Well, at least, they're releasing the Amelia Earhart files...

[Iommic Pope]

Releatse the Satre!


Edit: good gravy, image linking fail.
I've really got to preview my posts.

[snipelfritz]

Releatse the Satre!


Edit: good gravy, image linking fail.
I've really got to preview my posts.

"Grab z'em by ze pussssyyyyyy"

Grab them by...

[Fluffytime]

Freakin' out the squares. Right on.

1660_680.jpg (30.26 KiB) Viewed 1385 times

[Lurker13]

I don't know either, but it feels like some weird outgrowth of tribalism. Like we're all regressing to a really 'primitive' place...you can look at the form or the substance of these political movements, but either way it's super base. Like lizard-brained.

Short answer is that reason is hard, hate is effective. Look at the results we ('we') get from that approach, and how quickly. There are two kind of utopists, and the two types have nothing to do with their politics: revolutionary/radical utopists and incremental ones. There's an ebb and flow to which types are privileged, but there's also a 'risk management' element embedded in each. Civil Rights brewed for decades before reaching a tipping point that was sort of amorphous and inchoate; revolutions that result in genocide also have long backstories, but result in events that 'peak' with much more force. Helps me to think about it like weather patterns...a long, slow rain can yield as much precipitation as a hurricane but with waaaaay less damage. So we do have safeguards against crazy bullshit, and that's why incrementalists have a better rep.

But we're impatient, and, even though we know there'll be damage, we seem to be generally OK with occasional hurricanes because the structures set in place are perceived to be shit by a frustrated demographic. I don't have any ideas about the hate, though, beyond some kind of dark base assumptions about furriners. Seems dumb to make sweeping assumptions about the brokenness of democracy...it works pretty perfectly, as far as I can see. I think Trump is exactly what we deserve. Isn't he a perfect caricature of Americans?

(Only tangentially related, but I kinda think he'll be awesome. Not because there's any evidence to suggest that, but because we're clearly in fucking bizarro world. My compass is obviously broken, and nothing makes a fucking lick of sense. So by that logic, Trump could be Christ on Earth. Waiting with baited breath.)

In all seriousness, the regression to tribalism and dogma is, in my estimation, the desire to fill the void left by society moving away from rigid religious orthodoxy. People tend to treat personal decisions as extensions and projections of their very being, so any contradiction or disagreement is received as a personal attack.

Individuals who are trying to understand themselves and the world, longing to belong to something meaningful and a purpose worth believing in go all-in, drinking the kool aid of feminism, marxism, capitalism, socialism etc and use them as a cornerstone in constructing their identity, walling themselves off from the stones refused. The internet has given us the ability to find and mingle with other likeminded individuals and group together. Unfortunately, the tendency is to form homogenous tribes where cliques emerge and keep everyone more divided than unified. Diversity of ideas and the ability to contrast them without parsing words, sentiment or intent has become rare.

What I like most about ILF is how the diversity aint just superficial or superimposed. Everyone influences each other, melting a bit yes but one can remain distinctly individualistic without being exiled or deemed persona non grata.....providing they make an honest effort to champion Rule #1.

The diversity and depth of thought on this forum is one of the reasons I joined, it really is much more than just the most rad gear forum on the internet. The above quoted discussion is a great example. This was an election could have profound affects on all of our lives, so there is naturally a lot of passion, but here it is being coupled with intelligent reasoning.

Anway, thanks for tolerating my rants, ILF, and not having me deported

to Guam"?

I think I'd rather just take a vacation there.

[D.o.S.]

After another day to think about it, I think my big takeaway is something like "Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil" (a phrase borrowed from a Coil record). And that's not to say that it's solely on the side of Trump supporters, either -- basically in line with what IM and Rusty are going with.

However: I read something else that made me think a little bit, too. Those of us in the US who are on the older end of the millennial spectrum remember things like 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, graduating university with significant debt in the midst of a recession and so on. If you were poised to be a first time voter in 2016 (meaning you weren't old enough to vote in 2012) that means you were born anywhere from '94-'98, meaning that you may or may not have been very tuned in to how much of a shitshow the country was during/preceding the recession.

