rolling “Trump is gonna win” containment thread

Kate, that's a great post, I honestly think it's just a mature viewpoint -- like, you begin by saying Pol Pot and Stalin are awful, totally obviously true -- but it's actually less mature thinkers who do their own punditry about this, ignoring or explaining away or what-abouting Pol Pot's awfulness, Stalin's brutality toward his own people. You are thinking about the stuff that matters most, imo, in a way that gets you clarity instead of venting your spleen.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/07/18/agreeing-to-our-harm-marilynne-robinson/

Immediately before my partner checked her phone and saw the Supreme Court ruling, we had been reading this long and thoughtful piece by Marilynne Robinson. I found it bracing, in the sense that it literally braced me for another fucking piece being jackhammered loose from the foundations of American democracy.

Marilynne Robinson is probably the only living American author who deserves the Nobel

hard disagree but i am in the minority there, i find her work totally unreadable

How do you feel about Emerson?

i haven’t read him since i was in high school so uncertain. it also has been more than a decade since i tried Robinson so maybe i ought to give her another go

I don’t know which American author i would choose for the Nobel.

I prefer her essays. She wrote one on Calvin twenty years ago that made me reconsider the received wisdom.

i loved housekeeping but i could never get through any of the later stuff or the essays. my eyes glaze over. its like homework. like wallace stegner. zzzzzz......

Next American Nobel winner has to be one of the "New Dylans"

Maybe Steve Fobert?

Forbert

i can't read john mcphee either. i read about 100 pages of the bible during the pandemic. never do that again, lemmetellya.

Immediately before my partner checked her phone and saw the Supreme Court ruling, we had been reading this long and thoughtful piece by Marilynne Robinson. I found it bracing, in the sense that it literally braced me for another fucking piece being jackhammered loose from the foundations of American democracy.

― The king of the demo (bernard snowy)

i'm intrigued but i'm also not a subscriber so i guess i can't read it.

it's the idea of the foundations of american democracy, i think. they aren't really what i was taught they were. i don't know. i read "democracy in america", or at least a chunk of it, some years back and the country it described was... i mean i think we're more like tocqueville's france than the america tocqueville observed. there's a lot to like about today's america, but there was a lot to like about the concert of europe too, you know?

i guess the thing that gets me about america is... i mean, the roman republic wasn't what i was taught it was, either. it was kind of crap, honestly. patriarchy, oligarchy, constant aggressive militarism... built on invading and looting the countries around it. one of their favorite "comedy" stories was "the rape of the sabine women". all of today's fash who idolize rome... i feel like they're living up to the _spirit_ of rome, both republic and empire.

i don't think america's foundations, either in its historical models or in its initial principles, were ever strong. i think america's people are stronger than its foundation. i could be wrong on that.

i say next american nobel winner should be jakob dylan

during the pandemic i read emerson's and carlyle's correspondence to each other and was enjoying them and then i made the mistake of reading more about carlyle and ewwww he was one of those insane gross race-theory racists with extra hate and disgust for jews and black people and i was like fuck your genius and why the fuck was emerson such a fanboy but maybe they just never talked about that stuff. emerson just dug his books. i mean i know everyone was racist back then but some of those genius-types were just pathologically yuck.

i can't read john mcphee either. i read about 100 pages of the bible during the pandemic. never do that again, lemmetellya.

I still think Murnane should win the gd Nobel, but now we are way off thread.

"i mean i think we're more like tocqueville's france than the america tocqueville observed"

i highly recommend the documentary America As Seen By A Frenchman if you haven't seen it. from 1960. its really good.

xp this is a safe space <3

yeah i'm not a big nature writer lover anyway so mcphee with the endless descriptions...ugh. i liked annie dillard when i used to read her decades ago. bruce chatwin? i think i liked bruce chatwin also decades ago. he was entertaining. i liked how he wrote.

Something I think about in terms of civil liability is how (before Monday anyway) the country should’ve filed a class action suit against Trump for emotional distress and probably shortening of life by a few years

thats something that doesn't get talked about enough, not to imply we need to talk MORE about Trump but what he's done to the mental health of this country has been a real travesty, everyone's pissed off and combative and terrified, possibly even more so if you're a Trump voter than someone who merely hates his guts

thats something that doesn't get talked about enough, not to imply we need to talk MORE about Trump but what he's done to the mental health of this country has been a real travesty, everyone's pissed off and combative and terrified, possibly even more so if you're a Trump voter than someone who merely hates his guts

― frogbs

it's complicated! it's like... i actually like neando's allegory of the lake. cuz it's not just that the car is heading towards the lake, but there's two people in the front seat fighting, one of them keeps trying to step on the brake, and one of them keeps trying to step on the gas, and like. it's great that someone is trying to step on the brake but the car is still going towards the fucking lake, right?

