Donald John Trump: 2016 President-Elect

[millennium]

.

Edited January 7, 2017 by millennium

[KerleyQ]

10 hours ago, sistermagpie said:

Journalists are really going to have to come up with a way of reporting on his lies. You can't just let this guy who is not only obviously clueless about computers but who has publicly made it clear how clueless he is, make statements about how he "knows about hacking" and they just don't know. And you can't just let him make grandpa statements about how things that are really important have to go by courier without pointing out that he doesn't know fuck all about pre-internet communication either because yeah, couriers aren't secure either. Jesus.

I know he hasn't even become president yet but the news shouldn't just continue sticking with old habits by treating him as if they're talking to Obama and whatever he said must be somewhat reasonable. Even if they know it's useless to confront Trump in the moment because he'll just babble and then refuse to talk to whoever again, they can't just print his dumb statements and let them stand.

I'm still flabbergasted by the quote I saw from the editor-in-chief of the WSJ today.  He believes that, if they were to report the stories (and headlines) as "Donald Trump lied and said (insert lie of the hour here)," that it would be unfair and they would be making a moral judgement to use the word "lie."  No, asshat, you use the word lie when someone lies, and you let your readers make their own moral evaluation of the situation based on the facts.  If your readers think Trump is an immoral assclown because he lied, then that's what they think.  If he doesn't want them to see him as an immoral assclown, he can always, oh, I don't know, stop lying?  

I saw a list on Twitter today of some of the A-list entertainers Trump allegedly asked to perform who turned him down.  Among them?  John Legend and The Dixie Chicks.  I don't know which one of those was a more arrogantly stupid ask on his part.  Did he really think either would say "yes"?  

[NinjaPenguins]

He probably thinks he's doing them a favor, KerleyQ. I have to admit, small and petty though it may be, Orange's low-rent inauguration is one of the few things that make me happy. Talk about being told no one likes you on a grand and very public scale. 

[galaxygirl76]

Performing for him can do bigly things to their careers, you know, as long as no one expects to be paid for anything.

[Pixel]

14 minutes ago, NinjaPenguins said:

He probably thinks he's doing them a favor, KerleyQ. I have to admit, small and petty though it may be, Orange's low-rent inauguration is one of the few things that make me happy. Talk about being told no one likes you on a grand and very public scale. 

I love it because it's something that I know bothers him bigly. There's nothing he craves more than validation from the rich and famous. This rejection is eating him up, and I love it. 

[Padma]

1 hour ago, KerleyQ said:

I'm still flabbergasted by the quote I saw from the editor-in-chief of the WSJ today.  He believes that, if they were to report the stories (and headlines) as "Donald Trump lied and said (insert lie of the hour here)," that it would be unfair and they would be making a moral judgement to use the word "lie."  No, asshat, you use the word lie when someone lies, and you let your readers make their own moral evaluation of the situation based on the facts.  If your readers think Trump is an immoral assclown because he lied, then that's what they think.  If he doesn't want them to see him as an immoral assclown, he can always, oh, I don't know, stop lying?  

I saw a list on Twitter today of some of the A-list entertainers Trump allegedly asked to perform who turned him down.  Among them?  John Legend and The Dixie Chicks.  I don't know which one of those was a more arrogantly stupid ask on his part.  Did he really think either would say "yes"?  

I was so happy when the NYT used the word "lie" in a Trump headline.  But...I do kind of get what the WSJ is saying. "Lie" isn't just saying something false--it's saying it and KNOWING that its false.  With Trump, it's pretty well confirmed by anyone watching him that he lies all the time. But from a journalism point of view...I don't know.

Do they plan to use false? As in "Trump Continues to Repeat False Allegation That 3 Million Illegal Immigrants Voted for Clinton"?  They should at least commit to "false" and make it prominent--right in the headline and lead paragraph.

If someone repeats something that has been called out as false several times, maybe they could then hold him accountable for lying. "Trump Continues to Lie About Seeing Thousands of Muslims Celebrating in NJ on 9-11"

I think headlines need to have more info than usual in them, too, because accd to the ed of NYT, most people are reading on their phones and may not get much farther than the headline.

[backformore]

IMPEACHING TRUMP  a huff Post article

Quote

Trump has already committed grave misdeeds of the kind that the Constitutional founders described as high crimes and misdemeanors. With his commingling of his official duties and his personal enrichment, Trump will be in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which unambiguously prohibits any person holding public office from profiting from gifts or financial benefits from “any king, prince or Foreign state.”

Trump, who has entangled his business interests with his political connections at home and abroad, has already declared his contempt for these Constitutional protections. He declared, “The law is totally on my side, meaning the president can’t have a conflict of interest.” Oh, yes he can, and this president will. 

[random chance]

‏

1 hour ago, Pixel said:

I love it because it's something that I know bothers him bigly. There's nothing he craves more than validation from the rich and famous. This rejection is eating him up, and I love it. 

I wish the artists would say they turned him down so that I could make sure I buy their stuff.

[millennium]

48 minutes ago, Padma said:

 

I think headlines need to have more info than usual in them, too, because accd to the ed of NYT, most people are reading on their phones and may not get much farther than the headline.

I don't use a phone.   I have a burner flip phone I keep with me in case of emergency.   Otherwise, no.   I have never looked at a website on a phone.  I have never used an app.

If you could see how discouraging the world looks from my eyes -- people with their noses in their phones while walking their dogs, people unable to wait a minute or two in a line at the bank or supermarket without opening their phones,  people unable to attend a public concert or celebration event without obsessively recording rather than enjoying, folks at family gatherings sitting around a table checking their phones rather than talking to each other, kids and teenagers addicted and enslaved, probably for life, the new President tweeting words like "totally" and "Not!" and "losers" -- you might never use one again.

Sometimes I feel like the only person awake in a roomful of sleepwalkers.   I'm not a Luddite.  I've been online since '96.  But I did just fine for more than 40 years without being tied to a phone, and nothing I've seen convinces me that life's better having one. 

From my perspective, phones are rapidly eroding attention spans (like the ability/motivation to read more than a headline), intelligence levels, social skills and empathy for fellow human beings, and, unless something changes soon, phones will ultimately give rise to an American idiocracy (although it may already be too late).

[backformore]

57 minutes ago, millennium said:

If you could see how discouraging the world looks from my eyes -- people with their noses in their phones while walking their dogs, people unable to wait a minute or two in a line at the bank or supermarket without opening their phones,  people unable to attend a public concert or celebration event without obsessively recording rather than enjoying, folks at family gatherings sitting around a table checking their phones rather than talking to each other, kids and teenagers addicted and enslaved, probably for life, the new President tweeting words like "totally" and "Not!" and "losers" -- you might never use one again.

Preach it!  Kids as young as 2, if they have to sit in a grocery cart or wait in a doctors' office for more than a minute, get a phone shoved in front of their faces to distract them from, I don't know - LIFE?    Kids playing at the park, parents not interacting with them at all, just looking at their phones.  I had a teenager tell me the other day that she and all her friends "track"  each other on their phones.  So, they can check to see where everyone is, who is meeting whom, worry if they're being left out, etc. 

