I'm going to say it right now: Running Kamala was a bad idea. I said it before, and no one listened. Now look where we are. The amount of gloating we are gonna have to listen to for the next few days - nay, FOUR YEARS - will be insane. Serious question: Do any of y'all think anything good will come from a second Trump presidency? I am NOT looking for sarcastic answers.
Dude... nothing being said is sarcastic... you guys are fucked. Full stop. He is going to try and purge the enemy within, deport a fuck ton of people, and eliminate reproductive rights for women, among other things. Idiocracy is looking like a better timeline.
You were right about Kamala. Unfortunately once the Democrats hitched their wagon to a doddering old fool there weren’t any other good options.
You make it sound more…purposeful than it is to Trump, I think. First order of business for him is stopping the legal issues against him. Then, it’s simply supporting whatever the biggest ass-kissers want. Same result, though.
I actually don't think that's the case to be honest. I posted this somewhere else, so I'll just copy and paste it here. We are really fucked, but not because of the things you posted. I've seen an alarming number of people say something along the lines of, "Well, he'll end up blowing up the US because he's going to enact tariffs and deport this group or that group and let's see how things go when you get rid of the department of education and let's see how we feel about Russia taking over Ukraine", but is all of that just a giant ruse? The economy is now back on track, if he enacts one tariff and just rails on it, even though it has zero effect on the economy, he can claim a victory without needing to actually do anything. He promised tariffs to help the economy and lower prices, but we all know that's a lie and will have the opposite effect, but he doesn't actually have to do any of that because the economy is actually good right now. He can just sit back and ride Biden's economy, just like he sat back and rode Obama's economy. Prices won't come down, but people will "feel" like they are doing better so anything policy wise or having an actual effect on the economy won't matter in the slightest. We all know he can't stop illegal immigration, and the results of this election clearly show you can call people garbage and it will have ZERO effect on who they vote for. All he needs to do is clean up the border and deport 1% of people and he'll get credit for it. He doesn't need to spend any money actually deporting anyone, but he / Republicans won't be punished for not doing anything because illegal immigration isn't actually a problem. As long as border encounters drop even by 100 people, he gets to take full credit for everything. Elon has shown you can eliminate 90% of a company's workforce and still have it "run". He can strip away a good chunk of every 3 letter / Dept he doesn't like and the country will still "run". He'll get credit for this and won't have to deal with any of the consequences. It's not like the Dept of Edu is dramatically helping get our test scores up or having any measurable impact on our education at the moment, so he can easily break these departments apart and it really won't matter. On the world stage, we have shown as a country we really don't like "sending money" to foreign nations. Do you think Russia advancing and taking over Ukraine is going to move the needle in any meaningful way? Do you think Israel leveling Gaza even more than they have now is going to have any effect on our elections going forward? Do you REALLY believe anyone actually gives a fuck about Taiwan if it means the US will have to enter into a military operation against China? We all know Trump can be dog walked around and the people who are doing the walking this time are not the Neo-Cons he had last time. These people are 100% going to abandon almost everything they ran on and implement things we haven't even seen yet. You think Elon is going to fall back on Drill Drill Drill when he's the owner of the most successful electric vehicle of all time? You think he's going to start making gasoline cars all of a sudden? I hate to say it, but as bad as you think this election was, we are not going to have a Dem controlled anything for decades unless we have another black swan Covid like event to snap people back to our side. This was a really really really really really really fucking bad election to lose.
I think he'll keep himself out of jail, grift more cash, and golf. The problem is that everyone around him who will actually do something (Project 2025) will wreak havoc. Jon Stewart had a nice comment last night: “Here’s what we know — is that we really don’t know anything, and that we’re going to come out of this election. We’re going to make all kind of pronouncements about what this country is and what this world is and the truth is, we’re not really going to know shit,” Stewart said. “We’re going to make is seem like this is the finality of our civilization… we’re all going to to have to wake up tomorrow morning and work like hell to move the world to the place that we prefer it to be, and i just want to point out as a matter of perspective , that the lessons of our pundits — that our pundits take aways from these results that they will pronounce with certainty will be wrong. And we have to remember that.” “But this isn’t the end! I promise you, this is not the end, and we have to regroup and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country that we know is possible.”
That’s my point. Supporting whatever the biggest ass-kissers want. The Project 2025 people are the ones a-puckerin’.
So once a Trump stooge gets put in at DOJ, they're going to release the "Epstein client list" and it's just going to be totally fabricated, right? It's such an obvious propaganda opportunity I can't imagine they'd pass it up. Trump's name won't be on it, but you'll be able to see where it was hastily redacted in crayon.