that's, i think, how trump has affected my mental health - like, it's not personal, he doesn't personally have that kind of power, but him getting elected... if you remember my posts in 2016, it fucked me up something fierce. like yeah. it did. and the _atmosphere_, whether or not he's actually _president_, the _atmosphere_ is fucking up everybody. in ways that don't get acknowledged. i see it every day.

and we just... you know. fucked up or no, people make choices, and if you support trump, you know, whether or not someone is a "good person" doesn't matter. that's a choice. and me, trump got elected and i moved out to pdx and i transitioned, and that was, i guess. like sometimes i joke that trump "transed my gender", and it's not _true_, a lot of things went into my gender stuff. part of it, though, is me trying to come to grips with trump's election, the way i chose to handle that. and that to me will always be more interesting - not whether or not trump gets elected again, but how people who _aren't_ in a position of power deal with that... difficult reality.

I haven't read Carlyle since grad school, and, wow, his style is near impenetrable. I guess this atheist has more tolerance for prose infused with King James rhythms than the average ILXer, but, boy, Carlyle is garbled AND an elitist -- the garble is to make him intelligible TO elitists.

I love Emerson, though. He's plainspoken with lightning flashes of poetry. "Circles" and "Self-Reliance" I still read.

xp

whenever "Trump Derangement Syndrome" comes up (especially when someone goes "TDS - I'M TALKING TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME!" and then an audience wildly applauds), one of the many reasons i want to let out a blood curdling scream is that it's actually real! i think i have TDS! i hate that motherfucker! i don't understand how pathetic people have to be in order to kiss his ring! i don't understand it despite having lots of people in my family and upbringing who love him! i know all about them and their unique hyper evangelical fundamentalist christian backgrounds and it STILL doesn't make any fucking sense! if you even skim the gospels it's completely impossible to think any christian, ever, would ever support trump. it's like an eating competition level of hypocrisy piled on top of hypocrisy, paired with people who are so ready to be beyond help that they get persuaded by the likes of fucking charlie kirk.

as an aside i want to say fuck bose, because fuck paul harvey

i had a horrible moment (one of many) with my dad near the end because i confronted him on how horrible it felt for him to never listen to me or trust any opinion i had on anything, ever, while simultaneously he gobbled up every single word of fuckers like this

https://i.imgur.com/sKOz7ug.png

i've mentioned it before, but somehow when you get your ass kicked, you want it to be kicked by really smart clever asskickers. getting your ass kicked by fucking paul harvey gives you TDS in the mouth, and i'm talking total dissolved solids

so yeah, i expect that anyone who is paying any attention at all has suffered mental health consequences because it's damaging to mental health to observe people doing the wrong thing, over and over, on purpose, because they're so fucking hateful and selfish

I love you, zach

love you too alfred!

It was more bearable between 2016 - 2020 because we were clinging onto hope. There were positive developments that lead us to believe we could emerge from his Presidency and reverse the damage.

I think everybody expected the Roberts court to be insane and just hoped it would be on the lesser side of crazy but as soon as we saw they'd flipped the dial to 11, it was obvious that it didn't matter anymore.

Sometimes I wonder if I've been in a coma for eight years.

I feel that Zach! And Neando

i had a horrible moment (one of many) with my dad near the end because i confronted him on how horrible it felt for him to never listen to me or trust any opinion i had on anything, ever, while simultaneously he gobbled up every single word of fuckers like this

― z_tbd

it's such a brainfuck with parents, i'm thinking "look you LITERALLY TAUGHT ME RIGHT FROM WRONG i'm pretty sure this isn't what you taught me was 'right'

so i went back and checked and boy howdy _wow_ that childhood was _not_ the normal childhood i thought it was, whew, wow, that was all kinds of messed up

but _also_ i literally did learn some really good values about right and wrong from my parents and i'm putting those values into practice and they're not... well, i mean, i guess somebody's getting some use out of those values, you know?

the fact that we're dismantling our empire for Donald fucking Trump is what really gets me about this, in fact it gives me a weird hope somehow knowing how Trump's world does not extend beyond himself. his main goal in life is to be on TV more. wild to think if he was like 3 inches shorter none of this would've happened

cos of Presidential height limit

i had a horrible moment (one of many) with my dad near the end because i confronted him on how horrible it felt for him to never listen to me or trust any opinion i had on anything, ever, while simultaneously he gobbled up every single word of fuckers like this

Was he always like this or was it something that developed over time. My dad is this way but always has been, he's never asked my opinion on anything. He either has 100% certainty about something, or 0% and has to go and check what the guru's opinion is before he'll say anything at all. In his case the guru is George Galloway, but the names are irrelevant it's the mechanism. He is transfixed by the oracle Galloway, hypnotized

People sometimes say its gullibility, that they are easily taken in. But I don't think thats it, my mother is pretty gullible but hasn't gone down this path once inch. She doesn't have or seek this resolute certainty, and she asks my opinion. There is bi-directional communication.

