A collection of tweets from Day 1.
https://twitter.com/ManikRathee/status/796408766518292480
Someone on the streets of LA just yelled at one of my girl's Latina coworkers to "go back where you came from." #TrumpsAmerica
— Alex/Apex Gale (@AlexGale) November 9, 2016
https://twitter.com/Chris_Weatherd/status/796384091260207104
https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/796750646196191233
It’s strange, I’ve just noticed, having a soon-to-be president who has expressed angry, loud, hostile contempt for most of the population.
You’d think someone campaigning for the job would think of that and decide it might not be such a good idea.
I realize he endeared himself to a segment of angry white people, but he did it at the price of wholly alienating massive demographics. That’s not usually how presidential campaigns play out. We get candidates who seem brutally indifferent to our concerns and needs, but not ones who get up at 3 a.m to express furious contempt for us.
I don’t see this working out well. He’s lit a whole bunch of fuses, and he has no plans to stamp them out, and we can’t forget that he’s the one who lit them.
We haven’t done this before. Maybe Nixon was a little like that. You got the feeling that Nixon hated everyone, but you didn’t have hours of tv footage or hundreds of tweets in which he told us so.
No, I just can’t see this working out well.
Robert Reich points out that the Clintonistas abandoned the working class. I agree with him about that, but I still don’t see how it translates to voting for Trump. He lays out a lot of true claims, but doesn’t explain the ===> Trump part.
Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don’t reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.
Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers without college degrees – the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to [the] top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference by anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.
Yes. I know. But how is that a reason to vote for Trump? Trump benefits from that system too, and he doesn’t share any of his gains with people who don’t.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs.
I know. But Trump doesn’t represent the working class either. The fact that he’s a racist pussy-grabbing abuser doesn’t make him working class or a champion of the working class. He’s a filthy rich racist pussy-grabbing abuser. He’s deeply vulgar, granted, but that doesn’t make him working class either.
Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration – has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery, and his presidency.
I don’t see it. I don’t see what work “an opening” does there.
Racists are feeling empowered.
In his acceptance speech on Nov. 9, US president-elect Donald J. Trump made a pledge of unity, promising to be a leader for “all Americans.”
But some of his supporters have not heard that message. Even as Trump was speaking, one person in the audience yelled “Hang Obama,” and online commentators spewed a steady stream of racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic messages on a YouTube livestream, directed to “Anti-whites,” “Killery,” and “Jews in Congress.”
It’s grotesque that Trump said that. He’s a man who boils with hatred and contempt, and spits it out whenever the mood strikes him, which it does every few minutes. He despises women, black and brown people, Mexicans, foreigners, Muslims, Jews, “losers,” liberals…That doesn’t leave many people.
Trump’s victory, which he achieved with 279 electoral college votes but without taking the popular vote, appears to have emboldened some of the white supremacists who support him offline too. Self-identified Trump supporters are harassing minorities, and calling for more organized white supremacy.
Near Boston, MA, at Wellesley College, where Clinton went to school, two men from a neighboring college drove around the campus flying a Trump flag from their pickup truck, according to students who posted videos on Facebook. One wrote:
They laughed, screamed and sped around campus. Then, they parked in front of the house for students of African descent, and jeered at them, screaming Trump and Make America Great Again. When one student asked them to leave, they spat in her direction.
This is the new reality. This is what Trump’s America is going to be like.
Utah high schools have several reports of Latino students being bullied, according to a local Fox News channel. One student whose parents are Mexican immigrants said she was told, “You wetbacks need to go back to Mexico.”
Racist slurs and pro-Trump slogans were scrawled at high school in Minnesota:
Obama is meeting with Trump now to help him with the transition. Obama is meeting with the guy who spent years saying Obama was born in Kenya. Obama is meeting with the guy who was endorsed by the KKK last week.
Two people who drove through Wellesley College on Wednesday waving a Donald Trump flag were removed by campus security for being “disruptive” to students at Hillary Clinton’s alma mater.
Lisa Barbin, chief of the Wellesley College campus police, sent a campus-wide e-mail informing students of the incident.
“This afternoon there were reports of two disruptive individuals driving through campus in a pickup truck with a Donald Trump flag,” Barbin wrote. “We want you to know that College leadership, Campus Police, and Wellesley Town Police were informed, and the individuals were asked to leave College property without incident. As always, your safety is our first priority.”