What does this have to do with politics?  people will have a site like facebook, reddit, and scroll through to see the headlines - and miss everything, because they're not reading the articles.  If you see something enough times, you might start to believe it.  Just like those weird "click-bait"  links at the bottom of this site, trying to convince me that Harrison Ford AND Mark Harmon have a number of children with facial tattoos and  piercings.  It has to be true, right?  I've seen the photos!    If people kept seeing headlines saying "Hillary's corrupt", and never read the stories, they figured it was true. 

So, how do we get all these people to look at their phones and see "TREASON!  Trump has ties to Russia"?  

[QQQQ]

Each and every time Fondle Rump says, "I know more than everyone else and will reveal all on Tuesday  (Wednesday, etc.)..." ALL networks need to go to breaking news that day, with reporters assembled wherever Herr Trump happens to be, and keep playing Trump's boast to share his knowledge. "As promised by President Trump, we're expecting to hear from him any moment..." 

Also, I was going to share this comment with forum readers via personal courier but my budget is a bit tight following the holidays.

[Spartan Girl]

14 hours ago, DeLurker said:

Been watching the Harry Potter movies over winter break with my daughter. Last night she suggested we should just call him VoldeTrump.

Which is an insult to Voldemort. At least he didn't tweet every single thing that popped into his head. And most of the wizard world was smart enough to realize what he was capable of.

If anything, Trump reminds me more of Cornelius Fudge: an angry, short-sighted power hungry little man that only hears what he wants to hear and is going to screw us all over because of it.

[Pixel]

That ćourier thing reminds me of my elderly mother, who won't use an ATM because she's afraid her money won't get into her account and won't use her credit card online because thieves might get it. It doesn't matter how many times I tell her that her card information is already online - her bank put it out there when the card was assigned to her, and if she's used it even once at a store or restaurant, it's already out there. Meanwhile, I'm over here like, "What's that weird looking greenish paper you have in your hand?". I rarely use cash and literally have not spoken to a teller at a bank since the day I opened my account there 15 years ago. 

Edited January 2, 2017 by Pixel

[sistermagpie]

11 hours ago, Padma said:

If someone repeats something that has been called out as false several times, maybe they could then hold him accountable for lying. "Trump Continues to Lie About Seeing Thousands of Muslims Celebrating in NJ on 9-11"

I think in Trump's case it's just enabling to not call it a lie. Because the whole alleged justification is that calling it a "lie" implies that there's some sinister intent where as with Trump he just says whatever pops into his head that would be good if it was true in the moment.

Calling it a lie isn't just important for readers of the newspaper. It is absolutely giving Trump too much validation to say "Trump says X...but we found no proof of X" as if there's any chance that Trump might have some information they don't have. It's important for Trump to keep saying over and over again that yes, saying whatever you want in the moment even if it's not true and contradicts what you said yesterday is a lie. Trump was lying about these Muslims cheering in New Jersey the first time he said it the same way he was the fifteenth time he said it.

5 hours ago, QQQQ said:

Each and every time Fondle Rump says, "I know more than everyone else and will reveal all on Tuesday  (Wednesday, etc.)..." ALL networks need to go to breaking news that day, with reporters assembled wherever Herr Trump happens to be, and keep playing Trump's boast to share his knowledge. "As promised by President Trump, we're expecting to hear from him any moment..." 

Yes, basically use what he used to screw them over with the Birther announcements (remember when he said he was going to make a big announcement and tricked the press into covering his new hotel opening before saying Obama was born in the US) and keep hammering him with it. It might not get to him but at least keep reminding the public that when he makes these bullshit announcements about how he's going to tell you next week, it's just a way of deflecting. And then call that a lie. Then you can say, "Trump says he's got a big announcement for next week but he's lied about this many times in the past..."

Edited January 2, 2017 by sistermagpie

[DeLurker]

10 hours ago, millennium said:

I don't use a phone.   I have a burner flip phone I keep with me in case of emergency.   Otherwise, no.   I have never looked at a website on a phone.  I have never used an app.

If you could see how discouraging the world looks from my eyes -- people with their noses in their phones while walking their dogs, people unable to wait a minute or two in a line at the bank or supermarket without opening their phones,  people unable to attend a public concert or celebration event without obsessively recording rather than enjoying, folks at family gatherings sitting around a table checking their phones rather than talking to each other, kids and teenagers addicted and enslaved, probably for life, the new President tweeting words like "totally" and "Not!" and "losers" -- you might never use one again.

Sometimes I feel like the only person awake in a roomful of sleepwalkers.   I'm not a Luddite.  I've been online since '96.  But I did just fine for more than 40 years without being tied to a phone, and nothing I've seen convinces me that life's better having one. 

From my perspective, phones are rapidly eroding attention spans (like the ability/motivation to read more than a headline), intelligence levels, social skills and empathy for fellow human beings, and, unless something changes soon, phones will ultimately give rise to an American idiocracy (although it may already be too late).

TV has taught me that only no-goodniks use burner phones, so you're clearly on some Most Wanted Lists.

I say the PE is proof it is too late. 

9 hours ago, backformore said:

Preach it!  Kids as young as 2, if they have to sit in a grocery cart or wait in a doctors' office for more than a minute, get a phone shoved in front of their faces to distract them from, I don't know - LIFE?    Kids playing at the park, parents not interacting with them at all, just looking at their phones.  I had a teenager tell me the other day that she and all her friends "track"  each other on their phones.  So, they can check to see where everyone is, who is meeting whom, worry if they're being left out, etc.

 

Off Topic - I was Christmas shopping in a toy store and they had a number of versions of Baby's First Phone and I thought "Ha!  No baby is going to be fooled by this plastic crap after they have repeatedly handled the parents zillion dollar smart phones. 

Isn't the bolded part Introductory to Stalking?

6 hours ago, QQQQ said:

Also, I was going to share this comment with forum readers via personal courier but my budget is a bit tight following the holidays.

I considered using smoke signals, but figured smog would be a problem.  I'm looking into carrier pigeons.

3 hours ago, Spartan Girl said:

Which is an insult to Voldemort. At least he didn't tweet every single thing that popped into his head. And most of the wizard world was smart enough to realize what he was capable of.

If anything, Trump reminds me more of Cornelius Fudge: an angry, short-sighted power hungry little man that only hears what he wants to hear and is going to screw us all over because of it.

True, true...and Voldemort had disturbingly large hands too.  Fudge is a much better choice. 

We should work on a recasting of HP using politicians.  Pence = Umbridge in my version.  He's got that same pinched look about his face.

Edited January 2, 2017 by DeLurker
Oops! Used umbrage based on definition.

[sistermagpie]

12 minutes ago, DeLurker said:

We should work on a recasting of HP using politicians.  Pence = Umbrage in my version.  He's got that same pinched look about his face.

Can you imagine what JKRowling would have done with an HP character based on Kellyanne Conway?