I don't think either have them have changed with age

With my dad I guess all conversations are hierarchical, there is a transmitter and a receiver, he receives from youtube and then transmits.

In a different scenario he would have killed thousands of people the same way people deliver leaflets. It wouldn't have been done with joy or malice or sadism, if that was the task that was required then that was the task that was required, same as the leaflets

My mom watches network and local news every day, 60 Minutes, is on Nextdoor and local Facebook groups but has somehow evaded brain worms and if anything has gotten more liberal as time went on.

My dad died in mid-2017 - I don't think I could describe his beliefs as liberal exactly but he didn't like Republicans by default and hated Trump for being a celebrity conman. I'd like to think that would have stuck over the last seven years, he'd probably be the ideal Biden Democrat but I don't know that I'd have wanted to hear him talk about trans people.

She got on Instagram and TikTok a couple of years ago so maybe a steady diet of funny animal videos has built a firewall to Youtube and Twitter punditry.

My dad says he doesn't like Trump but there's no energy in the dislike, I know he is drawn to him secretly because he tells people what to do and he likes being told what to do, He hates uncertainty. He can't remember anything and never could so the simpler the better.

He's always liked Xi, and has warmed to Putin since watching Galloway more intensively, was on the fence before that. But while this does have some political aspects to it, its more that he is transfixed and hypnotized by anyone that talks authoritatively and charismatically (or appears to do so). Bold and definitive acts definitely help but are definitely secondary.

This doesn't necessarily need to be a political figure, a person calling the phone and professing to be a person of importance also works, regardless of whether they are or not, which makes him a good target for any kind of scam

Did he like Blair?

No, as a devotee of Galloway that would be impossible.

i do think the brainworms are sort of, hate to say it, a social contagion

my mom's always loved the midwest, idealized it really... she moved to indiana as soon as she got the chance, is now in assisted living in ohio... the thing is that a lot of it, i think, really is isolation. she's close to her sister now, and her sister is, i mean, i fucking love her sister, she's so completely amazing. which helps a lot. but also just... not being isolated, you know, helps.

i got an uncle who's a opus dei sort of catholic, latin mass and the whole thing, swore up and down he hated trump but voted for him because he was the "lesser evil". at that point he was dead to me. what on earth he thinks of my transition i can only imagine, lol. that's a lot of why i'm suspicious of "lesser evil" thinking, because i've seen people use it as a pretext for abandoning their beliefs, their principles, even if they're not _great_ principles. and a lot of this uncle, you know, a lot of why he turned out different from the rest of the family is his wife, who's just kind of an awful person, a racist, all that stuff. like, "go along to get along", it has some consequences.

anyway the thing is, he had a stroke, lost his job as a real estate lawyer in '08 when the market crashed, lost his house, but the thing is he went into the deaconate. and people who know him say it's really done him good. being more involved in religion has genuinely helped, has _softened_ him, has made him less strident. and i'm, you know, not exactly a huge fan of the roman catholic church, but he's not _isolated_, with his primary influence being the awful racist he married. you're isolated and the shit you see on tv or on the internet matters a lot more.

i'm horrified at people who value the shit they see on the internet more than they value their own children, but i guess, you know, they see and think about the shit they see on tv or the internet a lot more than they see their kids. i can and do judge them for that, but i also judge, you know. the world we live in. it's not _reasonable_ to expect better of them. is the sad thing.

i'm talking about all this stuff because for me, a large family, it's a system, and america, i think of it as kind of a system as well. all of this stuff happens on both a macro and micro level, but the only way we can deal with it is on a micro level. on the personal level. so if you look at cute cats, that's good, but if it's interspersed with war crimes, that's tough.

so my mom, the one in assisted living in ohio. she's terrified that she doesn't have enough money. she does, probably, she has lots more than me, and i'm not broke, but i am worried that i don't have enough money. i'm precariat. she's precariat. the complete dismantling of the social safety net from reagan on, a process assented to by clinton and obama, i mean, that matters. that's where trump comes from. people are desperate and we're pretending not to be but yeah a lot of us are desperate and at some point, you know, "quiet desperation" just stops _working_.

my mom has never been quiet and she's never been... i mean she's always been abusive and awful but she's become _more_ abusive and _more_ awful to the point where everyone around her notices. and i guess, you know, that's something that happens as one ages. and i think it is the isolation of being old. nobody visits. one feels abandoned by god, perhaps, whether one believes or not.

