bnw wrote:

… Trump took the supposed strength of the MSM and turned it against them and they’re too stupid to realize he’s been doing it against them since election day too. He will take his message directly to the people as president and the MSM will still be incapable of stopping him.

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Well stepping aside from his policies which you know I loathe,
I suspect, and its only a gut-intuition thing…but i suspect his arrogance/cockyness/narcissism/ego is what is going to be his undoing. I suspect his own weaknesses will bring him down. So, i agree, it wont be the MSM.

Who knows though. All I can do is watch from my front porch.

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— X — wrote:

I Still though, it was very, very obvious that the MSM was in the bag for Killary…. and lots of polls substantiated that claim.
But I say it played a part, because I don’t think that’s why she lost.

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Well i agree with the part i quoted there ^.

Yeah, i think the nonrightwing MSM was in the bag for The Hillary. It was obvious to me. I’d never seen anything quite like it before. I was used to a more ‘subtle’ pro-dem bias, but the pro-Hillary/anti-Trump bias on NPR, the NYTimes and the other places i read/watched were way beyond ‘subtle’.

Just my opinion.

I cant sum up why she lost though. It was a lot of things, and I dont think i know all the reasons. I know one reason was her pro-goldman-sachs/pro-Corporation/pro-war/fuck-the-poor-policies.
I wish that was the only reason, but I’m sure there were other reasons.

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last half of that last one….

…..Inside the hall, speaker after barnstorming speaker takes the stage to make the absolutely unarguable point that Hillary Clinton, whatever her faults, is a better presidential prospect than Donald Trump. In a signal that organizers are aware of divisive their candidate is, every half-time advert played on the big screen is about how scary Trump is, rather than how great Hillary is. As someone who recently watched their country fall apart over the failure of lesser-evilism as political strategy, it’s chilling to watch.

Particularly since there’s more at stake here than the presidency itself. The saccharine pageantry and drawn-out hype of the endless American presidential race is designed, to paraphrase the late, great Douglas Adams, not just to decide who wields power, but to distract attention away from it. Whoever is crowned King of the Free World at the end of this will have far less actual power to push through change than, for example, the new British Prime Minister, who was anointed two weeks ago after a campaign that lasted not more than 90 minutes. I come at this both as a foreigner and as a person who believes that democracy neither begins not ends at the ballot box, a person who believes that any vote cast by an ordinary member of the public in a General Election is a vote for the least worst option. My lack of faith in the party system protects me from heartache of the sort sloshing madly around the convention floor in Philadelphia tonight.

The heartache, however, hangs in the air too thick to dismiss, and it’d be great if those calling for instant unity could show some respect and give the people five minutes to grieve.

Outside the bear pit, the ground is hot enough that if you were to drop all your hopes for a fair deal for workers on the asphalt they would fry in seconds. A huge promo poster declares that 8 out of 10 “politically affiliated” millennials are Facbook users. I realise I am no longer politically affiliated. I did have opinions, once, long ago, in happier days somewhere three or four security gates back, before I came to this post-political hellconvention on the surface of the sun.

Those opinions are all gone now, and I am prepared to offer my vote and also my firstborn child to anyone giving out bottles of water.

At the Rally For Bernie, I was given a glass of seltzer by a very nice lady in a floppy hat, who told me that she didn’t believe a word the press wrote about Hilary Clinton. I explained that I was from the press. She took pity on me anyway.

Inside Media Tent City, by contrast, there are a great many free pens and stickers and several thousand complimentary copies of the New York Times, but nothing to eat or drink. At least in Cleveland there was coffee. Welcome to the desert of liberalism. That’ll be $4.50 for water.

Back in the hall, the Bernie or Bust contingent will not shut up. It’s hard to hear the actual scale of the dissent on the floor from the video feeds, which may not be accidental. Take it from me, though, that every speaker is having a very hard time. Bernie’s people yell over Elijah Cummings as he tries to talk about abortion rights. They yell over Cory Booker. They holler over a young black military widow who is on stage to talk about how Trump University scammed her out of her life savings, and she looked as if she were about to burst into tears. They even boo Michelle Obama. Michelle Obama! A woman who has eaten progressive goodwill for breakfast every day for eight years!