[Spartan Girl]

12 minutes ago, sistermagpie said:

Can you imagine what JKRowling would have done with an HP character based on Kellyanne Conway?

I assumed Hagway would be Umbridge...although maybe that Spicer guy would be a contender for a male Umbridge.

[Duke Silver]

[Duke Silver]

And in general:

[izabella]

^^ Sadly, that's all too little, too late. 

[Duke Silver]

It can still be enough to cause roadblocks to Trump & Goons legislative agenda.  Elected officials need to be elected.  They sure as fuck better care about public opinion (and they do).

Edited January 2, 2017 by Duke Silver

[Wordly Wise]

10 hours ago, millennium said:

Sometimes I feel like the only person awake in a roomful of sleepwalkers.   I'm not a Luddite.  I've been online since '96.  But I did just fine for more than 40 years without being tied to a phone, and nothing I've seen convinces me that life's better having one.

New poster here. In fact, I joined just so I could laud this post, and especially this part. That is exactly how I feel. Smartphones are good to have in an emergency, or to check weather on the go, but that's it for me. I cannot fathom a life lived hunched over a tiny screen, but I think we've already seen the effects of such a society with the election.

[Duke Silver]

16 minutes ago, Duke Silver said:

It can still be enough to cause roadblocks to Trump & Goons legislative agenda.  Elected officials need to be elected.  They sure as fuck better care about public opinion (and they do).

And this is why I was trying to get people to not place all their hopes in the Faithless/Hamilton Electors.  Too many people I know IRL were crushed by the inevitable: Trump winning the EC vote.  They've given up.  The fight is just starting.  If you think it's all over now, then it is.  I get being bummed, but fuck...come on.  Resist and don't just accept that Trump & Goons will get everything they want.

Edited January 2, 2017 by Duke Silver

[Lunata]

http://investigatingtrump.com/

Edited January 2, 2017 by Lunata

[sistermagpie]

7 minutes ago, Duke Silver said:

And this is why I was trying to get people to not place all their hopes in the Faithless/Hamilton Electors.  Too many people I know IRL were crushed by the inevitable: Trump winning the EC vote.  They've given up.  The fight is just starting.  If you think it's all over now, then it is.  I get being bummed, but fuck...come on.  Resist and don't just accept that Trump & Goons will get everything they want.

The article linked on this forum recently was really good at putting that into perspective--the bus boycott went on for something like 385 days. This is going to be a long fight we need to stick with. It's a slog. That doesn't mean it's useless.

[Pixel]

10 minutes ago, Lunata said:

http://investigatingtrump.com/

Bookmarked. 

[KerleyQ]

12 hours ago, NinjaPenguins said:

He probably thinks he's doing them a favor, KerleyQ. I have to admit, small and petty though it may be, Orange's low-rent inauguration is one of the few things that make me happy. Talk about being told no one likes you on a grand and very public scale. 

I think I know why he asked John Legend.  John and Chrissy have been very vocally against Trump from the start, and one of the specific things I've seen them say is that his economic policies would be very financially beneficial to them, but, they don't want the financial benefits when it comes to the trade off of having this assclown as their POTUS.  Asking John to perform may have been some attempt by Trump to show that he can, in fact, be bought.  We all know how petty he is.  So the inauguration performance invite may have been like his dangling the SoS post in front of Mitt to prove he could get him to come around for the right price (the price being the highest profile cabinet position in Mitt's case).  

12 hours ago, Padma said:

I was so happy when the NYT used the word "lie" in a Trump headline.  But...I do kind of get what the WSJ is saying. "Lie" isn't just saying something false--it's saying it and KNOWING that its false.  With Trump, it's pretty well confirmed by anyone watching him that he lies all the time. But from a journalism point of view...I don't know.

Do they plan to use false? As in "Trump Continues to Repeat False Allegation That 3 Million Illegal Immigrants Voted for Clinton"?  They should at least commit to "false" and make it prominent--right in the headline and lead paragraph.

If someone repeats something that has been called out as false several times, maybe they could then hold him accountable for lying. "Trump Continues to Lie About Seeing Thousands of Muslims Celebrating in NJ on 9-11"

I think headlines need to have more info than usual in them, too, because accd to the ed of NYT, most people are reading on their phones and may not get much farther than the headline.

I think they can definitely find a balance for the right time to use "lie."  Like you said, he has repeated many "facts" that have been proven false.  No need to sugarcoat it at that point.  It's also totally appropriate when it comes to things that we know he knows - like when he denies saying things he said.  There's no reason to not call that out as a lie.  Those aren't cases of him being ill-informed or mis-stating something.  

9 hours ago, backformore said:

Preach it!  Kids as young as 2, if they have to sit in a grocery cart or wait in a doctors' office for more than a minute, get a phone shoved in front of their faces to distract them from, I don't know - LIFE?    Kids playing at the park, parents not interacting with them at all, just looking at their phones.  I had a teenager tell me the other day that she and all her friends "track"  each other on their phones.  So, they can check to see where everyone is, who is meeting whom, worry if they're being left out, etc. 

What does this have to do with politics?  people will have a site like facebook, reddit, and scroll through to see the headlines - and miss everything, because they're not reading the articles.  If you see something enough times, you might start to believe it.  Just like those weird "click-bait"  links at the bottom of this site, trying to convince me that Harrison Ford AND Mark Harmon have a number of children with facial tattoos and  piercings.  It has to be true, right?  I've seen the photos!    If people kept seeing headlines saying "Hillary's corrupt", and never read the stories, they figured it was true. 

So, how do we get all these people to look at their phones and see "TREASON!  Trump has ties to Russia"?  

I agree, the short attention span that has been created by the whole 24/7 face in phones thing contributes to the problem.  The most terrifying example is driving.  It's disturbing to see how many of your fellow drivers are texting, taking pictures, posting on social media, etc while driving.  The worst part is that the worst offenders seem to be my demographic - women in their 30's-40's.  I'm looking at them and thinking "come on, I know you have lived a good deal of life without cellphones/texting/social media.  You know damn well it's entirely possible to drive without having a phone plastered in your hand."  I ended up contacting the police about a woman who works at my son's school.  The drive to his school is about 15-20 minutes, depending on traffic, and this woman lives near us, so we often end up near her on the road in the morning.  Every time we were by her, you could see her taking driving selfies, texting, doing her makeup (including mascara, who the hell does mascara while driving??).  And she was swerving all over the road, fully into the oncoming lane at times.  Thank God we never saw her get into an accident, but she was also doing this while in the school neighborhood, where there are a lot of kids who walk.  I finally talked to the police for the city the school is in, since the school zone use is what alarmed me most of the whole scary mess.  They used her license plate to track her down and had a talk with her.  Then they told me "whenever you see someone driving unsafely like that, call 911 and report it, so we can send an officer out to handle it."  I told the officer "honestly, if I was to do that every time I saw someone swerving all over, using their phones, you'd need to triple your officer staffing levels. All you'd be doing is responding to calls about swerving drivers."   