They hadn’t yet identified the two “people” – but a follow-up story has more:
Babson College said it was two of its students who drove through Wellesley College on Wednesday waving a Donald Trump flag just hours after one of the women school’s most famous graduates, Hillary Clinton, conceded defeat in the bitter presidential campaign.
Lawrence P. Ward, the vice president of student affairs at Babson, said his school is working with Wellesley College public safety officials to identify the two male students who then could face discipline under the student code of conduct.
Ward said in a letter to the Babson community that “two Babson students ‘[on Wednesday] drove around campus in a pickup truck, waved a Trump flag, and antagonized students. Their actions, as reported to me and other college officials, were highly offensive, incredibly insensitive, and simply not acceptable.’’
It’s BullyWorld, and we’re living in it.
Guest post by Josh Spokes.
“Liberal elites”. “Liberal elites.”
Who are they, New York Times and mainstream media? Who are these horrible super rich people who want women to have birth control, who want poor people to have food stamps and medical care (even poor people who super HATE them some “elites” but still want health care)?
Who are these villains that you say, again, are responsible for Trump’s victory? What ever did they do to make the people actually effected by Republican policies—no job stability, promises to take away their healthcare—hate them?
Fucking shut up. Do some real world analysis or shut up.
Racism and misogyny won Trump the election. Not my middle class ass. Not my “liberal elite” friends who work in human services, organize town clean ups after floods, who work to help poor people sign up for Medicaid.
We didn’t fucking do this. We actually try to HELP people. We do help people. We’re not perfect, but we haven’t done anything to deserve this stupidity.
And if one you puts up a quote from that self-regarding hick version of David Brooks, JD Vance, I’ll boot you out. I’m shocked at how many smart people have been taken in by his facile and obviously wrong headed diagnosis.
Donald Trump‘s transition team has prepared a preliminary list of potential Cabinet members for his upcoming administration.
The list, obtained by BuzzFeed News, reveals a number of familiar faces including Ben Carson, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and others being weighed for multiple positions.
In total, the list includes 41 names and covers 14 different departments. A source told BuzzFeed that the list is not final and will likely be changed in the future.
Attorney general picks include Chris Christie, Jeff Sessions and Rudy Giuliani.
Newt Gingrich, John Bolton and Bob Corker are listed as potential picks for the secretary of State.
Ben Carson is under consideration for Secretary of Education.
Christie is also being weighed for secretary of Homeland Security, and Carson, Gingrich and Florida Gov. Rick Scott are potential picks for secretary of Health and Human Services.
Sarah Palin also makes a surprise appearance on the shortlist, mentioned as one of seven potential candidates to become the secretary of the Interior.
Nothing but the best.
Russian government officials had contacts with members of Donald Trump’s campaign team, a senior Russian diplomat said Thursday, in a disclosure that could reopen scrutiny over the Kremlin’s role in the president-elect’s bitter race against Hillary Clinton.
Facing questions about his ties to Moscow because of statements interpreted as lauding Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump repeatedly denied having any contact with the Russian government.
…
Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, in an interview with the state-run Interfax news agency, said that “there were contacts” with the Trump team.
…
Speaking to Bloomberg News, ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Russian embassy staff met with members of Trump’s campaign, which she described as “normal practice.” Democratic Party contender Hillary Clinton’s campaign refused similar requests for meetings, she told the agency.
Probably a sign that it’s not so normal, yes? Or is it just that Clinton’s people are too shy to talk to strangers?
5 rules: How to write about Trump, his supporters and nationalists
1. Never use words like racists and bigots to describe racists and bigots. When people vote in overwhelming numbers to keep “Polish vermin” out of the United Kingdom or “Mexican rapists” and “Muslim terrorists” out of the United States, you must try to see the wisdom of the crowd. That is the beauty of democracy. If you deviate from this rule, some people will get really offended.
2. Refer to the abandoned white working class. Do not look at exit poll data that would show the working class in the United States actually voted for HRC and most of the Trump voters are actually among the richest people on this planet. Talk about how the white people are the real victims of a system that survives on blood and toil of black and brown labour.
3. Propose that we listen to the concerns of angry white men wearing red caps — the kind shouting “Kill Obama!” and “lock her up!” during the pussy-grabber-in-chief’s victory speech. Psychoanalyse them as much as you can. For this analysis, you can rely on hundreds of newspaper profiles and interviews of such men. However, always remember to propose that the media has failed to grant enough attention to the said demographic.