The comedian Sarah Silverman, who was and remains a proud Sanders fan, tells the Bernie Or Bust bros screaming at her from the stands that they are “being ridiculous.” Then she tries to start a chant of “unity, unity!” Al Franken, standing next to her, chants “Hillary, Hillary.”

Fuck that guy. He’s not helping. The only way this could get more embarrassing is if they wheeled out Paul Simon to sing Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Which is exactly what happens next.

Now, before I say what I’m about to say, I want you to understand that I have been a fan of Paul Simon and his work since my father first played me the Greatest Hits when I was six years old.

So you need to know that I’m not being flip when I tell you that Paul Simon subjects his second-finest song to slow and savage torture up there on that stage. His voice breaks on the word “bridge”. It’s too painful to watch.

Outside, an epic summer storm is breaking over the Democratic Demilitarized Zone like the world’s laziest metaphor. The wind howls like thirteen million heartbroken progressives, and the media tent creaks and buckles as hacks from every nation scramble for their devices and start to evacuate.

I spend an hour sheltering ineffectively outside the Wells Fargo building with Susie Cagle. Next to us, an independent internet journalist wearing a giant crystal pendant and no shirt starts explaining how he’s hoping for a Trump presidency to usher in the coming collapse of civilization. Inside, party svengalis plead with the delegates to be reasonable, to consider the greater good, to vote for the lesser evil. The problem is that ordinary decent people around the world have had thirty years of lesser-evilism, and they’re sick of it. Hilary is not talking their language. Trump, lying through his lacquered teeth about bringing back union jobs, just might be.

Here we are in the desert of moderate liberalism. The storm has hit, and nobody was prepared. I make a dash across the street to pay more than the minimum wage for a cup of lukewarm coffee, which spills down my front in the howling gale, and I stand for a second in the hurricane, drenched and starving and disheartened, ready to welcome the Old Ones in their terrible glory.

I try to imagine what the protesters, quarantined a mile away behind a mile of staged checkpoints, scaling fences to be arrested one by one, must feel about this. Then I remember that they’re a bunch of hippy idiots with big stupid notions about fairness and democracy who don’t realise that they’re not allowed to have feelings about any of it. They should know by now that they owe their votes, their conscience, and all their personal data to the Democratic party and its donors. Anything less is purity politics and not to be stood for.

Dissent will not be tolerated. Protest will not be permitted. You will shut the hell up and get on the Clinton bus as it rolls towards a future slightly less terrifying than Trump nation and you will goddamn smile about it.

The Democratic Party, like the British Labour Party, has decided in advance what is politically possible- but they may have made a terrible mistake. In the face of the collapse of the centre-left consensus, the right is terrifying in its grudging unity, and the left is terrifying in its disarray. Consider that after some initial brouhaha, the Republicans cheered on cue as their party was taken over by a giant evil baby. This is because the right runs on fear and is generally good at being told what to do. Meanwhile, Democrats who didn’t get the candidate they wanted were all but throwing punches on the convention floor. When you actually care about the world not sliding into fascism, compromise doesn’t hurt any less. It hurts more.

There’s a bad moon rising, the best lack all conviction and the worst have a million branded baseball caps and greasy little fingers grasping for the nuclear button. Good luck to us all.

Same writer — Laurie Penny — on the Duplicats convention:

link:https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/american-horror-story-ab4a4b389949#.tsd1m6ew0

see link…”Donald Trump makes you feel good like a line of cocaine or an adulterous orgasm makes you feel good. His puffed-up pridemongering appeals to the cowed, craving animal inside every citizen that wants to vote for cake today and fuck the other guy. Why? Because it feels good, and because so little else does.

But the Democrats? They make you feel good.

