"If you're like me, the implications of this have been hitting you in waves. One minute you're numb, and the next minute you realize that Donald Trump, this man, will soon have access to the nuclear codes. Then maybe you get distracted by daily life until it hits you again, oh, our future president was supported by a former Grand Wizard of the Klan, and sixty million people voted for him despite that. And then maybe you finally manage to get some sleep. But then you wake up realizing, oh shit, the Supreme Court! [...]
Now, it has been wave after wave of nausea all week. I woke up on Thursday feeling fractionally better, but then I turned on the TV and saw Trump in the Oval Office with President Obama. And just look at the President's face there! He cannot believe what he's looking at either! [...]
And then you remember, Trump's going to be in charge of the military! And leaders there do not know what to expect. [...] Our President-Elect has, at various times, said he would bomb civilians, loot oil, and waterboard, which isn't so much a military strategy as the series of words that Donald Rumsfeld mutters so that he can stay hard while he's masturbating.
Look, Trump won this election. Which means he won the Electoral College, which for reasons I will never understand no matter how many times it's explained to me is how things are done. And many people, it's important to remember, many people are happy to see him in office. [...] But for the rest of us, we are faced with the same questions as a guy that woke up the day after a Vegas bachelor party, deep in the desert, naked, tied to a cactus and a dead clown.
Namely: how the fuck did we get here, and what the fuck do we do now?"
John Oliver's half hour monologue on Trump is amazing
Tags: big brother, conspiracies, doomed, mpegs, tv
24 Responses:
"The uploader has not made this video available in your country."
Obviously this is of no interest to the rest of the world.
Yeah...
I'd like to say we lost all faith in America after you elected W the second time, but apparently that pit doesn't have a bottom.
I can't imagine what it's like for someone who actually lives there. Here in the UK where I currently reside it has deftly knocked brexit out of the worst thing in living memory slot.
I don't buy the electoral college line either. Like brexit we are talking about a few % of the popular vote either way, which in both cases is far far closer than it should be.
Clearly in both countries we need to own up to the fact that a large chunk of the population has been screwed over in the past few decades and subsequently feels disenfranchised by the status quo.
And if we don't want to see any more of these "F you all" votes then the rest of us need to start thinking about how to improve the lives of those people living in the midlands / fly over states.
I think that, in both countries (I'm in the UK) we need to own up to the fact that a large proportion of our population are racist, *ist shits. This 'felt disenfranchised' bullshit does not excuse them, not even close: they knew what they wanted, and they got it.
(Note I'm white, male, can trace my ancestry in the UK for hundreds of years: I am, in fact, one of the shits.)
Yeah that's nice, but that attitude isn't going to fix anything. We need to start thinking about how to change the game to get the outcomes we want. And telling them that they're "racist, *ist shits" is not going to do that. The "racist, *ist shits" aren't just going to magically go away, so we need to find a way to persuade them to make decisions we like. And since indulging their racism obviously isn't an option, that needs to start with listening to them and finding out what else is bothering them.
Oh, I think this is a long way beyond fixing.
Have fun with your mars flight or suicide or whatever, the rest of us still have to live here and life does go on.
I work on climate: life goes on, for a while.
I think this attitude -- "anyone who disagrees with me is obviously a racist, backwater, uneducated, wife-beating hick! there's no other possible explanation!" -- is a big part of why the Democrats lost the election.
Surprise! For a huge number of people -- including educated people, non-white people, female people -- the election was about issues and not character.
The near-complete unwillingness to take him or his supporters or their concerns seriously meant that he had the debate pretty much to himself.
The Cinemax Theory of Racism
I read that one a couple of days ago, and I have no problems at all buying that theory: whether you like it our not, if you support a racist candidate, that makes you at best an accomplice/enabler to racism. In fact, I find the denials by conservatives hilariously disingenuous.
Now, let's apply that logic to Obama's drone strikes and the liberals who voted for him despite them...
It's true: I voted for the centrist hawk, because I judged that the neocon hawk was far, far worse.
At least you own it. I've seen more than a few Democratic partisans who were all "NSA spying? Drones? LOL wat" when it was Obama doing it, and are now terrified at the thought that those same powers will be available to president-elect (!!!) Trump.
I think Jon Stewart said it best:
"There are guys in my neighborhood that I love, that I respect, that I think have incredible qualities who are not afraid of Mexicans, and not afraid of Muslims, and not afraid of blacks. They’re afraid of their insurance premiums. In the liberal community, you hate this idea of creating people as a monolith. Don’t look as Muslims as a monolith. They are the individuals and it would be ignorance. But everybody who voted for Trump is a monolith, is a racist. That hypocrisy is also real in our country."
So I completely disagree with the so-called "Cinemax Theory of Racism", and there's a reason that John Scalzi is a science-fiction writer, not a philosopher.
Sorry, I did not say, and nor do I think, that people who disagree with me are necessarily racists or whatever. But if people vote for someone with a given set of well-documented views then they are supporting those views, and supporting racist views is racism: there just is mo way around that.
anyone who disagrees with me is obviously a racist, backwater, uneducated, wife-beating hick! there's no other possible explanation
Congratulations on invoking an argument that literally no one was making. Especially given that today's what-the-fuckery includes some mayor in West Virginia who called Michelle Obama an "ape in heels" who is now threatening to sue people for libel because they reposted images of her very own exact words, which clearly could not be interpreted as a sign of harboring racist sentiments in any way except by people who are so unfair and hostile and looking for literally anything to cry "racist" at that they obviously deserve to have the full force of the law turned against them.
I found this very interesting: You are still crying wolf.
We gave you John Oliver, and you won't even let us watch him :(
proxfree.com works for me. Now I've mentioned it, I imagine that it will break instantly and permanently, but there are a handful of other web-based youtube proxy sites.
https://uk.proxfree.com/permalink.php?url=s54aaHA%2FaGsaD5vHs0QZLcUclS%2FcUxrnNZwEMCiA0I%2FKczKS4AO2tdls%2BwRQjiNbDCtAKxmEkJSoB%2BguEglXcA%3D%3D&bit=1
(and having gone to the trouble of providing a link, it turns out that proxfree don't encode important parameters like 'where your connection should appear to be from' in their urls. ho hum)
"The USA can always be trusted to do the right thing; having exhausted all other possibilities first." -- misattributed to Winston Churchill.
We've clearly proven this to be wrong. Perhaps it needs updating:
"When the other possibilities involve work, sacrifice, or trying; Americans can generally be relied upon to do the wrong thing."
Trump is president mostly because of histrionic rants like these. You have no idea how good it feels to watch these nutters squirm and cry.
Eat shit and die, Nazi fuckboy.