4. Blame the elite; mention the crisis of inequality; and, note the role of capitalism. What we are looking at is actually a revolution of sorts — the masses had enough with the elite, capitalist bastards, and now they have elected Donald J Trump as their president.
5. Always remember: Most of the nationalists are decent people with decent concerns about foreigners, people with different skin colours and religions. This, as opposed to the feminist, LGBT-loving, refugee-hugging, weed-smoking liberal elite tree-huggers “who just don’t get it!”
He’s so right. There is so much bullshit of that kind flying around and it’s all so wrong.
I especially detest #1. Yeah it’s not “elitist” to say that people who shout and wear and wave racists slogans are being racist. It’s not “elitist” to say that bragging about grabbing women by the pussy is misogynist and rapey. It’s not “elitist” to say that a guy who has cheated his workers is not a friend of the working class.
One of the first headlines I saw this morning –
Private Prison Stocks Are Surging After Trump’s Win
Oh, of course they are. Obviously our massive prison population should be an opportunity for somebody to make a yuuuge amount of money by giving prisoners bad food and worse medical care. What could possibly go wrong?
Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential elections helped shares of Corrections Corp. rise as much as 60 percent before paring their surge to 34 percent by 10:14 a.m. in New York, while GEO Group Inc. was trading 18 percent higher by the same time.
Those moves mean the stocks have recouped some of the losses they’ve registered since August, when the Department of Justice said it would start phasing out privately run jails. Analysts say President Trump would be likely to reverse that policy, and see an added windfall to the companies stemming from the difficulty of implementing his deportation agenda.
Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t the US a glorious country? We throw millions of people, most of them black and brown, into prison for drug offences, and thus provide an opportunity for corporations to gouge profits out of their misery and maltreatment.
“Private prisons would likely be a clear winner under Trump, as his administration will likely rescind the DOJ’s contract phase-out and ICE capacity to house detainees will come under further stress.” analysts at Height Securities LLC wrote in a note published this morning, referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement body by its acronym. Mass deportation of illegal immigrants would be likely to run into legal obstacles, “further necessitating a sizable contract detention population,” the analysts said.
Maybe by this time next year a third of the population will be in prison, clocking up the dollar bills for the stockholders.
The Times’s editorial summary of what we face:
So who is the man who will be the 45th president?
After a year and a half of erratic tweets and rambling speeches, we can’t be certain. We don’t know how Mr. Trump would carry out basic functions of the executive. We don’t know what financial conflicts he might have, since he never released his tax returns, breaking with 40 years of tradition in both parties. We don’t know if he has the capacity to focus on any issue and arrive at a rational conclusion. We don’t know if he has any idea what it means to control the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
Here is what we do know: We know Mr. Trump is the most unprepared president-elect in modern history. We know that by words and actions, he has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people. We know he has threatened to prosecute and jail his political opponents, and he has said he would curtail the freedom of the press. We know he lies without compunction.
He has said he intends to cut taxes for the wealthy and to withdraw the health care protection of the Affordable Care Act from tens of millions of Americans. He has insulted women and threatened Muslims and immigrants, and he has recruited as his allies a dark combination of racists, white supremacists and anti-Semites. Given the importance of the alt-right to Mr. Trump’s rise, it is perhaps time to drop the “alt.” David Duke celebrated Mr. Trump’s victory on Tuesday night, tweeting, “It’s time to TAKE AMERICA BACK!!!”
The Ku Klux Klan endorsed him, don’t forget. White racists are all for him.
When Mr. Trump has looked beyond our borders, he has said that he would tear up the agreement to prevent Iran from building nuclear arms and that he would do away with the North American Free Trade Agreement. He has said that he would repudiate last December’s Paris agreement on climate change, thereby abandoning America’s leadership role in addressing the biggest long-term threat to humanity. He has also threatened to abandon NATO allies and start a trade war with China.
We know that, with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, Mr. Trump would be able to restore a right-wing majority by filling the Supreme Court seat that Republican senators have held hostage for nine months.
Republicans will soon control every branch of the federal government, in addition to a majority of governorships and statehouses. There is no obvious check on Mr. Trump’s vengeful impulses. Other Republican leaders, including his running mate, Mike Pence, have largely made excuses for his most extreme behavior.