Interestingly (at least to me), this means that these folks have, for all intents and purposes, basically had one president who was a significantly better candidate than either of the two offered up this time around, and you may have had a substantially rosier view of the US govt. and less of an inclination to vote for a shitty candidate (like Clinton) in favor of a "fuck the system" candidate (like Trump) because you really had no skin in the game the last time everything went to shit, particularly if you watched the Democratic race unfold and you feel like your candidate (that'd be Bernie) got unfairly shafted by the DNC -- which he did.

Obviously this is something of a cyclical trend, as folks are born into times of relative prosperity and relative downturn all the time, but it's something worth noting, perhaps.

[popvulture]

However: I read something else that made me think a little bit, too. Those of us in the US who are on the older end of the millennial spectrum remember things like 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, graduating university with significant debt in the midst of a recession and so on. If you were poised to be a first time voter in 2016 (meaning you weren't old enough to vote in 2012) that means you were born anywhere from '94-'98, meaning that you may or may not have been very tuned in to how much of a shitshow the country was during/preceding the recession.

I agree with this. Having been living in NY during 9/11 and experience it all first hand, the idea of returning to that kind of reactionary, strongman governing is deeply chilling to me. Putting Rudy in some kind of national position of power is even more horrifying. Fighter jets flying over the city only lasted a little while, but the cops were doing these sort of display-of-virility rallies up and down the West Side Highway pretty much daily for years afterwards. The general attitude was a bunch of small brain / big dick hivethink, the kind of world in which you could NEVER criticize the government in any way to these people, from whom every response was "BUT 9/11."

This is what got Bush elected twice. The only silver lining for me is that since the beginning of this election, I've always said that either candidate would only get one term.

[Invisible Man]

"Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil"

Can you explain? Seems a little different than the 'evil is banal' argument we've talked about before. Is it a criticism of self-interest, or of lack of philosophical ability?

(Got into a pretty public argument yesterday with someone about his phrase 'all roads lead to business.' That's how I read the phrase about shallowness...absent a pretty strong framework, every decision is just a coin flip, and whichever way a coin lands its still money--business wins.)

[D.o.S.]

As best as I'm able to through this head-cold, sure: To answer your second question, it's a bit of both, but I think that the self-interest leads to a lack of philosophical ability which sort of summed itself into a massive shift towards what could be called bumper-sticker logic but I think might more rightly be described as the Jerry Springer effect that made everyone over here so entirely sick of the election for most of the past year. When you're dehumanizing people you don't agree with (whether they're nasty women or a basket of deplorables) you're not engaging in a discussion about the best way to move the country forward, you're throwing out an insult and waiting for the crowd on your team (as it were) to go "Ooooooh" the same way a fucking Maury audience used to in the late 90's when someone's baby-daddy or whatever would be carted onto the stage. You could call some of this the social media effect, and that's probably fair, too.

I think the hardest thing about this to swallow for me (and, I presume, others) is not the result of the election on the face of it (see: 2004, etc.), it's things like the fact that we saw debates for, arguably, the most important political position in the Western world devolve into things like "No puppet, no puppet, you're the puppet." The Al Gore sigh was one thing (a thing that maybe cost him the election, to be honest) but this was an entirely different and decidedly uglier affair, which speaks poorly to the character of supporters on both sides of the campaign beyond casting a bad light on those involved.

[Invisible Man]

Don't have cable, but found a live stream from NBC on Tuesday on our smart tv...they had Michael Moore and Glenn Beck (among others) come on for brief interviews. I was positively blown away by Glenn Beck's talk...he was deferential, humble, tentative in his wording, and seemed like a man in the midst of a personal crisis (he explicitly said that he was).

Kind of nuts to hear a hardcore bulldog best known for scrawling insane conspiracy theories on a chalkboard--theories too crazy for FOX News--recognize his own complicity with the diminution of humane political discourse. It runs against the grain of what we tend to do because it is perceived as weakness, but feeling some apprehension or ambivalence from someone who previously seemed incapable of it gave me a lot of hope. It wasn't just because I don't agree with the 'directionality' of his politics, by the way. Dude is an actual person who was honest, thoughtful, and repentant.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gle ... ce6fbfedb8

[pd~]

A series of Reddit posts that gave me some perspective:

Just FYI there are roughly 238 million voters in the USA. Less than 120 million voted in this election.

