The country runs in cycles. Do you remember the internment of Japanese Americans in the United States of America during World War II–the forced relocation and incarceration in concentration camps in the western interior of the country of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry?
How could the country do this to American citizens?
By my reckoning the only fundamental problem you have with American democracy is that not enough people vote the way you do.
So that’s two of you.
This is not the worst place the country has ever been in. Not by a long shot in fact. None of us are saying that things are glorious and wonderful either, so stop conflating our failure to embrace hysteria with a lack of realization that Trump is a lunatic.
Slavery ring a bell? What about the Native Americans, heard of them? Women, have they been in the news lately? Runs in cycles is about right. We inch forwards I think. I am glad that we are able to look back and say that where we are is much better than where we were. It gives me hope that we can get past where we are now. We have a lot to be ashamed of, however.
But you’ve never had a President with a Twitter account.
Times have changed, your lunatic has an immediate audience. And they’re sucking it up like a sponge.
In my 58yr old opinion, this IS the worst place your country has ever been in, especially in the international arena,
…two of use what?
How the fuck did you get that from what I posted? What the fuck are you going on about?
We figure that out THEN.
Meantime, we try to take back Congress in a month. Ain’t gonna despair of democracy until there’s better reason than we’ve experienced.
American Civil War ring a bell? We’ve got a ways to go to hit bottom. Before WW I and WWII we weren’t looking that great internationally either. Until Pearl Harbor, we were rather firmly isolationist and not interested international issues like Nazi Germany and Japanese Expansionism. The point being that Trump may be a dimwit with a twitter account but things have been worse, much worse. We will chuck him out on his ass, hopefully with jail time to follow.
Trump will win in 2020, because nothing has fundamentally changed. A sufficiently large minority is all the Republican party needs. H
Heck, for Trump supporters things are going fucking great. Why would they vote him out now?
He’ll go down in history as one of the worst leaders of modern times, in any country, and I do firmly believe America will get beyond this.
Because mankind always does. Eventually, good wins out in the end.
But it will take decades - I doubt I will live to see once more an America I can be proud of anywhere in the world - and I weep for the pain and suffering it will cause for millions in the interim.
This.
He never said anything like that. He just jumped in to refute Guin, who was making the issue with Trump out to be as silly as those other statements. He was pointing out that, unlike those other situations, Trump is a real threat.
Have we been through worse? Sure. But that doesn’t make this insignificant nonsense, either.
I do get what she was trying to do, but her execution was not great. You don’t stop people from panicking by yelling at them.
I have literally no idea what you’re talking about. Again, I have found no real reason to listen to you, so you’ll have to be more specific.
Something about that phrasing…
Dunno if Ravenman is an expert (I’ve never met him IRL), but he’s very smart and very thorough. I’m pretty smart, and do pretty well when I mix it up with people in debate threads here. But on those (fortunately infrequent) occasions when Ravenman and I are on opposite sides of some point, I’ve come to almost look forward to finding out how I’m gonna get schooled this time, because that’s usually what happens.
So I really need to see a link to where you totally owned him. I want to gaze in awe at it. Or laugh at it, whichever’s appropriate, you know? 
I’ll panic more when Canada builds a wall along its northern border. That will spell the beginning of the Skinny Polar Bear Revolt southern migration. They’ll fatten up nicely once they cross into the Lower 48.
“If we would just be more optimistic…” is right up there with “thoughts and prayers.”
When I started the Clusterfuck thread I was pounced on for overreacting and getting carried away and becoming hysterical. Several people said I should be banned for posting too much gloom and doom. Well, the thump administration has turned out to be MUCH worse than I imagined and possibly much worse than any of you imagined. The problem is we’re getting used to it! Now it seems perfectly normal that he should conduct government business BY TWITTER! THAT IS NUTS! But we’ve lost sight of what is nuts and what is normal. There are still a couple of thousand migrant children in tents who will probably never see their parents again. Pushed off the front page by thump’s rallies where he made fun of Dr. Ford and Al Franken. Every day he grabs the headlines with some new turd. Meanwhile, the government is being dismantled in the back rooms. We’re getting used to this! That’s what **asahi **is ranting about, and it’s true. We’ve normalized the destructive, narcissistic nutcase who happens to be our so-called UNELECTED president.
“Optimism”?? Yeah, that and thoughts and prayers will definitely stop this avalanche.
This thread is making me nuts. Asahi, keep ranting and don’t stop.
I think asahi has been* deep* into his namesake.
Umm… good beer!
Yeah, the damage that has been done to our democracy is permanent and catastrophic, but Trump is the symptom, not the disease. We simply don’t have the resiliency of our culture or of our institutions to recover from this.
Also, I’ve never met a smart optimist.
American democracy isn’t broken, or even close. As long as it takes roughly half the votes to win (give or take some because of gerrymandering and our bi-cameral setup, but still roughly half) , it is working. Even if you don’t like what that roughly half picks. Even if they were to objectively pick the worst possible things. Now, anyone who says that there is an objectively right choice, and that this needs to be an outcome to be assured by means possibly outside the current legal framework, that person is a danger to our democracy. Be they Vlad Putin, or some 17 year old with no friends in school I’d never noticed before.
Most Americans don’t vote, we have active voter suppression of black voters by the GOP in red states and no one really gives a shit, and gerrymandering means that politicians pick their voters rather than the other way around. We invaded Iraq to topple a secular dictator because religious fanatic Saudis working out of Afghanistan attacked us, but as a nation we shrugged and said a rag head is a rag head, let’s burn them. We have ample evidence that a hostile foreign government undermined our election with collusion from the president. If your lucky you will die in the economic class into which you were born and not slide downward and our healthcare system requires is linked to your employer, discouraging entrepreneurship and risk taking.
Plus, Americans are so brainwashed that America is great that they can’t even begin to conceive of how deeply we are broken.
Things fall apart.
It’s scientific. 