By challenging every norm of American politics, Mr. Trump upended first the Republican Party and now the Democratic Party, which attempted a Clinton restoration at a moment when the nation was impatient to escape the status quo. Misogyny and racism played their part in his rise, but so did a fierce and even heedless desire for change.
That change has now placed the United States on a precipice.
The BBC tells us about some world media reactions to the election of The Pussygrabber.
Media across the world have reacted to Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election with a mixture of shock, disbelief and anxiety. There is also a large measure of uncertainty as to what the future holds.
In the US some heavyweight papers have published leader articles that are unprecedented in their contempt for the future president.
The New York Times says Mr Trump “is the most unprepared president-elect in modern history” and “has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people”.
The Washington Post sees little cause for optimism about the vote, recalling that Trump “has promised to deport millions, rip up trade agreements and international efforts to fight climate change, each of which would hurt many people”.
The Los Angeles Times asks in its editorial “How did that happen?” The paper says “the campaign, and the candidate, played to the worst in America, and it has left the electorate scarred”.
The election of a misogynist racist ignorant narcissistic hatemonger has no silver lining then?
The Miami Herald says in an editorial: “The losers, still stunned, must acknowledge that Mr Trump managed to read the mood of much of the country better than they did, tapping into the frustrations of people who had come to believe that the government was no longer working on their behalf or even understood their problems.”
Oh horseshit. Trump appealed to racism and hatred because that’s who he is. People voted for him because that’s who they are. There’s no connection between people’s belief that the government isn’t working on their behalf and voting for Trump. Trump isn’t going to work on their behalf. He’s a very rich thief and cheat, and he thinks everyone who isn’t also a very rich thief and cheat is a Loser. That’s not understanding people’s problems, it’s dismissing them with contempt.
“How could this happen?” is a similar headline on the website of German daily Die Welt. It says Trump is as “unpredictable as a hurricane”.
The main German public service news programme Tagesschau tries to provide an answer, saying Trump “owes his electoral victory mainly to white male voters” who voted for “the political outsider”.
The French business daily Les Echos is forthright in its assessment: “Racist, populist, male chauvinist, arrogant and unpredictable. We do not know what is most terrifying in the personality of Donald Trump.”
The Washington correspondent of Spain’s El Pais stresses that Trump “goes to the White House with massive support from white voters discontented with elites”.
If they don’t like elites it wasn’t very clever to vote for Trump. Ignorant racist bullying isn’t the antonym of “elite.”
Papers in Italy agree, with La Stampa seeing the result as “a hurricane of discontent” that comes “from the belly of the nation”.
Russia’s state-run rolling-news TV channel Rossiya 24 carried Trump’s victory speech live instead of its 0800 gmt news bulletin.
The station aired an animated graphic, showing Trump dancing ecstatically and making faces at Clinton, who is sitting despondently.
“The epic defeat of Hillary Clinton… is a resounding slap from the people to the US political elite” is how the official Rossiyskaya Gazeta paper sees it. “No less resounding than the slap that Britons earlier gave to their authorities at the referendum on EU membership”.
Uh huh. It’s also a “resounding slap” (or a blow to the head with a brick) from the people to the poor, the non-white, the female, the foreign, the non-straight, the disabled, the non-cheaters – to the intellectuals, the artists, the eccentric, the teachers and bus drivers and nurses, the gardeners and house cleaners and fast food workers. None of those people make up the real elite.
Latin American newspapers are surprised but also anxious about the news.
A front-page opinion piece on Argentina’s Clarin calls Donald Trump “an emerging neo-fascist”.
“The phenomenon is not a one-off,” it continues. “It correlates with many European ultra-nationalist figures, and is growing at a serious moment for the world.”
Other than that…
Profound and empathetic insights on the election of President Pussygrabber from Dana Hunter at The Orbit.
Friends I love are going to die.
The things that were keeping them alive will be gutted.
Bigots who despise them have been emboldened enough to murder them without a twinge of conscience.
And you did that to them.
White folk. You did this. Cis folk. You did this. Bernie-or-busters, third party voters, people who didn’t vote because you couldn’t be arsed, people who thought all candidates were the same, people who voted for Trump because you’re either too white or too sexist or too racist or too selfish or too all-of-the-above to think it through, you did this. It’s all on you.
As a cis folk, I’m appalled at myself.
I’m reminded of something the late Chuck Colson — a brutal Watergate felon who made himself over as the reigning intellectual of the Christian Right, with help from centrists — told me: “I love ‘compromise.’ I stay right where I am and they come to me.”
