more positive than anger or frustration. The democrat party has failed to learn this, over and over again, and the people who they've left behind in their refusal to actually fight for any principle are pretty fed up.

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2 hours ago, Gormongous said:

One of the interesting things I read, courtesy of staying in touch with people at my Midwestern alma mater, is why Iowa went for Trump despite doing very well under Obama, with the lowest unemployment in the nation. Iowa is prosperous, by post-2008 standards, but polls and interviews show that Iowans don't feel prosperous, partially because the recovery has been gradual enough that they aren't able to assign it any agency and partially because enough of them know people in Kansas, Wisconsin, or Michigan who aren't still doing well and make any good times feel like a fluke. Sure, Brownback and Walker are really to blame there, but I think a lot of people (liberal elites included) vote for presidents as wish-fulfillment and Obama's slow, growing prosperity just wasn't enough for some people.

 

I'm in Iowa and yeah, I think there's a lot to this. And the other part of this is that unemployment doesn't tell the whole story... there are a lot of young people underemployed, and older people who feel stuck in a job with increasing pressure and dwindling benefits. The "America is already great" message was pretty tone deaf.

 

The other thing I'll say about Iowa is that it's reeeeally white. The older generations here (including a lot of Democratic voters) don't even seem to recognize Trump's racism as a problem. To quote @JonathanCohn on Twitter, "Prejudice may not be the motivating factor for all Trump voters, but black, brown, and LGBTQ lives simply do not enter their moral calculus." I think people here were more offended by Trump saying pussy than by any of his racism and sexism.

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This piece on Clinton's get out the vote effort written by a couple of Sanders organizers was interesting. It aligns with my own experiences, which were of the Sanders campaign frequently contacting me via text during the primary season to alert me of local campaign events and then contacting me twice on primary day reminding me to vote (and probably would have continued to do so until the polls closed if I hadn't responded and said I'd already voted) and the Clinton campaign contacting me all of once via text two weeks before election day asking me last-minute to volunteer at an event.

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11 hours ago, pkirkner said:

This piece on Clinton's get out the vote effort written by a couple of Sanders organizers was interesting. It aligns with my own experiences, which were of the Sanders campaign frequently contacting me via text during the primary season to alert me of local campaign events and then contacting me twice on primary day reminding me to vote (and probably would have continued to do so until the polls closed if I hadn't responded and said I'd already voted) and the Clinton campaign contacting me all of once via text two weeks before election day asking me last-minute to volunteer at an event.

 

Although I did get approximately 5-6 emails per day from the Clinton campaign (not an exaggerated number). Always basically the same copy, but with different signature lines (Hillary, Bill, Joe Biden, both Obamas, etc.) asking me to donate odd amounts like $27.

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This prescient article, on Cracked of all places, seems to echo the comment on "America is already great" being tone-deaf. Life in rural America seems bleak. It's got to be galling to be told to "check your privelege" when you're living in a leaky trailer, and you see all the money going to the cities. Trump pretends to listen, and suddenly, it doesn't matter he's a billionaire from the city, or that he's said fucktons of reprehensible things - here's a guy that's offering easy solutions to complicated problems. It's seductive, even if deep down, you know he can't deliver.

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39 minutes ago, Beasteh said:

This prescient article, on Cracked of all places, seems to echo the comment on "America is already great" being tone-deaf. Life in rural America seems bleak. It's got to be galling to be told to "check your privelege" when you're living in a leaky trailer, and you see all the money going to the cities. Drumpf pretends to listen, and suddenly, it doesn't matter he's a billionaire from the city, or that he's said fucktons of reprehensible things - here's a guy that's offering easy solutions to complicated problems. It's seductive, even if deep down, you know he can't deliver.

 

I can understand the sentiment of that if you're choosing between someone who has easy solutions to complicated problems and someone who says there's no problem.

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1 hour ago, tabacco said:

 

Although I did get approximately 5-6 emails per day from the Clinton campaign (not an exaggerated number). Always basically the same copy, but with different signature lines (Hillary, Bill, Joe Biden, both Obamas, etc.) asking me to donate odd amounts like $27.

Those amounts are used to fiddle with average donation size numbers. Sometimes they have symbolism. When I was working with Fight for $15, we were selling shirts for $15 and used it as a suggested donation amount.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2016/11/10/im-a-muslim-a-woman-and-an-immigrant-i-voted-for-trump/

 

So this came up in my feed and, well, as much as I related to it. I couldn't help but feel that it was a little selfish. That said, the points about Saudi Arabia and Qatar were well made, I am just worried that Trump is no better.

