Honestly this must be the first time in ages I've clicked on this thread and it's actually been about Trump.

Among the surprising things about this is that 1) Greenwald can be affable 2) I can agree with him more than I disagree with him.

lol wut?

Hey yeah, that was pretty good. He even brought up the disease analogy for American politics that I think is apt.

Yup, that's Clinton.

"Red America is increasingly a backwards region economically. ****ing losers, amirite?"

Rather than

"Red America is increasingly a backwards region. We should do something to help improve their conditions and quality of life."

Well, she was inching toward the second version you wrote by implying that the blue states had somehow figured out how to advance economically and that therefore Trump wasn't going to be able to help those red states, but the whole thing is just so phony and contrived anyway.

Was she going to say something positive? She went from saying, first, that Trump voters were destitute to, second, saying that they were racist, and then that Trump won by appealing to their racist tendencies. She's depicting them as undeserving poor.

No, you are right: she was being completely arrogant, and from the triumphant tone of her voice, seemingly unwittingly.

In fact, I remember watching the DNC, and simply thinking how abrasive and forced everything she said was.

She is not a good politician at all.

Right??? What's stunning is how anyone thought she could win at all. I wouldn't say that I "called it", but I did think throughout the campaign that she was in trouble, and that the only thing she had going for her was who her Republican opponent was. Her flaws reminded me too much of John Kerry in 2004. She and Kerry ran similar campaigns: both of them were boring and had little charisma, and both of them ran as responsible technocrats who would push back against Republican excesses. They both promised that if you can tolerate them as bad candidates they'd be good presidents.

It's so troubling how many people actually think that Trump is the problem itself and not merely an indication that there is something more fundamentally broken in our society. Very prominent people are hocking the idea that if you remove Trump then America will reverse its decline, as if we haven't spent the better part of the past two decades watching institution after institution fail, seeing it get worse and worse, and wondering all along if it could culminate in authoritarian rule.

Speaking of the continuity thesis, another thing to consider (I think I've brought this up before) is that Trump's rise is not explainable only as a popular mobilization (or response) to the immediate historical circumstances of the past few years (namely, the slow economic recovery). Rather, it is an outcome of Trump's strategy of exploiting splits within the Republican coalition. One of the largest blocs (if not the largest) within the Republican coalition is what we now call the Trump base, even though it existed long before Trump. Before we called it the Trump base, we called it the Buchanan base: it's so large that it's splintered from the Republican party in the past and cost the Republicans presidential elections, for example, in '92, and '96. In '92, Ross Perot's run flat out cost Bush 41 the election (Clinton only got 43% of the popular vote). Trump's rise can be explained partially as a strategic move to mobilize these same voters (who had the same frustrations with American internationalism and with coastal elites in the early 90s as they do now) and use them to take over the Republican party, rather than to mobilize them to run against the Republican party as a third-party candidate.

This is pretty fascinating:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1992#Results_by_state

One shouldn't assume that a vote for Perot would've been a vote for Bush if Perot didn't run, but look at these numbers. More people voted for Bush + Perot in California than did Clinton, and also in New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania...

Also, the wikipedia description of him:



So many of the ingredients are familiar. It's like what they said about Goldwater and Reagan, that Goldwater won in 1964, it just took them 16 years to count the votes. Perot won in 92, it just took them 24 years to count the votes.

Just look at the first question of this debate. Skepticism of the Democratic and Republican economic consensus is nothing new... which is not to criticize or undermine the skepticism, but only to point out that much of what people say is radical about Trump isn't. In fact, Trump's predecessors were incredibly prominent. To say that his base was a "subterranean" political force would be a gross inaccuracy.

Did Perot cost Bush 41 the election? http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-ross-perot-myth/

Trump fires tillerson ducking lmao

Trump has blocked the proposed hostile takeover of Qualcomm by Broadcom.

A friend of mine is a shareholder and has been getting letters and voicemails for weeks in an attempt to earn his vote in favor of the takeover. And now that was all for nothing. lol

The weird part is, Qualcomm doesn't really do anything secret. Nothing that other IP companies couldn't quickly figure out how to do, at least. Their strategic value is actually their US patent portfolio.

So the US government just blocked the acquisition of Qualcomm in order to maintain US access to a monopoly created by the US government.

I suspect there might be a simpler, long-term solution for this problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/13/us/elections/results-pennsylvania-house-special-election.html

I guess the Trump legacy is that nobody wants to vote GOP anymore.. so.. maybe it's not so bad?

