Might as well give in to despair. We're fucked.

[Shagnasty]

@Scylla

Now we can just blame all of our collective failings on Trump, and still feel good about ourselves.

So we will have that again.

There you go. That is looking for the rainbow in the oil slick.

I actually put some thought into this last night for my own sake and because I knew I would have to explain it to my daughters.

Here is what I have come up with so far:

1. Trump and Putin are already brothers from a different mother and hit it off quite well. As a child of the Cold War, I can definitely say that positive relations with Russia are a desirable thing. We might have just avoided nuclear war for all I know.

2. Trump seems like he wants to be Head of State rather than an actual President. That is mostly unprecedented but may be a good thing in this case. If he let people that actually know what they are doing handle most everything, he will be free to hang out with other foreign leaders including, but not limited to, his buddy Putin.

3. Melania and Ivanka Trump really are pretty damned hot.

That is all I have so far but I am working on it.

[Scylla]

4. Orange is the white.

[Mijin]

@Shagnasty

I didn’t vote for Trump and I can’t fully explain the phenomenon just yet but he hit a lot of nerves among many different groups. The vast majority of people praising his victory on my Facebook feed this morning were women and the happiest person of all was a middle-aged black man at work that served in the military for 20 years.

We’ve had a number of threads on the US being “post-truth” recently, and I really think there’s a lot to this, and alas not just in America.
Whatever version of reality people ascribe to they can link with thousands of others that think the same way and reinforce those views, and never encounter pesky “facts”.

Republicans seem to better understand that it’s just an open meme market now, so it’s just a matter of marketing “truths” like: crime and unemployment are both increasing, Hillary is a criminal, climate change is a hoax and the world is laughing at us etc etc. All the Trump supporters I’ve met believe some or all of these.

The other factor is simply that Trump is the more charismatic candidate; something which party insiders consistently fail to understand the importance of.
His election has often felt like the Kingsmoot on Game of Thrones, or Homer being elected Sanitation Commissioner on the Simpsons: get the crowd fired up and none of what you say has to make any sense or even be consistent.

[enipla]

Battles are lost, wars are won.

This will be a real problem for women’s and minority rights. Hopefully not much will really happen on that front. LGBT too of course.

The people that are truly fucked are the low income whites that voted the asshole in. They don’t even have a sword to fall on.

[Scylla]

@Scylla

4. Orange is the white.

Orange is the new white.

[Kobal2]

@Bricker

Hell no.

They don’t have a flag.

[/Eddie Izzard]

The Iroquois do !

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Bricker

Me too!

But since I don’t believe that list is exhaustive – that is, I ALSO believe America is for Asians, and Africans; Africa is for Americans and Asians; and Asia is for Africans and Americans – I suspect I don’t agree with you. Nor is my list complete: a more general rule is that any individual’s genetic heritage or national origin is not a relevant factor in what continent he is “for,” whatever that even means.

So what is it you believe, specifically?

Go back to Hispain, wetback!

ETA: That was not meant to be taken seriously. Under the circumstances, I think we’re all going to have to be more clear about that sort of thing.

[Doctor_Jackson]

@Shagnasty

People like you need to quit repeating this because it isn’t true and this misrepresentation is what caused this dumpster fire in the first place. Trump is popular with working class whites but they don’t have nearly the numbers to get anyone elected POTUS. Where did the rest of the gap from from? The answer is a significant number of almost all of groups including a much higher than expected number of hispanics, a surprising number of blacks and a lot of people in the higher income tiers. He pulled in numbers that mainstream Republicans like Mitt Romney could only dream of among some minorities. I am sure he had plenty of gay supporters in their too.

I didn’t vote for Trump and I can’t fully explain the phenomenon just yet but he hit a lot of nerves among many different groups. The vast majority of people praising his victory on my Facebook feed this morning were women and the happiest person of all was a middle-aged black man at work that served in the military for 20 years.

Don’t make the classic liberal mistake of thinking that uneducated cowboys and coal miners can produce those types of numbers because they can’t. They simply don’t have enough people. Look at the electoral map. It is a sea of red except for the coasts and a few very explainable blue pockets like Illinois (which is still mostly red by land area except for Chicago). The red areas are extremely diverse and have little in common except for the fact that people preferred Trump. Once you have taken a drive across the country and actually talked to the many different groups that don’t live in one of the metropolises, you can start to truly understand, learn and maybe even heal a little.

Oh, Damn, Shag done went and brought facts into a Pit whinefest. Is that even allowed?

[joyfool]

@Doctor_Jackson

Oh, Damn, Shag done went and brought facts into a Pit whinefest. Is that even allowed?

In another thread, Ramira has brought in some cites showing that one reason that helped Clinton lose was that not enough democrats turned out to vote for her. Now whether that was because they weren’t passionate enough about the election (or her personally), or that she had it in the bag and therefore their effort wasn’t necessary, is anyone’s guess. But yeah, that’s another data point added to the above.

[SteveG1]

@Scylla

The good news is this:

Race relations are worse than they were when Bush was in charge. The world is still fucked up, and the environment is still going to shit.

We were either going to have to start blaming Obama for all this, or accept the realization that we humans are generally just shitty.

Now we can just blame all of our collective failings on Trump, and still feel good about ourselves.

So we will have that again.

I’m more thinking along the lines of

The truly worst of the shitty people will be bolder now. That means the rest of us will know who they are.

[Mijin]

Actually in a couple ways I feel positive after this election result:

It makes the world feel up for grabs (if that’s not a poor choice of verb). You can know nothing about the world, make numerous mistakes, and be President of the USA!
Or, alternatively stated, whatever dumb things you might have done in your own life, you’re better than the president!

And of course the reality-TV liking part of my mind (a part of me I hate, but it’s there) is looking forward to not just Trump’s gaffes but his surrogates, Carson et al who may get government roles.

As long as we don’t all die in a nuclear apocalypse, or starve in a great depression, it could be a fun few years.