So... seriously question here. How do you - each of you, individually, not the royal "you" - move forward, if literally half the country is so morally misaligned with your core values? This isn't really about "politics" per se, or about the actual policies that may or may not be enacted. What I'm struggling with most of all, is that this is the first election in my lifetime where I have felt that the morality of one of the candidates and his core backers was so completely and utterly fucked up that it shows a moral bankruptcy of your character to have gone out and voted for him. I don't mean that in a hysterical way, I am being quite literal here. I am willing to accept pure ignorance from the first election, but not anymore. It's been 8 years. We know who he is. And now I am faced with the thought that, not only are we subjected to this shit stain on humanity and his cronies for another 4 years, but... how do you more forward with your fellow humans? I have never felt like my morality is so disconnected from so many people. Until Trump, for my whole life, I had friends of all political stripes and we could talk about it. I don't have to agree with you just to see to the other side, and for the most part I don't think that a lot of policy choices are indictments on your character. I might even think that your opinions are uninformed or badly considered but it doesn't make you a bad person. I'm feeling very lost on this front. I believe fundamentally that Trump is a bad person, he has been clear and straightforward about being a bad person, and he surrounds himself with bad people. If you don't know that by now, you are woefully ignorant, and if you do know that and went out and voted for him anyway, then my values are so clearly misaligned with yours that I'm not sure how to exist in your presence. @Misanthropic's take is, of course, that all people are shit and we should expect all people to be shit. But man, I have just never felt like my morals, rather than my politics, were so intractably out of sync with half the population.
I don’t know what to tell you, no suggestion I make would help. How do I deal with it? Anger and alcohol, which isn’t the greatest combination. I started the day by telling my oldest and dearest friends, many of whom are right wing, to go fuck themselves. Maybe not the best approach but I’ve spent 58 years going along to get along and I’ve had it.
The truth is a lot of this political turmoil is the result of a party realignment. When the dust settles, the coalitions thar make up the Rs and Ds will look very different from what they were before. This is the 6th time this has happened in the US and won't be the last. Trump just happens to be in the middle of it and took advantage. Pseudo-populists have always been around during these periods. None of that is really comforting, but it's probably part of the explanation.
But why are so many of the people we see supporting Trump such fucking assholes? It's like he's captured the "fuck you!" vote. Right now it makes me want to have less and less to do with the US.
I had looked into the immigration requirements for New Zealand a while back (I'm a pessimist by nature), and while I do have in-demand skills that give me a good chance of being accepted, I ultimately don't think that's a workable solution. As last night went on, I did feel myself having opinions shift on certain things. I could feel myself making living in a solid blue state (and not just a purple state) more important. It became more important to be able to get to my family without having to transit through red areas of the country. It became more important to live in a place that has better climate resilience. Those sorts of things.
Any time an incumbent is booted out, it's basically a "fuck you" vote. He won because he told the working class what they wanted to hear. A week ago, Harris declared she would have done nothing different than Biden. That was probably the final nail. The Democrats need to rebuild their coalitions completely. And because the working class and unions are going to become very powerful politically for the next 20 years, they would be wise to align their platform accordingly.
But they're not. They just threw away their leverage. Trump's friends are going to crush their unions, drive down their wages, and feed them culture war slop. And when they go to the polls to express their anger, should they ever get a fucking clue, they're going to find that they gave away that too.
Fuck me, what the fuck wrong with slightly over half of you guys. Do you really hate women that much? Hate people who don't look like you that much? I don't think I have seen such a piece of shit candidate before and he got the popular vote and the seats. I am conservative but I wouldn't have voted for the orange man in a million years.
I just took a closer look at the results, and I figured it was going to be another case of the Electoral College fucking us over, BUT SHE LOST THE POPULAR VOTE?! JESUS HOLY-SHIT CHRIST. Are you fucking kidding me?! Before people start on about how "Hate has won," Trump got fewer votes than he did in 2020. It's not like the Trumpers turned out en masse, and he got 85 million votes. Kamala got SIXTEEN MILLION fewer votes than Biden did. Just think about that. I would say that running her was a world-class fuck up, and I don't think all the blame on the outcome of this election should be put on "hateful people on the Right." But what do I know? I'm just a straight white guy from a red state.* *You know, the demographic that the Left has been demonizing for the past thirty years. I am REALLY anxious to see the statistics of who did or didn't vote for Harris. The Dems need to "examine that." They might learn something (but they probably won't ).
The same way I have for the past 8 years. Look, a lot of people I consider friends are Trump supporters and they know I can't stand the sonofabtich. And when we have conversations about any and all topics, they concede he is a a complete piece of shit as a person. But they're also looking around at a rapidly changing society that tells them that they're a piece of shit if they disagree or even dare question whatthe hell is going on. They've been called "deplorable" and more recently, "garbage." And these are people who'd give you or anyone the shirt off of their back if you needed help. How are they supposed to react? So they see and hear the guy saying things that perhaps they're thinking, and they gravitate towards that, faults and all. The same reason so many people who lean hard left are assholes. They're loud and attract the attention and the cameras. I can't stand either. But I still believe there is a vast majority of Americans who, no matter how they voted last night, understand that at least know how to be civil, if not kind. But they don't sell ad revenue and they're too busy living their life to warrant much attention. Maybe I'm just a fucking idiot, I don't know.
I think the Democrats thought that women and people of color were going to gravitate towards her because, well, she's a woman of color. I'd be willing to bet when they parse out the data you'll see a lot more blacks, latinos, etc. voted for Biden than they did for Harris. And women didn't suddenly jump to support her like they expected. This was about the economy by and large. And you can proclaim things are better all you want when it comes to that, but when prices at the grocery store continue to climb that's what sticks in peoples' minds.