6 hours ago, QQQQ said:

Each and every time Fondle Rump says, "I know more than everyone else and will reveal all on Tuesday  (Wednesday, etc.)..." ALL networks need to go to breaking news that day, with reporters assembled wherever Herr Trump happens to be, and keep playing Trump's boast to share his knowledge. "As promised by President Trump, we're expecting to hear from him any moment..." 

Also, I was going to share this comment with forum readers via personal courier but my budget is a bit tight following the holidays.

Yep.  You can almost guarantee that, whenever he makes this big announcement about the stuff he "knows" about the hacking, it will be similar to that scam press conference about the birther shit that was really a commercial for his new hotel.  We'll get next to no information on the hacking (because whatever he does know is stuff he won't admit to, since it implicates him and his buddy Putin), and the real gist of the announcement will be something self-promotional.  I think I can even guess what his announcement will be.  There's a former UK diplomat who has been working with Assange or years.  He claims that he was in the US in September, and a member of the DNC personally handed him the emails in question.  I've seen his story described by journalists as "disorganized and implausible."  More than likely, Assange deployed him to push his "Putin is innocent, and we obtained these emails from someone who had legal access to them, so no crime has been committed" narrative.  Trump would absolutely promote that angle.  

If cost is an issue, you could always just rubber band your comments to the leg of a passing bird.  Tell them it's for the PTV Trump forum.  Just don't use a blue bird.  Those are for twitter use.  

1 hour ago, Pixel said:

That ćourier thing reminds me of my elderly mother, who won't use an ATM because she's afraid her money won't get into her account and won't use her credit card online because thieves might get it. It doesn't matter how many times I tell her that her card information is already online - her bank put it out there when the card was assigned to her, and if she's used it even once at a store or restaurant, it's already out there. Meanwhile, I'm over here like, "What's that weird looking greenish paper you have in your hand?". I rarely use cash and literally have not spoken to a teller at a bank since the day I opened my account there 15 years ago. 

Older people are weird about the whole credit card security thing.  I've had to explain to more than one older relative that the whole "I don't sign the back of my credit card so a thief can't copy my signature if they steal my card" thing actually makes things easier on the thief.  If they get your credit card and it's blank in the signature line?  They just get to make up their own signature for you, and the store clerk will be none the wiser (if a store clerk even bothers to look at the back of your card in the first place).  

17 minutes ago, Duke Silver said:

The takeaway here?  44 percent of the people polled aren't very smart.  The man is a walking scandal.   Hell, I think he'll be disappointed if he doesn't manage a scandal or two during his reign.  He loves that stuff.  It's all attention, and any attention is good.  

[Duke Silver]

[HunterHunted]

On 1/1/2017 at 11:04 AM, Lunata said:

One thing the press has been guilty of in my opinion anyway, is that they gobble up the 'click bait' and instantly make news out of one of Trump's stupid impetuous tweets. They do that because people want to read it on the website of who they're working for whether it's CNN, Washington Post or Fox.

If news reporting wants to be taken seriously again then they'll have to start focusing on the bigger picture and not the momentary impulsive tweets that really don't amount to a hill of beans in the bigger picture. They're so quick to point out that he's emotional unstable that they're missing the bigger stories about what he's really doing or planning to do. Those tweets are nothing really. They're only his way of manipulating, inflaming and getting people to notice him. If the legitimate press can restrain themselves from falling for that type of manipulation then maybe he'll get less attention about it and cut it out or at least scale it down.

I've been thinking about that. In 2007, the AP decided that they weren't going to report about Paris Hilton anymore unless she did something actually newsworthy like died. A lot of other news outlets followed suit. Soon after, the bulk of her business moved overseas. My brother asked me recently what she does for a living. She does club appearances and has clothing lines and fragrances. My brother was shocked that anyone would pay her for that. People do, but not in the US. Simply ignoring someone or failing to write/talk about someone can do a lot to undercut their power and influence.

I agree that the press should be ignoring his tweets or at least dealing with them differently. A story about his tweets should never be above the fold. It should never include Trump's name in the headline. When he is clearly wrong on the facts or the law, the article should devote its headline and the bulk of the text in the article educating the reader about the facts or the law. Any mention of his tweets in the article should be brief and only long enough to explain how incorrect the tweet is. The focus should be on the truth. When the headline and the bulk of the article includes his incorrect assertions, we give power to the lies.

Edited January 2, 2017 by HunterHunted

[walnutqueen]

10 hours ago, millennium said:

I don't use a phone.   I have a burner flip phone I keep with me in case of emergency.   Otherwise, no.   I have never looked at a website on a phone.  I have never used an app.

If you could see how discouraging the world looks from my eyes -- people with their noses in their phones while walking their dogs, people unable to wait a minute or two in a line at the bank or supermarket without opening their phones,  people unable to attend a public concert or celebration event without obsessively recording rather than enjoying, folks at family gatherings sitting around a table checking their phones rather than talking to each other, kids and teenagers addicted and enslaved, probably for life, the new President tweeting words like "totally" and "Not!" and "losers" -- you might never use one again.

Sometimes I feel like the only person awake in a roomful of sleepwalkers.   I'm not a Luddite.  I've been online since '96.  But I did just fine for more than 40 years without being tied to a phone, and nothing I've seen convinces me that life's better having one. 

From my perspective, phones are rapidly eroding attention spans (like the ability/motivation to read more than a headline), intelligence levels, social skills and empathy for fellow human beings, and, unless something changes soon, phones will ultimately give rise to an American idiocracy (although it may already be too late).

I've never owned or even used a cell phone.  I also have no use for social media.  If that makes me hopelessly old-fashioned, I'm at peace with it.  I've already mostly removed myself from a society I feel increasingly alienated (present PTV company excepted).

 

19 minutes ago, Duke Silver said:

And this is why I was trying to get people to not place all their hopes in the Faithless/Hamilton Electors.  Too many people I know IRL were crushed by the inevitable: Trump winning the EC vote.  They've given up.  The fight is just starting.  If you think it's all over now, then it is.  I get being bummed, but fuck...come on.  Resist and don't just accept that Trump & Goons will get everything they want.

I'd like to see much more fight in a generation with so many more tools to get informed and organized.  Maybe that's the problem - there are just too many disparate "movements" and options available.  We had maybe one radio station that played the same protest songs we all knew, sit-ins and rallies were telegraphed by word of mouth and flyers on telephone poles, and the 24 hour "news" cycle didn't exist.

[Lunata]

11 hours ago, millennium said:

I don't use a phone.   I have a burner flip phone I keep with me in case of emergency.   Otherwise, no.   I have never looked at a website on a phone.  I have never used an app.

If you could see how discouraging the world looks from my eyes -- people with their noses in their phones while walking their dogs, people unable to wait a minute or two in a line at the bank or supermarket without opening their phones,  people unable to attend a public concert or celebration event without obsessively recording rather than enjoying, folks at family gatherings sitting around a table checking their phones rather than talking to each other, kids and teenagers addicted and enslaved, probably for life, the new President tweeting words like "totally" and "Not!" and "losers" -- you might never use one again.