 

I have a couple of other friends in the same boat, because Trump is such an isolationist - they are happy because they expect it to mean that he will be too busy closing borders to bother fucking up the middle east as much as the previous Presidents. Something that they saw Clinton as intent on doing.

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1 hour ago, twmac said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2016/11/10/im-a-muslim-a-woman-and-an-immigrant-i-voted-for-trump/

 

So this came up in my feed and, well, as much as I related to it. I couldn't help but feel that it was a little selfish. That said, the points about Saudi Arabia and Qatar were well made, I am just worried that Trump is no better.

 

I have a couple of other friends in the same boat, because Trump is such an isolationist - they are happy because they expect it to mean that he will be too busy closing borders to bother fucking up the middle east as much as the previous Presidents. Something that they saw Clinton as intent on doing.

 

Quote

The checks and balances in America and our rich history of social justice and civil rights will never allow the fear-mongering that has been attached to candidate Trump’s rhetoric to come to fruition.

 

Hm, that is very optimistic. 

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Do they realize that it seems likely that Putin will destabilize eastern Europe by invading sovereign nations because he knows that the US wouldn't stop him?

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6 hours ago, jennegatron said:

Do they realize that it seems likely that Putin will destabilize eastern Europe by invading sovereign nations because he knows that the US wouldn't stop him?

...no. I mean, let's not sugarcoat it, most people don't really know lots of relevant stuff. This isn't just limited to people who vote for Trump, of course, but it definitely applies to people who vote for Trump, and especially when we look to them to explain their votes, they fair pretty badly there, because you add in the normal amount of ignorance (which is pretty high) plus the additional issue that Trump is a horrible candidate who is terrible along any line of reasoning that you could use and still sound reasonable (even if you're mistaken in that line of reasoning) and thus they're making the additional mistake of thinking Trump matches up with what they want.

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I wrote about this shitshow for my blog thing yesterday. I'm just going to dump the entire text here rather than link it.

 

---------------------------------------

 

President Trump.

 

President Donald fucking Trump.

 

The last few days have been strange. There was a kind of trick we played on each other as kids, where we’d hold one fist on the other person’s head, hit it lightly with the other hand, and trickle our fingers down across their hair, telling them we just broke an egg on their head. If you had the right touch, it could be an effective illusion. And that’s kind of what it felt like – a shock, too light to hurt exactly but unignorable, followed by a creeping feeling as the egg that wasn’t there slid down the scalp, the neck, slimy.

 

That slimy creepy feeling is still there, placed in honor of a slimy creep. Every day when I wake up I have to remind myself of the way my country has chosen to self-mutilate. President-elect Donald; Donny P; King Trumplefuckle, first of his name. That feeling has mostly subsided now, the numbness as mostly faded.

 

What’s left is rage.

 

Anger’s not that interesting to talk about, but god damn I feel it. It twists my guts up. And I’m trying now to figure out how to let it stray far enough away that I can think straight while still keeping it on a leash to make sure I never lose it. We’re going to need anger and outrage. Anger at injustice is the lattice that holds hope together, that affects change, that can protect and sustain us through what is likely to be one of the most dangerous eras in American history.

 

There’s a part of me that wants blood and violence, that wants to scour the country with fire until the cancer of white supremacy is burned to ash. I won’t say that violence is categorically unjustifiable, especially in a confrontation against those who believe that lynchings are an acceptable tactic. However, these are the minority of the opposition. We won’t defeat them by crushing them. We will defeat them by discrediting them. This work was begun but never finished: We must make the concept of white supremacy as disgusting nation-wide as it always should have been. We must make the very idea of race entitling you to a better life, making you mentally or physically superior, as a sick fantasy, masturbated to in dim light briefly before the curtain of shame falls.

 

So, yeah, normally I like to talk about video games here. I will, again, soon. The world carries on, and art is still important – terrifyingly so. Our culture has gotten away from us, has founded itself in lazy reinforcements of stereotypes rather than new stories that teach new ways of being and seeing. We’ve chewed up and regurgitated tropes that have lasted for far too long, colonialism and racism and sexism dressed in new clothes so we could pretend that’s not what they were any more, so that we could do things the easy way, so we could just hide behind paying tribute to the classics, so that we could make art that just reinforced the same ancient and lazy thoughts that have motivated the worst violence of the past centuries.

