rolling “Trump is gonna win” containment thread

your pedantry has stomped me once again

this thread is a crowded roomful of people staring at a clock while they jab their elbows into the ribs of everyone around them.

i do worry about those 2-3 months by the way. they will probably be critical months for coronavirus response.

is there any scope for changing the inauguration date or is that written into the constitution?

It’s in the constitution

Man that wasn't very smart. It's like writing a dependency into a core library (or something? you know what I mean)

Just think: until 1936 Inauguration Day was in March!

y'all

this thread is a fucking nightmare, ok? it's just a complete fucking nightmare. first y'all started circling around the aberration-vs-culmination debate that's been going on since 2016 (it's both), then neanderthal jumps in to ask people to please not use the word "gaslighting" because he disagrees with the context in which it's being used, and now tombot has jumped into shit-talk a in-thread-terms ancient post by unperson just so that he can express his personal repulsion and disgust at what unperson is saying

i understand we all got our own emotional shit right now, our own extremely heavy emotional shit, but for god's sake people need to start learning to take control of their own shit instead of putting their own personal shit on other people who, whether or not they "deserve" it, don't fucking benefit in any measurable way, none of us benefit from it

oh yeah we allegedly can't do anything about the president until november, so let's just spend the next three months telling people on the internet how wrong they are and how they're the real fucking enemy, right?

this board was in a fucking death spiral anyway. huge chunks of the best posters here have quietly walked away this year, and their reasons are their own, but whatever the reason, i don't blame them, i hope they're doing better than some of the people on this cursed thread, i hope they have some people who can support them and who they can support and who they can interact with ways that are better than this.

#onethread and it's fucking this one.

Counterpoint: personal compulsions aside, this and the Biden thread in particular are actually pretty easy to avoid.

My question for the post-Trump era (whenever that is) is how much of his bullshit will be easy to reverse? He's reviled by our erstwhile allies, might that actually make it *easier* to rebuild trust? And the SC and judges are one thing, but all his executive orders, can't they just be executive ordered away again? My biggest concerns on this front, per W., is the bullshit he's promoted that will stick around as stubbornly as TSA shoe screenings. Will whatever border wall has been built up bigger be ... taken down? Will the families he has rounded up on the border simply be ... released? The Iran deal, I don't know how you undo that undoing, but something like the Paris Climate Accord, can the US just ... rejoin it? The various vindictive tariffs, will the US just end them? And so on.

I did not ask people not to use the word "gaslighting", I asked people to stop misusing it. because gaslighting is a form of intentional, psychological emotional abuse, and Dan S accused milo of gaslighting simply because he felt milo was downplaying Trump's corrupt behavior.

accusing people of a form of emotional abuse simply to win an internet argument isn't something I'm cool with, even if that's not what Dan was intending to do, and I'm seeing it everywhere lately.

much easier to nitpick each other than punch the bullies. same as it ever was

"Counterpoint: personal compulsions aside, this and the Biden thread in particular are actually pretty easy to avoid."

hmmm, what i will say, and this isn't just me, i've seen it mentioned elsewhere, is that there is a mood, a tenor to the board, and that transcends what goes on in any one individual thread. this seems like some sort of variation on "if you don't like it, don't read it", and while certainly nothing anybody is saying in these threads is equivalent to the open hate speech one sees on twitter, facebook, whatever, ilx is not just a collection of discrete threads, it is a community, and engaging with ilx while actively avoiding the community... i don't know, i don't do that myself.

"My question for the post-Trump era (whenever that is) is how much of his bullshit will be easy to reverse?

― Josh in Chicago"

short answer is "we don't know".

my personal feeling? my personal feeling is that there has been significant, long-term, possibly irreversible damage done to the legitimacy and the sustainability of american institutions as a result of the trump presidency. i know we've been here before. i know gwb did what he did and then obama got elected and he got a nobel peace prize for SOLVING RACISM FOREVER and all of the stuff gwb did got swept under the rug. obama campaigned on closing guantanamo and he didn't and some people complained about that...

and i'm sorry i can't keep telling this story without getting deeply, deeply sarcastic. do i think obama's vice president, his pale shadow, is going to do a better job than obama did? not really. i think he's going to just try and sweep shit under the rug, make shit go away, just like obama did, and speaking as one of the... things... that a lot of people have, historically, worked very hard to sweep under the rug for the sake of Our Democratic Norms, i'm not super on board with that.

much easier to nitpick each other than punch the bullies. same as it ever was

― reggie (qualmsley)

to be fair, i'm not exactly throwing teargas at anybody.

significant, long-term, possibly irreversible damage done to the legitimacy and the sustainability of american institutions

also to our international relations. i think everyone else gave us a pass on W once we elected obama. to force everyone else to go through another white trash redneck administration (that disbanded our global pandemic response team after colluding with russia to "win" then obstructing the investigation no less) so soon after the bush/cheney financial crash is not good for longterm trust. i worry if trump's reelected the international reserve currency switches from the dollar. say trump loses and biden picks oprah and she's president through 2032 and AOC is president through 2040. eventually there will be another republican president of the US. and s/he'll be worse than w and trump (and nixon and reagan)

He's reviled by our erstwhile allies, might that actually make it *easier* to rebuild trust?

It's a mixed bag. Some of your "erstwhile allies" will miss having such an easy mark in the presidency. On foreign policy, the EU is learning how to mobilize without the USA as an ally & maybe even as an enemy. This makes for a more dangerous world. For allies in the Middle East, the damage is done.

The damage the recent moves against immigration have done to USA universities will take decades to undo, if the American university system as we have known it since the start of the Cold War has that long left. There's nothing a Biden administration can do to undo this damage, whereby foreigners will be less likely to want to risk going to the USA. Everyone now knows how fragile the openness of the USA really is, and will have to judge whether the accordant risks are worth it.