Sometimes I feel like the only person awake in a roomful of sleepwalkers.   I'm not a Luddite.  I've been online since '96.  But I did just fine for more than 40 years without being tied to a phone, and nothing I've seen convinces me that life's better having one. 

From my perspective, phones are rapidly eroding attention spans (like the ability/motivation to read more than a headline), intelligence levels, social skills and empathy for fellow human beings, and, unless something changes soon, phones will ultimately give rise to an American idiocracy (although it may already be too late).

I also have very little use for a phone. I have one, but it's the kind of phone that's used mostly for emergencies. It's a Tracfone flip-phone. Yeah, it's a little embarrassing when I have to pull it out to use in public but too damned bad if anyone thinks it's stupid looking. I use it mainly in the car connected to Bluetooth so I can contact police or EMS if I have trouble while traveling. I also communicate with my husband in a casino when we lose each other. He's deaf in one ear and doesn't usually hear it so he usually holds it so he can feel the vibrate. I can't hear it with all the casino noise so I usually stick it inside my bra to feel the vibration when he calls.

This country is obsessed with gadgets and electronics. These devices have taken us into a very secluded place where the only thing we're connected to is on a screen or in an ear bud. This is what has happened to Donald Trump. Because he has a  mental disorder NPD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) usually accompanies it. He can't stop Tweeting, he never will. We're going to have a Tweeting President! This is a very bad thing. What was meant to be a convenience for people has become an obsession. Our country is a country of users not producers. We use 'stuff', we don't design, develop and sell our ideas, we buy others.

The issue of who can access information stored on your electronic devices has become increasingly controversial in the last year, with authorities obtaining search warrants to unlock smartphones for everyone in an office building, courts ruling that police can force smartphone users to give up their devices’ pass-codes, and federal lawmakers trying to force weakened encryption on consumers. Now, police investigating a homicide are hoping to get a look under the hood of Amazon’s Echo speaker to see if its virtual “Alexa” assistant might have recorded evidence of a murder. This translates to Big Brother not only watching your every step with hidden cameras, but tracking your whereabouts on your phone and now seek to have the legal right to know what you're own voice has recorded inside the privacy of your home. This is scary shit and all done 'for our own good' of course.

Personally, when I'm a passenger in a car, I'd rather be watching what's going on outside of the car rather than staring at a phone. I am not a fan of Facebook or Twitter either, but it's necessary today to be able to follow and comment on Twitter accounts like Donald Trump. I have no friends or family on my Facebook, again.....I use it only to be able to comment on others page. I don't need to know that my nephew jogged 3 miles this morning and had a green shake for breakfast. I don't need to play 'candy crush' and I certainly don't need to see a photo of someone's baked tuna casserole photographed as if it's going to be on the cover of Gourmet magazine. The bottom line in all this technology is that it's making us all less and less connected instead of making us more connected. We're virtually connected to social media and people halfway around the world, but we haven't chatted across a fence or hallway with a neighbor in years. There's no friendships being made, there's only social contacts.

[Duke Silver]

Between reading this Twitter thread & Eichenwald's Newsweek piece about Trump's so-called "conflicts of interest" (I prefer to keep it simple & use "corruption" like the GOP does about everything related to Clinton Foundation ), the extent of potential foreign influence is mind-boggling.

[Lunata]

39 minutes ago, Duke Silver said:

And this is why I was trying to get people to not place all their hopes in the Faithless/Hamilton Electors.  Too many people I know IRL were crushed by the inevitable: Trump winning the EC vote.  They've given up.  The fight is just starting.  If you think it's all over now, then it is.  I get being bummed, but fuck...come on.  Resist and don't just accept that Trump & Goons will get everything they want.

I agree, the fireworks show is yet to begin. The Trump team is still lining them up and can't decide which to fire off first.

Joe Biden is right there, ready and waiting. He has already challenged the GOP.  (minute 0:17)

[stillshimpy]

Quote

Meanwhile, I'm over here like, "What's that weird looking greenish paper you have in your hand?". I rarely use cash and literally have not spoken to a teller at a bank since the day I opened my account there 15 years ago. 

 

 

I pulled this quote because it's the sentence that got me thinking about something:  absolutes in any direction, any form of inflexible thinking is kind of the way this stuff happened rather than  "if everyone else would just shape up and be more like me, we'd have a better world" because everyone believes the way they do things is the right way and others should follow suit.  They are  just as convinced that however they do things is how things just ought to be done.  

Realistically, part of the reason people are constantly shoving phones into the hands of tiny children is that it gets them to be quiet and well-behaved in public.   Same reason I always had toys, or a book, or moms used to carry giant diaper bags packed with stuff you hoped would keep your kid quiet enough in public so that you wouldn't be running the gauntlet of disapproving stares everywhere you went, lest your kid act too kid-like in public.  It also helps give parents a freaking break.   People on dates, at dinner, just constantly attached to phones like to have a social buffer between themselves and others.  There really are a whole host of reasons that people do things and it usually isn't just down to one thing.  For every "I just don't want my kid to scream the restaurant down around us, okay?" parent, there's going to be one that just wants to put their kid on pause for their own sake.   There are a lot of complex reasons that go into that, some of it has to do with the constant fear of judgment that our "never read the comments" social media world both instills in people and instigates at the same time.  People seeking to engage while also trying to insulate themselves from others.  It's this contradictory thing but it plays a part.  

I think that historians -- if we actually make it that far -- will have a field day breaking down the reasons this shit show has happened.   There's going to be a lot to it.  For instance, why did journalists feature so much Trump material?  A big reason is ratings.  Hardly anyone under forty watches TV in any conventional sense any longer.   Hell, the only people I know who have cable TV are older than fifty (or big sports enthusiasts as that's one of the few things that still benefits from "I tune in live, quite easily" ).   

People who stream everything hardly ever saw any actual political ads or commercials for anything.  I saw exactly one and it was while we were out to dinner.  God knows what it was saying, but I glanced behind the bar and a cartoon Hillary Clinton was rampaging around with a chainsaw on the TV.  I'm not kidding.  It was such a case of "What the fuck was that?" and it was almost absurdly sinister.  It made me laugh because I thought "who in the world is that gullible?"  Apparently lots of people.   Then I end up with the knowledge that I'm clearly a little naive myself, as I did not believe people full-grown people could be convinced of such idiocy. 

One segment of the vote that Trump just wrapped up with a bow was the senior citizen vote.  Trump's Graying Army, as The Atlantic termed them.  I'm truly not seeking to demonize senior citizens, either, but just as in the above quote: they are more easily convinced of conspiracies and are actually a segment of the population targeted for fraud a lot of the time because it's part of the aging process:  aging people are very attracted to being told what they already want to think.   This is also a group with a lot of internalized misogyny because they've witnessed a sea change in the world during their lifetimes and some don't like that.   They are also treated as being less and less important by those around them and because we're social creatures that tend to group by type, there have been a lot of studies about how that also adds to views of anything that sparks the "that's an Other" designation.   That's not to say all seniors are racist either, just that Trump killed in a particular segment of the population who didn't mind hearing racist, sexist things constantly because they'd likely heard them as children.  Heard people they loved growing up saying worse.    They weren't the natural disqualifiers that they were for people brought up in places where objectifying women into a menu of body parts or calling people from other places horrible names was called out as bad.   

