My Fantasy Is As Worthless As Yours

A rant:

I’ve got one major thing to say to you. HILLARY CLINTON DID NOT FAIL US, WE FAILED HILLARY CLINTON. Now I know, I know, she won the popular vote by almost two million votes, and I know that a lot of you were a part of that so yay go ahead and pat yourselves on the back. You done? Okay. You say she was flawed? Y’all motherfuckers didn’t DESERVE the candidate you got, and every day I watched as "progressives" posted on Facebook about how much they hated corrupt Clinton, talked about how imperfect she was as a candidate, posted articles that were flat out lies, or wrote things like #ImWithHerIGuess. Your enthusiasm for the former First Lady, Senator of New York, Secretary of State and first ever possible female President was shameful when you compare it to the enthusiasm the other side had for their “flawed” (racist homophobic tax evading possible rapist who has to make his undocumented Mexican maids wash the orange out of his bedsheets every fucking morning) candidate. If you would have just swallowed your pride and given Hillary half of the love you gave Obama, then we might not have woken up on November 9th worrying about families being torn apart, marriage licenses being taken way, guns getting into the wrong hands and women having to stay pregnant after getting raped. Does that sound too harsh? Too bad! This reality show is now our reality and we need to accept it and own our shit. We stepped in it and now its going to take at least four years to clean it off.

And to you people out there saying “Don’t blame me, I voted for Bernie”- suck a dick. Oh noooo- I’m so sorry you didn’t “like” Hillary. That’s so saaaad! I guess that’s worth this result. Your “I told you so” is so worth the millions of people who will suffer because of selfishness and pride. We all act like our nominee has to be the perfect representation of us regardless of how many years they’ve spent working tirelessly for the people. I didn’t give a shit about John Kerry, but I voted for the rest of my country. Every candidate has an email/Swift boat Veteran/Born in Kenya/Benghazi/Reverend Wright/Gennifer Flowers bullshit scandal that gets played over and over again, and for some reason we thought Hillary’s private email server (WTF is even a server?) was more damaging than Trump ADMITTING TO SEXUAL ASSAULT AND CALLING MEXICANS RAPISTS. Who’s talking about those damn emails now? NO ONE. Think about how the world must perceive us.

--snip--

And to those of you that say Bernie would have won? Suck two dicks. We look back and say that the Democrats should have focused their campaign on the white middle class and criticize Hillary for focusing on racial and gender equality. FUCK YOU!!! I am sick and tired of people making the white middle class the biggest victims in this election. Oh the Caucacity of it all! The real victims are the Black and Latino kids out there living in a trailer park eating canned food for the 4th day in a week. That was me. I know how it feels. I’m sorry, Becky, for hurting your white feelings and for being upset by your privilege, but your pain and guilt are a small price to pay for the millions out there who are struggling in this country. And we are thankful to you for trying to help - that goes without saying. White people lost limbs and lives fighting against slavery, but they knew it was caused by them and probably didn’t complain when they received criticism. If they can accept that, I’m sure you can handle it when people point out inequality and racism amongst white people in general.

Make your case for whatever you think we need to do to Make The Dems Great Again - but let's try to be sure we're not building on a foundation of unicorn farts.

Sleight Of Hand

Trevor Noah and Trump's Muslim Registry

Trump flings shit, and while we're all either ducking it or normalizing it or cleaning it up, don't forget to watch what else is happening.

Distract-and-Divert is a very important element of Divide-and-Conquer.

While we're busy worrying about who's being appointed to Trump's Cabinet, let's not stop looking for what's going into Trump's pockets.

New Age Of Fear

Be sure to get a good daily dose of driftglass 

An Un-Joke

John of Patmos (writing Revelation): 

Lord, the End Times will be signaled by trumpets?

God: 

No - Trump/Pence

John: 

Oh, right - Trumpets

God: 

Fine - whatever - they'll know.

hat tip = Jay Smooth

Today's Tweet

Spot on description of the Trump admin by @RyanLizza.

Kakistocracy: a government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens. pic.twitter.com/1JSCUdMQUJ

— Michael Skolnik (@MichaelSkolnik) November 16, 2016

How We Got Here

A shortish interview with Paul Horner, Facebook Fake News Impressario, by Caitlin Dewey at WaPo

WaPo: You’ve been writing fake news for a while now — you’re kind of like the OG Facebook news hoaxer. Well, I’d call it hoaxing or fake news. You’d call it parody or satire. How is that scene different now than it was three or five years ago? Why did something like your story about Obama invalidating the election results (almost 250,000 Facebook shares, as of this writing) go so viral?

Horner: Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.

 I was wrong when I said this is the Era Of Post-Trust.  Actually, I was wrong not to include the part that says this is the Era Of Poe's Law.

"...without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers or viewers as sincere expressions of the parodied views."

Mr Horner again:

My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

You know this shit ain't normal - push back against it.

A Short Mainfesto

Eric Berg

Don't Get Over It

Eugene Robinson via The Oregonian:

WASHINGTON -- The people chose Hillary Clinton. But it's the electoral vote that counts, not the popular vote, so Donald Trump will be president. And no, I'm not over it.

No one should be over it. No one should pretend that Trump will be a normal president. No one should forget the bigotry and racism of his campaign, the naked appeals to white grievance, the stigmatizing of Mexicans and Muslims. No one should forget the jaw-dropping ignorance he showed about government policy both foreign and domestic. No one should forget the vile misogyny. No one should forget the mendacity, the vulgarity, the ugliness, the insanity. None of this must ever be normalized in our politics.

And don't make it normal.

 

Stop Pretending

Watch this video on The Scene.

Rhinoceritis

Via my Facebook pal Bill D:

NYT:

It is an epidemic of “rhinoceritis.” Almost everyone succumbs: those who admire the brute force of the rhinos, those who didn’t believe the sightings to begin with, those who initially found them alarming. One character, Dudard, declares, “If you’re going to criticize, it’s better to do so from the inside.” And so he willingly undergoes the metamorphosis, and there’s no way back for him. The final holdouts from this mass capitulation are Berenger and Daisy, his co-worker.

Eugène Ionesco was French-Romanian. He wrote “Rhinoceros” in 1958 as a response to totalitarian movements in Europe, but he was influenced specifically by his experience of fascism in Romania in the 1930s. Ionesco wanted to know why so many people give in to these poisonous ideologies. How could so many get it so wrong? The play, an absurd farce, was one way he grappled with this problem.

This shit is not normal.  Fight back.