On foreign policy, the EU is learning how to mobilize without the USA as an ally & maybe even as an enemy. This makes for a more dangerous world.

― Joey Corona (Euler)

it makes for a more dangerous _america_ certainly. the permanent loss of america's status as a global hegemon is going to come as a shock to many americans, who are blind to the privilege they still, even now, possess.

Glad we're finally talking about the damage Trump has done to the US's allies. Anti-American sentiment has reached an all-time high in Canada under his presidency and Europeans who hold a favourable view of 45 are almost invariably affiliated with far-right parties such as UKIP, the Rassemblement national, Fidesz, Truth & Justice, etc.

i think anybody in a country other than the us has a right to know the answer to the question:

what are you doing to make sure that this never, ever, ever, fucking happens again?

i want to know the answer to that question too. and whenever i ask it, all i ever seem to get is a lecture about "our democratic freedoms".

maybe you should just take a fucking break instead of telling other people how to fucking post

what are you doing to make sure that this never, ever, ever, fucking happens again?

Kate, just want to say that I appreciate yr posts here and elsewhere.

i think anybody in a country other than the us has a right to know the answer to the question:

what are you doing to make sure that this never, ever, ever, fucking happens again?

Yes, we're all dying to go back to the good old days of Bush/Cheney.

well, now we've seen that millions of Americans desire populist, hip-shooting racist Presidents, it's probably going to be an ongoing risk. We have QAnon kooks winning primaries, as well as White nationalists, and he's emboldened them.

But the other major problem is the expansion of the Executive branch's powers, which didn't start with Trump, but enabled him to enact most of his hate platform without much check and balance from Congress. not that I think the GOP would have ever pushed back on him. we really need new laws enacted to strip some of these excess powers where possible.

I don't know how you stop something like this outright, but one thing is that the faux-cutesy civility politics the Dems played up to the 2016 election belong in the cemetery. Call Nazis "Nazis", punch them too, attack hate rhetoric, and if you're in a position to stop hate, don't get entrenched with "fairness" optics. if you can confirm a SCOTUS judge through a recess appointment in the future...do it. don't ever expect the GOP to play nice again.

then, find and groom damn candidate that can at least appeal to progressives without alienating the moderate voting base but at least excite people. there's always going to be nose-holding to a degree, but at least don't run somebody whose chief quality is who he isn't.

idk why I said "again", as if the GOP has ever played by the rules

"Sending money to the NPVIC campaign. What about you?

― sound of scampo talk to me (El Tomboto)"

ok, i wanna step back and clarify, because looking back i was pretty unclear about who the "you" was. that wasn't a personal question. that question is a question that _america_ needs to answer. _you are not america_.

"Kate, just want to say that I appreciate yr posts here and elsewhere.

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table)"

thanks table! i definitely appreciate what you're saying on this board as well.

Thanks, Kate, for the posts.

^cosign

not gonna lie, today has been very rough

Every time Biden is allowed to speak I go back to worrying

Mail boxes have been removed from the street in Portland, Eugene and Los Angeles today. (Presumably in other cities, too, I just haven't seen footage or reportage.)

Not sure what that achieves beyond inconveniencing people. The stuff in PA is more worrisome.

Inconvenience discourages a lot of voters.

Biden himself is way down on my list of worries, certainly behind mail-in fuckery, foreign interference, Bill Barr, and the Supreme Court

the mail shit is a legit concern, idk if enough to change results, but it's not something that should go uncommented/responded to.

think this can only backfire on Trump

vote by mail doesn't really help either party and if the mail is slow it's gonna piss off a looooot of boomers

Inconvenience discourages a lot of voters.

I get that, but is there any reason to think removing mailboxes in those cities will materially change the results or just generally suck?

I just worry that more of his voters are going to be happy to go vote in person because they think COVID is nbd.

The silver lining of the USPS shit is that it almost certainly makes fully funding USPS into a priority for the Dems. If they get the hat trick in November I expect a USPS funding package by April, if they don’t get the Senate then it could still turn into a piece of the next must-pass NDAA or whatever.

anecdotally at least, the mail shit is already backfiring on him

"is there any reason to think removing mailboxes in those cities will materially change the results"

yes!

So, to recap.

Trump gets famous for telling people they're fired.

A clear majority of people want to fire Trump.

The safest means by which they can do so requires a functioning postal service.

Trump realizes that the postal service works for him. So he fires them.

So now the people who want to fire him need people who he fired, so that they can fire him.

It's like a festival. Of fire.

I think Democrats are going to vote in person in massive numbers

Yep

the fact that they won that Supreme Court seat in WI a few months ago is a pretty strong sign that's the case

Because fuck this guy

That’s a good point, that does make me feel better.

I will drag my wretched corpse to the booth and yell Fuck Yooooooou as I cast my vote, and so will a bunch of other people. Seriously, fuck this guy

I don't want the end result of us voting him the fuck out = another 50,000 - 10,000 people dying tho

the fact that they won that Supreme Court seat in WI a few months ago is a pretty strong sign that's the case

― frogbs, Thursday, August 13, 2020 10:33 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

In fact a huge proportion of votes for that election came in by mail and data like this

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/us/politics/wisconsin-mail-voting.html

is probably a big part of what's driving GOP efforts to find ways to trash legally cast mailed-in ballots

*100,000

i'll gladly do it but i'm in relatively good health

The good news is, there was really no spike in cases here coming from the election, in which tens of thousands of people did vote in polling places. We've had BLM protests, we've had lockdown protests, we had an election, we've had counties with mask mandates, we've had counties without mask mandates, basically the only things that seem to cause real spikes are a) meatpackers forced to work under unsafe conditions because the bosses don't care; b) bars being open.