Then they are also the group that was most likely to see those ads I just referred to.   The most likely to tune into TV news broadcasts.  

That's going to be one part of what the hell just happened.   There's bound to be some bright-eyed doctoral student who, having shed her body weight in tears over the last month, will now commence a long thesis on the workings of internalized misogyny in America because that played a big fucking role in this too.  The positively idiotic things people convinced themselves Hillary Clinton had done is almost hilarious....except for how now that Woman Hating Tangerine Tumor and Pence are on deck  and represents such danger to the LBGTQ community, I can't think about it for more than three minutes at a time without wanting to go crawl under the bed and pull the world in after me.   

Then there's also things that played a part in getting us to this Trumpocalypse which Bill Maher has talked about and has to do with excessive word policing and extreme political correctness.  That part of what went into "Well, alarmingly it seems that a fuckton of people are terrifyingly comfortable with racism and sexism in the most overt terms, in 2016, what the actual hell?"  is going to be the segment of the population who felt like they never got anything right anyway, since the goal post kept moving in ways they didn't understand.    I do know several people I suspect voted for Trump, one is a small business owner, she's actually a very nice person and very caring towards others in most ways.   She's exceptionally proud of her daughter-in-law for all the foster children they take in, the first to donate to one charity drive I helped with to benefit mentoring of women in the inner-city by donating interviewing outfits, complete with accessories.   Just saying, she's not a bad person.   She lived in Texas for years though and I met her in when I lived in Missouri.  We never talk about politics because she knows I'm very liberal,  but I had to explain to her one day that one of our neighbors was not, in fact, "married to an Oriental" as only objects could be termed Oriental, as it was a trade route, etc.   To her credit, she understood that, put it into use and understood the distinction, but she said something during that conversation that is part of what I'm talking about, "I have to update my vocabulary more than an update my wardrobe"  and she chuckled kind of ruefully.   We had that conversation in 2014.  She's in her late fifties and one thing that she said just kind of stuck with me, "that was the polite term when I was growing up, the racist term was....." (and she proceeded to say something that I'm just flat-out not going to repeat).    She has a college degree in Art History,  she's traveled, met all sorts of people and she thinks she's open-minded.   She doesn't know that she's engaging in coded racism pretty much all the time.   

So there's that factor too, people who aren't horrible racists in the classic sense, engage in coded racism (like telling me the race of one of our neighbor's spouses for no other reason than to randomly bring up his race), thought they were trying to get it right and felt like they were always getting it wrong anyway.   So that when people very rightly pointed out things like, "Holy shit, how can you be okay with this blatant racism??"  I'm assuming that part of what went into is that feeling of "Well, hell, I get accused of that.....and I know I'm not....." etc.    And yes, I'm aware, this otherwise nice woman, who does try to help others, is actually racist.  It's just she really doesn't actually know that about herself and I'm sure that's part of why she discounted it in Trump.     

This list could just go on and on.   How we got here is a long road that includes things like the role of algorithms in determining the content that you see in your ads online, and all that.   People hang out in echo chambers and just scream a lot anyway.    That's all before you get around to factoring in Russian-aided, strategically planned info dumps by people like Julian Assange.   Or the even stranger thing that a lot of people became more kindly inclined towards Russia when they sheltered Edward Snowden, who is a key figure in people really understanding that the government has a tendency to view all of us as potential enemies, that it can be a lot more difficult to get het up over promised civil rights violations against other people when you've already accepted that your own are routinely violated.   

That's still not even close to the whole ball of wax on that "How the fuck did we get here?  That man isn't just offensive, he's dangerously unqualified and giving ample evidence that he's unfit to serve and may be mentally unstable on top of everything else."   

Somewhere in the future, a sobbing cultural anthropologist will weep for our lack of sense.   Remember all the things you learned that people did in the past, that are just so damned stupid that you can't believe it ever caught on?  "Oh, they used arsenic in fabric dyes and wallpaper and powdered their face with lead-based  cosmetics.   Used opium to soothe crying babies and....."  and you thought, "Wow, before the spread of easily accessible and reliable information, we were really our own worst enemies."   

It turns out that with almost limitless information, we're just as self-destructive.   We went from a bunch of "we'll believe anything, have some more laudanum!" types to people who used the tools to seek out information to further shore up fallacies in their own minds.    I mean, when you can honestly use the term "fake news" and there are clearly still people happily yumming down on that stuff  the answer isn't that "it all has to do with our phones" but that the freaking call was coming from inside the house, you know?  

Edited January 2, 2017 by stillshimpy

[PatsyandEddie]

shimpy, your post is a thing of beauty! So succinctly put! 

[sistermagpie]

7 minutes ago, stillshimpy said:

One segment of the vote that Trump just wrapped up with a bow was the senior citizen vote.  Trump's Graying Army, as The Atlantic termed them.  I'm truly not seeking to demonize senior citizens, either, but just as in the above quote: they are more easily convinced of conspiracies and are actually a segment of the population targeted for fraud a lot of the time because it's part of the aging process:  aging people are very attracted to being told what they already want to think.  

I admit, when I hear about senior citizens so in the tank for Trump I always think about an old joke from I think SNL from years ago with Sam Waterson doing a commercial for robot insurance. It was basically just aimed at senior citizens telling them how the robots were coming so they needed to have insurance for when the robots came to get them. With cheap shots of old people answering their door and getting attacked by robots. So I hear some of these people ranting and think, "Robot insurance." it goes nicely with the classic, "Old Man Yells At Cloud."

And I know that not all ss are like this at all--I have family members that prove it. I'm just hoping I don't turn into one one day.

[izabella]

@stillshimpy, I think the one other big thing you left out is religion and older people.  My MIL lives in Betsy DeVos land, and is a very kind, thoughtful lady.  But her Christian megachurch told her to vote for Trump, over and over, because of abortion and LGBTQ and crooked, demon Hillary.  My MIL volunteers at a food pantry and is always working for causes to help people in other lands, while, at the same time, not understanding that changing to a system of voucher schools means more of those poor children she helps feed will be further segregated and more poorly educated.  Her sons patiently kept explaining things to her that her  church got wrong, but it wasn't until Trumputin told us he grabbed women by the pussy that she realized she couldn't vote for him.  She still believed the crooked Hillary stuff, though, so went with Gary Johnson (in Michigan, dammit!), so she was zero help, and neither was the rest of her church. 

Religion played a big part in this election, in some unsavory ways.

Edited January 2, 2017 by izabella

[Lunata]

5 hours ago, KerleyQ said:

If cost is an issue, you could always just rubber band your comments to the leg of a passing bird.  Tell them it's for the PTV Trump forum.  Just don't use a blue bird.  Those are for twitter use.  