They make you feel worthy, and pure, and moral, or at least like you could be all those things if you tried. They make you feel like you’re a good person for trying. They make you feel like liberalism is a position that makes sense. Everyone wants to believe that they are a good person. Americans want to believe it more, perhaps, than the rest of us, because their nation has done and continues to do some very bad things both in the world and to its own people in the name of a dream that is still a nightmare for millions.

America is still, fundamentally, a nation of puritans. That’s why this convention feels, at every stage, like a cross between a rock concert and a church revival. America is soaked in the language and practice of religion and wants to believe in its own goodness — in right as well as might. The signs handed out to delegates on Day One of the DNC said “Love Trumps Hate”. On Day Two, they said “Do The Most Good”. Most of the taglines could have been lifted from the Bible — the Good News version, not the King James. The Democrats are still pushing the Gospels on a suspicious, skeptical congregation that’s starting to lose faith in the hereafter. The Republicans, meanwhile, have run rabid and are reading straight from Revelations.Of course, like every story in the religious mode, American presidential politics is a fairytale.

It’s fairytale designed—like all fairytales—to tell lost, frightened children that darkness can be overcome if they are well-behaved and listen to their elders. It’s a fairytale not just because no nation has a monopoly on morality, but because nation states themselves have never been the vector of human goodness and never will be. America The Brave is a bedtime story, the kind you tell to scared kids who know full well that the monsters are real. But for a moment there, I still wanted Obama to tuck me in….see link

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zn wrote:

wv wrote:

btw, i do ‘get’ the fact that the ‘racism’ issue really sets you and bnw off. You guys react strongly and swiftly to that issue/belief.

I hope you do understand no-one is calling you guys racists. Some of us do indeed believe that part of the Republican strategy is to pull in the ‘racist bloc’ of white folks in the south. I think its been a ‘strategy’ for a long time. Doesn’t even mean Nixon/Bush/Reagan were ‘racists’ — just means they wanted that voting-bloc so they exploited the issue.

I could be wrong of course. I haven’t studied on it much. I might change my mind after further review, who knows.

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There are profound and deep and wide issues of race in the USA. There’s no getting around that. And it drives a lot of politics.

And it’s such a messed up issue because the conversations are always skewed. So for example, the general way the word “racist” is used, it means an open, militant bigot with clearly stated and repugnant views based on straightforward stereotypes and generalizations. Which is a generally rejected, morally abhorrent thing. If I put a type like this in a movie, they are meant to be reviled.

Problem with that is, it disguises the real problem.

Two things happen. We can look at that “type” and say, clearly I am not that.

AND when the term “racism” comes up, people can then get defensive and say “you’re calling me THAT.”

But…the racial issues in the USA persist, they are clearly part of the society, BUT most of it comes from just denying the racial issues are real and matter. Which is probably the biggest problem in the current impasse.

Of course there’s the “well there’s no problem” problem, and then there’s the AGGRESSIVE “anyone who says there is a problem is promoting victimhood” version. The latter being it’s own kind of problem.

Another problem of course is that the actual real open KKK, David Duke style openly bigoted racism still exists.

For example most people could not name the key platform points behind blacklivesmatter. If you actually look at them, they make unbelievable sense. In fact anyone from a right libertarian to an actual leftist ought to agree with every single principle (I of course do mean not what mainstreamers call the left, which isn’t, but the left).

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As you know, i agree with all that.

Its hard to converse about race. And politics. And religion. And play-calling.

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btw, i do ‘get’ the fact that the ‘racism’ issue really sets you and bnw off. You guys react strongly and swiftly to that issue/belief.

I hope you do understand no-one is calling you guys racists. Some of us do indeed believe that part of the Republican strategy is to pull in the ‘racist bloc’ of white folks in the south. I think its been a ‘strategy’ for a long time. Doesn’t even mean Nixon/Bush/Reagan were ‘racists’ — just means they wanted that voting-bloc so they exploited the issue.

I could be wrong of course. I haven’t studied on it much. I might change my mind after further review, who knows.

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