In 2008 there were roughly 210 million voters in the USA and around 140 million voted in that election.

Damn... the electorate grew by 13%, so there would have been almost 160 million voters if turnout had been the same.

40 million people - one in every four - who would have voted in a 2008-like election simply stayed at home.

Despite what they say every election cycle, winning isn't about getting the independents and the undecideds, they tend to always fall fairly evenly. Winning is about getting your base motivated to go out and vote.

Trump got 59.6 million votes. Romney got 60.9, and McCain got 59.9. Clinton, on the other hand, got 59.9, while Obama received 65.9 and 69.5.

The race wasn't determined by uneducated white people or third party spoilers. The race was determined by democrats who weren't motivated to go out and vote for Clinton.

I've also read that Clinton's heavy budget (DNC significantly outspent Trump) burned up donated cash that could've been used for House/Senate campaigns.

Ouch.

[D.o.S.]

In shocking Reddit fashion that's completely ignoring the fact that the Roberts Court gimped the Voting Rights Act in 2013 because, and I quote, "The conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterizes voting in the covered jurisdictions," and "African-American voter turnout has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six states originally covered"

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/1 ... 6_6k47.pdf

I've seen numbers circling around 400,000 voters between Wisconsin and 100,000 in another state, and the North Carolina folks wanted to (and did) close polls early on Sunday, prior to the election -- in areas that are "historically black" and "historically Democratic". I'm fairly positive that "not motivated" does a disservice to all the people barred from voting.

But, you know, it's totally chill to put those sorts of people in the Supreme Court (something a Trump victory entirely guarantees).

[jrfox92]

Don't have cable, but found a live stream from NBC on Tuesday on our smart tv...they had Michael Moore and Glenn Beck (among others) come on for brief interviews. I was positively blown away by Glenn Beck's talk...he was deferential, humble, tentative in his wording, and seemed like a man in the midst of a personal crisis (he explicitly said that he was).

Kind of nuts to hear a hardcore bulldog best known for scrawling insane conspiracy theories on a chalkboard--theories too crazy for FOX News--recognize his own complicity with the diminution of humane political discourse. It runs against the grain of what we tend to do because it is perceived as weakness, but feeling some apprehension or ambivalence from someone who previously seemed incapable of it gave me a lot of hope. It wasn't just because I don't agree with the 'directionality' of his politics, by the way. Dude is an actual person who was honest, thoughtful, and repentant.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gle ... ce6fbfedb8

You really need to look at how things have been with him for the last couple of years.
He's been, pretty much, disowned by the republican party and called a complete nutjob because he, basically, called out Trump as the next Hitler really early on.
He got really religious in the "be more like Jesus" way and has spent the last year or two trying to atone for the crazier things he's done in the past by attempting to bring together the left and right through various projects (his charity work under Mercury One, talks with liberal media, etc.).

[popvulture]

He's a truly bizarre guy, and he in particular has made me wonder about what a lot of these pundits and hosts actually believe. Do they see an opening at a new network and think "oh, here's my chance to step into a new role, but I'm going to need to be more __________?" I remember when Glenn Beck used to be on CNN (or maybe HLN?) and had a pretty banal news show that didn't seem to lean too heavily in any direction, maybe a bit right leaning. The next thing I knew, he was acting like a complete lunatic on Fox News.

He also had his own line of made-in-USA selvedge denim, which I thought was HILARIOUS.

[Invisible Man]

Yeah, thanks for the info on that. I'm keyed in on what he's been up to, but I was thinking less about his political situation than his philosophical one. It occurred to me that he's just making another political play, but that particular interview didn't add up...he didn't want anything. He rejected a couple of things, talked about his errors, and said he's going to stop talking and start listening. Maybe he will, maybe he won't...but I'm impressed with the ability to assess himself and to shut the fuck up and try to figure out 'why' in a relatively nonpartisan manner.

...aaaaaand now I'm supporting Glenn Beck (not really; just advoc ting for humaneness and ambiguity by proxy).

[jrfox92]

Once he left Fox and started his own network things really went all over the place.
On one hand, he was buddies with Don Lemon there for a while (I don't know about now, I stopped paying attention to pundits after the primaries) and on the other, he hired Tomi Lahren.