 

Maybe Trump has a bird in mind for his courier service. A vulture carrying a dark omen of scary news.

Edited January 3, 2017 by Lunata
yeah I misspelled courier, sue me

[KerleyQ]

14 minutes ago, stillshimpy said:

So there's that factor too, people who aren't horrible racists in the classic sense, engage in coded racism (like telling me the race of one of our neighbor's spouses for no other reason than to randomly bring up his race), thought they were trying to get it right and felt like they were always getting it wrong anyway.   So that when people very rightly pointed out things like, "Holy shit, how can you be okay with this blatant racism??"  I'm assuming that part of what went into is that feeling of "Well, hell, I get accused of that.....and I know I'm not....." etc.    And yes, I'm aware, this otherwise nice woman, who does try to help others, is actually racist.  It's just she really doesn't actually know that about herself and I'm sure that's part of why she discounted it in Trump.    

My son and I watched Michael Che's stand up special on Netflix last night, and he talked about this very thing in one segment of it.  He talks about how the way to fight racism (or similar issues like homophobia) is through honesty and not biting people's heads off the second they say something racist.  One of the lines he had was about how he has a friend who is a trans woman, and she finally told him one day that his use of the term "tranny" was offensive.  He responded with "but, it's just adding a y.  How is a y offensive?"  Her response was "so you'd be OK if I started calling you 'blacky'?"  Honest conversation is a far more effective way of getting people to understand why something they do or say is offensive.  Like your example, there are a lot of good people out there who, for various reasons, including things like what they grew up around, what area they live in, or what different groups they've been around, may have some ideas, words, or behaviors in them that they don't realize are offensive.  They're going to naturally bristle when they feel like you're trying to lump them in with people like the KKK, nazis, or Westboro Baptist Church.  When they are lumped in with those groups because of the use of one word, then they're going to have more sympathy for someone like Trump when he is lumped in with them.  For so much in life, I believe that education is the answer. And it isn't always formal education.  Education comes from sitting down and having a conversation with someone who can contribute their life experience and knowledge to your own.  

Of course, there are those who are happily racist.  They're not going to change their opinions or behavior no matter how many honest conversations you have with them, because they know they're racist.  They're happy to be racist, and they genuinely believe that they are, by virtue of the color of skin they were born with, better than those who were born with a different skin color.  I'm not under any illusion that sitting down with them to talk about why the N word is offensive is going to create any change in their attitude.  (And, honestly, the N word is one which falls outside of my "have an honest discussion with them about why the word is offensive" theory.  Anyone who has heard that word more than once knows exactly what the word is.  They know it's racist.  They know it's offensive, and they know the power it has to hurt.  If they choose to use it anyway, they're making a conscious decision to engage in racist behavior.)  But there is a whole range of people in between those groups and those who never say or do something that is racist/phobic.  I believe that the people in that middle ground are capable of understanding and changing, but that can't happen if they aren't given the chance to do so.  

[Lunata]

1 hour ago, stillshimpy said:

It turns out that with almost limitless information, we're just as self-destructive.   We went from a bunch of "we'll believe anything, have some more laudanum!" types to people who used the tools to seek out information to further shore up fallacies in their own minds.    I mean, when you can honestly use the term "fake news" and there are clearly still people happily yumming down on that stuff  the answer isn't that "it all has to do with our phones" but that the freaking call was coming from inside the house, you know?  

It was all a great post 'STILLSHRIMPY' but the last paragraph really illustrated exactly what has happened. We're a technologically advanced society but technology has made us a very lazy one too. Introspective people can walk in the shoes of their ancestors who may have struggled and worked hard just to make ends meet, we don't want to. People don't care what their ancestors before them had to do just as long as they don't have to. Now we have the entire world of information right in our hands and get access anything we choose to. So, what are we looking at? YouTube cosmetic guru's showing us how to apply layers of eye-shadow to look like Kylie Jenner. Instagram photos of celebrities doing the duck pout. Internet retail websites for purchasing worthless stuff to replace the worn out worthless stuff we already have.

People are seeking out news on websites that will only validate their own opinion, not to change them. Fact isn't fact. lies are truths, people make the choice. Imagine a world without all this free ambiguous information so readily available? We'd have to seek information the hard way, through newspapers written by real journalists that have degrees in journalism. We'd have to go to the library again to do research (remember those days?) We'd have to learn to be discerning about what we read and what we trust. The bottom line is that despite having every imaginable electronic device invented that has the capability to give us any information we need, we're becoming less informed, less discretionary and less educated. We trust too easily, we believe more than we should and we don't question deeply enough. Putin was right years ago when he said that he has no worries about the U.S. because "they are destroying themselves from within."

Edited January 2, 2017 by Lunata

[stillshimpy]

Thank you, PastyandEddie, I can honestly say I'm not often told I put something succinctly (or concisely) ;-)  Could be my habit of always using 15 words when 3 would likely do, but that was a super kind thing to say and I appreciate it.  

Quote

 

@stillshimpy, I think the one other big thing you left out is religion and older people.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

You're absolutely right, izabella, that is another factor.  As are the single-issue voters who would have voted for Beelzebub if it meant fewer regulations in the banking industry.   Or looked at the last eight years of obstructionist government and decided this "He's an outsider!" (and that also means he has no fucking clue how to do any of this....oh what giddy prospects that brings with it....WASF) was a selling point that they would take any nasty terms of service agreement addition to try and see if that would help.  The single-issue voter played a big part and I'm not very good at guessing their motivations.  

Quote

My son and I watched Michael Che's stand up special on Netflix last night, and he talked about this very thing in one segment of it.  He talks about how the way to fight racism (or similar issues like homophobia) is through honesty and not biting people's heads off the second they say something racist.  

 

 

 

I should add, I did not tell my friend, "Don't say that, it's racist"  I told her a version of "don't say that because the Orient was a trade route, so that's why objects, such as rugs can be called Oriental but people are......"   I didn't tag it with any shaming words.   

There's actually no sin in being ignorant of anything.  The problem comes in when people reject learning new things or take not knowing something as a mark against our own intelligence.   It never will be.   None of us can know everything that is to be known.   We're all going to be learning throughout the course of our lives and we are all, if we are lucky enough to live that long, going to be the dinosaurs to future generations.   

Everything we believe right now is likely to grow, evolve and change, hopefully for the better and we will all look positively quaint and backward  to those that come after us.   It pays to be kind when encountering it in others because man, we are all going to be in that hot seat sooner or later, as the world changes around us.   

Edited January 2, 2017 by stillshimpy

[Duke Silver]

[sistermagpie]

38 minutes ago, KerleyQ said:

My son and I watched Michael Che's stand up special on Netflix last night, and he talked about this very thing in one segment of it.  He talks about how the way to fight racism (or similar issues like homophobia) is through honesty and not biting people's heads off the second they say something racist.