 

That’s what I have to say to the artists. Do good, and do better, and try to ease pain and light a way to a better place. Also endeavor to spread diversity both through the work you do and the work you boost. It makes everything more varied and vital and interesting, and maybe if people will be a bit less cavalier with voting for xenophobia if their favorite musician or artist or whatever will be hurt by it. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

 

However. Good art isn’t enough to fix this, which is a huge disappointment since that’s the field I tend to be most interested in.

 

First and foremost, we need to talk about harm reduction. Protect and take care of yourself. Survival is protest. Once you’ve made yourself as safe and comfortable as you feel you need to, protect and care for your friends and family. And so forth, it echoes outwards, together creating the most safety we can for each other, to our friends, to their friends, to strangers on the street and on the bus. Solidarity. We must come closer together. We all have our differences, and someday will probably need to negotiate those, but now we have a lot more in common and a much bigger problem that needs solving. These communities may be needed if the police fail to function, which is quite possible when they’re compromised at the state level – especially since, even before that became a concern, they often failed to actually serve the communities they were assigned to.

 

I won’t say things are going to be okay, but we have the power to make things more okay than they would otherwise be.

 

After that, we need to do everything we can to keep the ground we have gained over the past century. Obstruct, obstruct, obstruct: Fortunately we’ve had a good example set for us over the past 8 years by the GOP. Don’t let them do a fucking thing. Bury them in yellow tape, make sure not a single change goes by uncontested for four years. Our lawmakers have to be told that this is what we want. It’s fine: Democrats have a proven track record of getting nothing done, so they should be up to the job.

 

If things are going to get anywhere near as bad as I think they will, there are going to be deaths. Actually, there already have been: Several suicides on the night of the election and day after. But the full damage remains to be seen. When it manifests, we must do everything we can to tell the story. We must draw the line from the human suffering effect to its root cause in policy and rhetoric. Avoid accusation, but make the conclusion obvious and unescapable: The voice of guilt must come from within.

 

America has made many mistakes, and Americans know it, even if they don’t like to say so. Much of what went wrong with this election was a lack of a narrative, but this provides us with a powerful narrative for the next election: Redemption. “Everything has gone wrong, everything is fucked up, but it’s not too late: Together we can fix this”. It’s a powerful message, but for it to be effective we need to have a wide consensus that things are fucked. Obviously, with Trump in charge they will be, but that’s not the same as getting everyone to agree that they are – if we’re not careful, the Trump Empire will become the new normal. That’s why the story of the human suffering created must be told, told again, retold, until it becomes widely understood that things are broken.

 

Of course, selling the brokenness is only half the battle. We will also need a plan to put things back together. We’ve needed such a plan for a very long time. The lack of such a plan lost this election. Perhaps something like basic income will be the only effective strategy to combat the extinction of manufacturing and mining jobs: I don’t know. In two years we must be ready with a plan and candidates who are behind that plan.

 

Perhaps most vitally, we must stop letting our opposite define the terms of the conflict. We let them define our defense of our human dignity as ‘having an opinion’, and let them make it a virtue to flout that common decency. We let them pretend that the imaginary transgressions of our candidate were comparable to the many monstrous grotesqueries of their candidate. We let them call themselves patriots while they worked to undermine the constitution and everything this country has ever stood for. Maybe we’re getting smarter about these things, slowly, but we have let far too much slide. So I will say this: If we are ‘Social Justice Warriors’, then let this be the Social Justice War. I, for one, intend to win it.

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Here's an emotional rant that I don't know where to put so I'm putting it in here because it's based on the next president, I guess:

 

We're two weeks in now and y'all, I'm more scared now than I was on election night. It's not a disconnected, abstract fear that I know the shape of, something like what I learned to live with growing up in gay in the American south, but a visceral, deep fear. It's a fear that infests every part of my day, to the point where coworkers I barely interact with or store clerks that I have passing relationships with have looked me in the eye, furrowed their brow thoughtfully, and asked with concern, "Are you doing okay? Like, really -- are you okay?"

 

I wake up every day to see this white nationalist tapped for a White House position, or that homophobe put in a position to impact national policy, and I'm scared for what it means for myself, for the people I care about, and for the people I try to help through my work and my activism. I'm a utopian, and for years I've lived each day trying to achieve this vision of the world that I had. I cope with my depression by trying to make the world a more bearable place to live in, and I've just lost the ability to picture that world anymore, much less devise a course of action to help bring it closer to reality. All I can make myself hope for now is to make it a week without someone yelling faggot at me out of their car while I'm waiting at a bus stop, and man, what a dark world that still is. I'm stuck helping people rush to prepare for a worse tomorrow -- helping my friend pay for their name and gender marker change, connecting people I know to communities that can offer a port of calm in the coming tempest. I'm not working for a better tomorrow anymore; I've had to shift into working for a tomorrow that we can just survive.