my dad, he wouldn't be down with any of this, he was a communist. at the end i guess he became a born-again christian. i mean he was dying. nobody visited him except for this christian lady. hispanic, i think an immigrant. probably voted for trump. does that make sense? on a personal level, no, but when everyone around you says something...

i don't think... i don't think my stuff is a "social contagion" the way the "gender ideology" folks say it is. another word for "social contagion" is _role models_. they're not just for kids. who are the role models we have? i mean moving to portland from indiana.... on a personal level, my role models were suddenly very different. and i think that's a good thing. mostly.

and it's not, you know, it's not really about _trump_ i don't think. he's not special. he's not unique. he was just... i mean, inevitable. frankly in a way i'm glad it's him, because he's so blatantly incompetent... it could have been so much worse if it was someone like reagan. if i was to compare him to any past political leader it'd be more likely to be charles le fou than hitler. history doesn't remember charles le fou as a tyrant.

and frankly i feel like i have about as much choice in who's president as i do in who's king. and i think, probably, a lot of us feel that way. learned helplessness. desperation. you know, voting for someone who wants to eradicate transgenderism.... on some level i gotta treat someone like that as an enemy, but it's not _personal_, none of it is _personal_.

i got a friend who says i'm blackpilled, because of the fucked up shit i've seen, here in portland. certainly i've been really isolated. again, it's not _trump_ per se. covid happened and honestly, i hate saying this, but honestly i was more or less ok with my ex sexually abusing me until covid happened and i was trapped in a house with my abuser and never saw anybody else. that wasn't good. and i did wind up leaving but it took a lot out of me, and i'm in a situation now that is... i've seen a lot of fucked up shit. my role models, frankly, aren't great. even though i'm not a trump voter, i feel like i _understand_ them, _understand_ how they got that way. i'm just trying like hell to not go there, to not end up like that. doing that and _also_ not, like, dying. that's challenging.

anyway that's kind of a long ramble but i guess i needed to say that stuff at some point.

frankly in a way i'm glad it's him, because he's so blatantly incompetent

you're not wrong, though he has surrounded himself with a lot of Stephen Miller types who are going to hit the ground running and will probably have figured out exactly how Trump can abuse this SCOTUS ruling. but yeah I feel like if he's gonna abuse the justice system to go after his enemies it won't be popular progressive figures it'll be people like Liz Cheney and Morning Joe

when i think about my own life, a lot of times i think about a writer named robert walser. a lot of y'all probably know him, i probably know about him from ilx. folks here have a level of literary knowledge far beyond that of anybody else i know. he wrote these... delightful little short stories. if there's anybody i'd like to be like, as a writer, it's walser. he didn't have an easy life, though, and he wound up in an asylum. it was a nice asylum, though, and he did these really fascinating little miniscule... like, incredibly tiny writing, almost impossible to decipher. anyway later on they transferred him to another, less nice asylum, and he stopped writing. he said "i am not here to write, but to be mad." the way i think of it was that it was a vocation, like writing, his _job_ was to be mad.

being mad is the job i'm most qualified for. being mad is even less valued as a job than writing. it's really hard to get into that field, and once you do, people treat you like shit. even aside from that, the job is unpleasant, and the working conditions are terrible. my dad, after he got divorced, worked hard for years and eventually landed a job being mad.

when i look at trump voters, i do see people who are doing the job they're qualified for.

you're not wrong, though he has surrounded himself with a lot of Stephen Miller types who are going to hit the ground running and will probably have figured out exactly how Trump can abuse this SCOTUS ruling. but yeah I feel like if he's gonna abuse the justice system to go after his enemies it won't be popular progressive figures it'll be people like Liz Cheney and Morning Joe

― frogbs

certainly those people could do a lot of damage, assuming he doesn't sack them within the first three months of his presidency in various fits of pique, or drive them to quit through similar fits of pique

the thing that makes dictators dangerous is that they _don't take counsel_.

i mean i could be wrong. i'm just going by what he did last time he was president!

my dad is 89 and has voted 100% democrat his whole life. his father was a connecticut republican from the old school. a yankee republican because of the conservative money thing. taxes. the stock market. my dad was on all the boards in my town when i was a kid. planning board. school board. etc. he hates trump. thinks biden and kamala are great. he would totally be happy to vote for kamala. he loves strong women politicans. the only tough one for him would be if tom selleck ran for president as a republican. he might be torn there. he loves his Blue Bloods so.

Shit, *I* might have to consider GOP candidate Tom Selleck

He’s 79!

We haven't had a mustachioed president since Taft