I feel like there's also the issue that racism isn't just calling people slurs or even the wrong name. I've talked to people where it's amazing just how much of their worldview comes down to ethnicity, as if biology is destiny. It's exactly like that one guy wrote about the community in which he was raised--racism is ingrained in it. Doesn't mean people use rude words or consider themselves racist. If asked they'd say God loves everyone the same. But they absolutely think that everyone has their proper place and white people, men, straight people, cis people--they belong in the superior place. They don't notice that they always give the white person more benefit of the doubt etc. They just point at inequality and see it as a confirmation of their own bias as being true. In the article the guy even pointed out that the only thing that made his father soften a bit on gay rights was having a beloved family member who was gay. But even then he didn't change his view on being gay as wrong, he just adjusted his view so that he could love this person despite their being gay. The hierarchy of the world wasn't wrong.

[backformore]

33 minutes ago, KerleyQ said:

They're going to naturally bristle when they feel like you're trying to lump them in with people like the KKK, nazis, or Westboro Baptist Church.  When they are lumped in with those groups because of the use of one word, then they're going to have more sympathy for someone like Trump when he is lumped in with them.  For so much in life, I believe that education is the answer. And it isn't always formal education

Right.  My dad (age 91)  does not think of himself as racist - he respects some people of other races, he doesn't call names.   But - he is racist.  he absolutely believes that it has been proven that Black people are less intelligent and more prone to violence than white people are.  (It's been proven!  Look at the news!) My mom was the same way - she was in a hospital once, and threw a major fit because an African-American orderly transported her to a test.  She was alone in the elevator with him, and was scared to death that she would be raped.  nothing happened, but she still complained to the hospital administrator that she was put in danger.  This is the way most of their same-age friends and relatives think.    My parents were scared of Obama, thought he was pretty much going to lead a revolution against whites.  Trump's bombastic narcissism, to my dad, seems familiar and safe.  

The thing is, that people in that generation were raised to think of Russians and communists as the enemy of America.  Once they actually are faced with trump's dealings with Putin, they will (maybe)  feel deceived.

[KerleyQ]

14 minutes ago, backformore said:

The thing is, that people in that generation were raised to think of Russians and communists as the enemy of America.  Once they actually are faced with trump's dealings with Putin, they will (maybe)  feel deceived.

I was thinking last night about the whole Make America Great Again thing as it relates to Trump's Russian ties.  I think the general consensus is that, when Trump's slogan is generally referencing a period in our history where, coincidentally, we had kids in schools doing bomb drills the same way current day children do lockdown drills in school.  Fear of Russia was a big thing at that point in time.  So it seems really bizarre to me that the same people who are looking back at that time as a time when things were good (and, by that, they mean that anyone who wasn't a white, Christian male knew their place), are, so far, just peachy keen with Putin's attempts to influence our electoral process and the possibility that he may wield some influence over our incoming POTUS.  Because it seems like the Russian threat was, to them, the only real fly in the ointment of those "good old days."  But, now, they may really be getting the full scope of their good old days, Russian threat, and all.  

[sistermagpie]

14 minutes ago, KerleyQ said:

Fear of Russia was a big thing at that point in time.  So it seems really bizarre to me that the same people who are looking back at that time as a time when things were good (and, by that, they mean that anyone who wasn't a white, Christian male knew their place),

Sadly, the short answer is probably as simple as that: The Russians are white, Christian and male now instead of just being white and male. I believe Hitler did not see Slavs as white, but now Putin seems to be a sort of spiritual leader to the Neo-Nazi, white supremacist movement all over the world, so in some ways his change of allegiance is even more stark--the Russians historically have really hated Nazis for obvious reasons. Much more than they hated the US.

[random chance]

1 hour ago, stillshimpy said:

I pulled this quote because it's the sentence that got me thinking about something:  absolutes in any direction, any form of inflexible thinking is kind of the way this stuff happened rather than  "if everyone else would just shape up and be more like me, we'd have a better world" because everyone believes the way they do things is the right way and others should follow suit.  They are  just as convinced that however they do things is how things just ought to be done. 

First I will echo, your entire post is a thing of beauty and I agree with all of it.  I think the paragraph above is probably the root of all conflict - personal and global.

The rest of the unattributed quotes below are also @stillshimpy

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There's bound to be some bright-eyed doctoral student who, having shed her body weight in tears over the last month, will now commence a long thesis on the workings of internalized misogyny in America because that played a big fucking role in this too. 

Oh yeah, and we should have seen it coming because this election wasn't the one that woke me up to just how misogynist the world still is - that was the 2008 election, with how Sarah Palin was treated ... by liberals. Yep. I actually heard women say things like "she should stay home and tend to her children." Liberal, Democratic young women, who you'd think would have belted anyone who suggested women should stay home and tend to their children rather than holding down a job. At the time I thought they were saying this simply because she was on the wrong ticket, (which was bad enough, being hypocritical as all hell), but now I wonder if they're part of that statistic that put Trump in office.

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One segment of the vote that Trump just wrapped up with a bow was the senior citizen vote.  Trump's Graying Army, as The Atlantic termed them.  I'm truly not seeking to demonize senior citizens, either, but just as in the above quote: they are more easily convinced of conspiracies and are actually a segment of the population targeted for fraud a lot of the time because it's part of the aging process:  aging people are very attracted to being told what they already want to think.

Probably especially true if they've got a lot of people telling them they're wrong all the time. Even if they are wrong - for example, there is no Nigerian Prince who will be sending them money - they resent it.

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Somewhere in the future, a sobbing cultural anthropologist will weep for our lack of sense.

So many times I have thought of the John Oliver rant that included the line, “when he’s sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2017, on that day his opinions are going to matter. And you will remember that date because it’s one that time-travelers from the future will come back to to try and stop the whole thing from happening.”

@KerleyQ

You make a very good point with the tran/tranny observation (sorry I accidentally deleted that quote box), I think people are willing to learn so long as they aren't made to feel bad or stupid. That's the key thing. Once you make someone feel bad or stupid, they're going to dig in their heels.

[Pixel]

I work in a predominantly white place.  I've only worked with maybe 5 black people since I started at my place of work. Recently, I had a black woman as a member of my team. As we were getting to know each other, I told her - listen, I'm not racist.  But, I did grow up in a racist environment, and we live in a racist area, so if anything stupid flies out of my mouth, please don't get mad, because I promise I don't mean to be racist. I want you to call me out on it, because I am telling you right now I don't want to hold racist points of view, and if I do say anything offensive, there's a 99% chance I had no idea it was something I shouldn't have said.  

I'm pretty careful about that stuff anyway. My dad would casually drop the n-word and call negotiating prices "jewing them down".  I grew up with that stuff, and it has taken me a long time to not have to think about it before I say certain things.  She only called me out once in two years, and we got along great.

My point, of course, is that I like to believe I helped facilitate a better relationship because if I hadn't opened up that communication, maybe that one time she did call me out she wouldn't have said anything, and it would have become a festering sore between us and ruined our relationship. Even though we no longer work together, we remain friends.

Edited January 2, 2017 by Pixel

[Moose135]

4 hours ago, Duke Silver said:

If you think it's all over now, then it is.

Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

[Duke Silver]