Not that there's not much to cheer for in the Democrats..

It's even more impressive because of the horrendous partisan gerrymander that state currently has. That district was supposed to be safe AF.

The district was such a lock that the Republican incumbent Tim Murphy ran unopposed in 2014 and 2016 and before that won by a 28 point margin.

http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-jr-vanessa-trump-divorce-rumors-2018-3

Sorry for the lowbrow article, but this is too funny:



Trump sure has a reputation among everyone who actually knows him.

And she still married him.

With a divorce in the works. Maybe somebody should have told her that intelligence is partly genetic? Of course money is also hereditary, so maybe she had other reasons for going ahead.

It’s capitalism. Being retarded doesn’t matter as long as you inherit enough money.

Decided to open 4chan for the first time in a long time, just to see how different my perception would be.

Turns out a 4channer livestreamed their suicide just a few hours ago. Made me remember why I never visit that website.

I can't believe I missed that!

That's interesting Reid, but doesn't the (unexpected, admittedly) conclusion of your 4chan visit make it more appropriate for the gun thread?

Do you visit 4chan to just confirm your views on whatever? I'm pretty sure it has a range of different users and the vast majority are just trolling.

Tbf to Reid, if I read about the incident correctly, the guy's suicide became quickly a meme, so it was probably being spammed across all different boards at the time.

Of course, given 4chan's content to begin with I'm not sure this should have come across as too shocking. People on r9k are plotting their suicide constantly, even if they don't livestream it.

Also as for perceptions, well, it's going to vary a lot across boards. I mean if you go to /pol or /r9k you can expect to hate it, but for most of the other boards like /g or /sci or whatever, you're not going to necessarily come across people who are genuinely depressed / doing more than messing around or trolling

My ex was a devout channer, and every few months she'd go "This is bad for my mental health, I'm going to stop." And then a week later she'd get bored and go back to r9k and her toxic views about women/relationships/society. I hate 4chan with a passion, and I have a special disgust for r9k along with its normalization a huge variety of mentally unhealthy behaviors. She tried to tell me /fit/ was a good board, but it's just filled with the same insecure and mentally unhealthy garbage as r9k regarding relationships and normalcy in slightly more PC terms.

The only board I've ever been able to tolerate was /vr/, and that was when I realized it's a website filled with the same threads and the same posts without end. I have the same issue with reddit being samey (along with a host of other issues) and so now I stick to a select set of threads on SA.

I completely agree with you zloc about r9k, and about it bleeding into other boards.

That said, /news seems pretty safe from it since it's low traffic. And there was this on it today which was informative. Although there is still a lot of petty arguments and racist trolling from people coming in from /pol.

I know that there are a few boards that can be okay, but I have a moral opposition to 4chan after that relationship regardless of how small/niche the board may be. This is a really uncommon thing for me, but 4chan is a hard line I refuse to cross.

Elliot Rodger isn't a funny meme, talking about your suicide on a board where it's ambiguous who's serious and who's trolling ****s up the worldview of people who aren't mentally well, and glorifying depression as "yup this is my life now I'm depressed *feels*" (which happened across all boards I ever read) is not okay.

This is just soapboxing, I'm not trying to tell you what to do. Feel free to browse to your heart's content; I do miss reading /ck/ occasionally, they had some funny stuff. I just can't do that website knowing some people IRL who browse it religiously to this day.

Well for the most part I agree with you anyway. I don't browse the site anymore for the most part, although I haven't completely stopped going to /news because sometimes something outrageous floats to the top that is worth a look.

And I also know somebody who was ****ed by r9k. He wasn't even depressed, but he still thought the Elliot Rodger meme was funny. I kind of got angry at him when he kept spamming it in a group chat with another friend, which made me rather uncomfortable. In the end, though, it was the Trump memes that really pushed me over the edge to the point of basically not talking to this guy about memes or politics ever, and now we hardly talk about anything. :-/

what is the elliot rodger meme

is it just... general elliot-rodger-ness

:-/

People who sympathize with him for bad reasons and publicly venerate his graven image.

For example, they'll include the image in a post about how upset they are about being single, etc.

I was not on a board expecting and I got it, yeah.

Do not like or appreciate second hand trauma first thing when I wake up.

Basically this, there are some really funny things that come off that website, but the concentration of severe mental health issues is too much. I used to browse more often and I think it had a negative effect on my mental health. It's important to stay away.

I try to stay away from Twitter.