 

I ask questions sometimes in the course of political discussion -- what do I do with this high grade fear and anxiety that now permeate every aspect of my existence? How do I try to make the world better when I can't even picture what that better world looks like? And I feel like I'm screaming them into the void anymore, that they get lost in the dispassionate discourse of politics where we have these numbers over here and those laws over there, disconnected from the real impact that politics have on all of us. But these are real, honest, vulnerable questions: What do we do now? How do we learn to live with these real regressive threats looming over our heads? I wake up every day and have to make decision that today I can do this. I can live with this fear and function in the world and try to make it better. But sometimes I can't make that decision. I'm just too fucking scared, and it's so exhausting.

 

I never saw it coming to this, and I'm just so scared. What do I do about it?

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I'm also in a period of reassessment.

My method of coping in the meantime is watching gospel organist videos on Youtube between reading articles about politics.
 

 

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6 hours ago, Mangela Lansbury said:

I never saw it coming to this, and I'm just so scared. What do I do about it?

 

I can only speak from my experience, but finding something that brings peace and practicing it when necessary is a relief. I like driving at night with the windows down and music up b/c I'm a dork from Southern California. I'm also getting into learning about hair care and using coconut oil. Maybe you can find peace in exercising, mindfulness/ guided meditation, creative expression, enjoying art, etc. Or maybe you need to do something that makes you feel powerful like learning to shoot a gun or taking a judo class?

 

Pain is going to happen, that's unavoidable, but make sure to take of yourself while taking care of others and find people in your life that will take of you as well- people that will make you feel not alone.

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I found this article pretty helpful as a way of processing the politics of Trump as psychological warfare, and I've been able to reflect a little better on my own emotional state.

 

I'm also doubling down on efforts to give back to the community, and that is helping somewhat.

 

EDIT: Forgot to post link to article, thanks Clyde!

http://thebaffler.com/blog/against-bargaining-penny

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59 minutes ago, sclpls said:

I found this article pretty helpful as a way of processing the politics of Trump as psychological warfare, and I've been able to reflect a little better on my own emotional state.

 

I'm also doubling down on efforts to give back to the community, and that is helping somewhat.

 

What article?

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I've never had anything diagnose-able, but for what it's worth, I find that picking hobbies that improve me rather than just distract me has been really helpful for giving me a sense of control. Back in the day when it was just video games, I'd play games for an evening and then turn around and still feel terrible that nothing in my life had improved but time had passed. As time has gone on, I've got heavily into guitar and have started going to the gym three times a week as well. When I'm doing either of those things, I'm still not thinking about what's bothering me. When I'm done, I can turn around and say "AND now I'm better at a real skill/healthier than I was before!"

 

Being able to see and mark improvement in my ability to play and physical health/appearance as a result of my hobbies has given me a very important feeling of control over my life when I'm down that I didn't have before doing so. I know our situations are very different (I'm a straight white male, and also in Canada), so take that for what it's worth. Hang in there. It's got to get better than this, and there are enough people out there who have your back and are going to work to make sure that it does.

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Good advice, Miffy!

 

There's a transcript on the NYT about a meeting they held with Trump and it's... they are asking reasonable questions and he is just bloviating his way through. It's tiring to read the way he speaks [without managing to say anything yet repeating everything twice or three times]. It's preposterous the way the staff tries to interest him into questions about climate issues by tying it into the state of his golf courses - the way you'd goad a child into caring. Not that they do this, but that apparently it's the only way to engage him.

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Man, the last week has been insanely exhausting. Friday was super depressing, the Women's March was the most uplifting thing I've seen in a long time, and now I'm back to depressed after today. I've been slowly getting more involved with local politics by calling representatives, doing the Women's March and future protests, and helping my local Democratic club but holy shit, I really hope the next 4 years don't continue to be this intense.

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The basic idea of this article is that Mike Pence is no stranger to disaster capitalism, where prevention of disasters isn't incentivized because a disaster can create the sense of urgency needed to gain the political will to circumvent labor-laws and give out no-bid contracts. 

This goes along with the idea that libertarians are putting people in power who are incapable of governing so that they can have more reason to privatize all social programs. 

DeVos and her brother are excellent examples of this effort.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/get-ready-for-the-first-shocks-of-trumps-disaster-capitalism.html

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