When I heard that 9.7% of San Francisco voted for Trump, I was puzzled, because does San Francisco even have that many cops?Turns out, no: 26k Trump voters, 2,100 cops. So the rest of them must work for Peter Thiel and his Brownshirt Combinator.
Last night we had an event that was a musical tribute to the movies of John Carpenter, so I busted out my "MAKE AMERICA OBEY AGAIN" costume. On Halloween, that costume seemed funny. After last week, it doesn't seem so funny any more.
And then... some guy thought I was not joking and straight up admitted that he voted for Trump. To the guy dressed as a methane-breathing space zombie.
Can you imagine how disconcerting that is? "Very disconcerting", is the answer. Judges would also accept "baffling", "horrifying", and "hyperventilating inside a latex mask seems like it might be bad for you".
Then some other pinhead told me I was "brave" for wearing that costume and that he voted for Johnson. "Because Hillary? Is like corrupt? Or something?"
I mean we only had like 200 people there, and 1% of them not only boldly admitted to voting to fuck us all with switchblades, but weren't even ashamed of it.
It's enough to drive me to drink, I tell you.
Dude probably saw you as human.
Hahaha haha.
I needed that laugh.
Fuck those guys.
I can't tell if you wasted the irony or built a surplus.
Flames. Flames coming out the side of my face.
Jesuschrist every bit this
Why are you so panicked? We're gonna get an undersea aleutian rail tunnel to Russia and an integrated North American and Russian imperial alliance. We'll be more and more tied with your ancestral blood. It's gonna be great.
Not sure which emoticon is even remotely appropriate to express the mix of shock and anger.
Their vote was lost because of the US electoral system. However, other people that voted for Trump may have elected a President that will oversee less blood spilled overseas. Your tax dollars may now pay for less murder. We'll never know either way. Between a warmonger and a protectionist, possibly racist loon I'm hoping the latter will pile up less body bags.
Let me guess: you are white, right?
Yeah. I'd rather see people white or otherwise deported rather than murdered. So sue me. The lesser of two evils is still evil. Keep paying your taxes.
Of course, deporting millions of people is killing some proportion of them. But that's OK because, um, well, it's just OK.
The problem is that mass deportation is murder. You can see plenty of examples, but the one that leaps to mind is this one. Out of ~16,500 deportees, somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 of them - somewhere around a third of them - died en route. There are no statistics about how many died after their forced relocation.
Deporting three million people - the number Trump suggested during his campaign - is not like deporting one person three million times. Even divided across four years, it's still nearly an order of magnitude more deportations than usual. Dropping three million people on another state's refugee system, even over the course of months or the small number of years comprising a presidential term, without any clear plan to ensure that they arrive somewhere with adequate food, shelter, and political willingness to care for them, is a recipe for mass deaths. To disregard this is to embrace murder.
That's not even considering the secondary violence that, historically, mass deportation programs engender in the populace. Knowing that "those people" are going to be "removed" tends to embolden violent racist asshats. This phenomenon is so reliable that it's part of the recognized and repeatable process for beginning a genocide (see particularly points 3 through 6 particularly).
You don't have to take my word for it. Sit down with someone whose family have been subjected to a mass deportation program and listen to them. Read up on the history of mass deportation programs. This pattern is repeatable: they kill, en mass.
I do take your point that deportation is bad. However I do stand by my position that war is worse than deportation. You can see that from the number of people effectively deported from Syria by war.
Like how conscription and risking troops lives egregiously, ended after Vietnam, it may be healthy that the country sees some of the misery it is so happy to export, first hand. You still have a functioning democracy, unlike the UK.
Everyone is long past embracing murder and we're right at the damage limitation point.
Noted, as they say, for future reference. I may never tire of watching people look at a candidate who has promised to increase the size of our bloated military budget and scale up our actions in the middle east and immediately say to themselves "here, at last, is the isolationist, noninterventionist president of our dreams." So which, precisely, of our current military entanglements do you expect the Trump administration to abandon? Iraq? Afghanistan? Syria? Yemen? And on what timeline?
Stick around; in 2-4 years we can tally up the dead. Should be a fun conversation.
As I said, take care to note, we will never know which way the Clinton Doctrine would have gone. I don't forsee any abandonment. My hope is rather, that no new fronts will be opened up. I will say that the Secretary of State has an impressive record of warmongering. But that's OK because, um, well, it's just OK?
As I see it, isolationism is a lesser evil than deportation. For all the talk the Obama administration was nearly as bad as what went before.
Previously? https://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/08/damned-dirty-ape-mask/
"Brownshirt combinator", what a wonderful way to put it.
Humor and irony does not work for some people. Especially politicians.