It’s worth noting Colson was talking about how he’d come to appreciate the Clintons as inadvertent partners in the rightward lurch of America. He was one of the engines, but let’s remember that too often the Clintons were the caboose of that train. They also did some decent things for everyday people. But they did them on the terms of knee-cappers like Colson. Clintonism ultimately worked out for the Right; it didn’t work for humanity. I voted HRC to stop Trump. It didn’t work. That time is over. It’s struggle time. In truth it always was.
Which makes me even more appreciative of something my friend Christian Haines wrote today: maybe the old labor saying “Don’t mourn, organize” isn’t quite right. Maybe we mourn by organizing.
There’s talk that we may be losing our democracy. But democracy isn’t something you can lose any more than it’s some magical thing you can just find. You don’t have democracy. You make it.
Let’s get started.
Sarah Ditum in the Independent:
America has chosen, and it chose the pussy-grabber. The guy who said his daughter was a “piece of ass”. The guy who has been accused – in multiple, mutually corroborating accounts – of sexual assault. The guy whose ex-wife accused him of rape in a divorce deposition. So tell me again how a rape accusation ruins a man’s life. Please, I am all ears for your sympathetic descriptions of the terrible injustice done to men when they’re named as the suspected perpetrator of a violent crime in exactly the same way that suspected perpetrators of violent crimes are always named.
We just elected a known (though not convicted) rapist president. We elected him even though we’ve heard him bragging that he sexually assaults women.
Tell me more about how misogyny is not a thing.
Why would it count as a crime, if the people it’s committed against don’t matter? If they’re not even fully people, but just women? During this campaign, so many women have made the extraordinarily brave decision to come out publicly with allegations against Trump. And they were not listened to. Their voices did not matter. The final word on sexual assault in this election is Trump, caught on tape, laughing about everything he could get away with as a powerful man. And now he’s the most powerful man in the world.
And we in the US have just put ourselves on a par with the Germany that elected Hitler.
David Remnick in the New Yorker:
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.
Fear. “Anxiety” is too mild. I’m terrified. Everyone I know is terrified.
There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other.
I would have put the female Other first, because after all we’re a full half of the population. Trump has lacerating contempt for half the population, plus non-WASP men.
All along, Trump seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.
We’re going to be a pariah state. There’s no question about that. We’re going to rank with Mugabe’s Zimbabwe…but a Zimbabwe with nukes and a gigantic military.
Trump began his campaign declaring Mexican immigrants to be “rapists”; he closed it with an anti-Semitic ad evoking “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; his own behavior made a mockery of the dignity of women and women’s bodies. And, when criticized for any of it, he batted it all away as “political correctness.” Surely such a cruel and retrograde figure could succeed among some voters, but how could he win? Surely, Breitbart News, a site of vile conspiracies, could not become for millions a source of news and mainstream opinion. And yet Trump, who may have set out on his campaign merely as a branding exercise, sooner or later recognized that he could embody and manipulate these dark forces.
An avowedly misogynist racist man who got rich by cheating and exploiting people and who spends his leisure hours spraying out insults on Twitter – that’s who is succeeding Barack Obama.
It could not be worse.
About three hours of sleep.
President Grabthembythepussy.
We have a president who calls a US Senator “Pocahontas.”
Who calls women pigs.
Who has an upcoming rape trial on his schedule.
I have a few articles open, that I haven’t read yet –
Meghan Murphy: America really, really hates women.
David Remnick in the New Yorker: An American Tragedy.
Sarah Ditum in the Independent: Donald Trump is President of the United States – so tell me again how rape allegations ruin a man’s life.
We (Americans) will never live this down. Never.
I’m a journalist, so this, here, is why even as a white man I am personally afraid of Trumpism. I haven’t seen this t-shirt but as part of the crowd at two Trump rallies, in Ohio and Arizona, I turned with the mob as they screamed violent wishes at the press pen — a literal metal pen into which they’d allowed themselves to be corralled. Under a Trump presidency we’d see the power of the federal govt turned against journalists like me who have annoyed Trump, and we’d see vigilantes taking more extreme measures with nothing but show investigations by federal authorities and many of the PDs that have effectively endorsed Trump through their union.
Dear fellow lefties, fellow disdainers of Clintonite corporatism, this isn’t just another Republican. Put aside your high-mindedness, your games, and even your conscience if you must; let’s stop this asshole and send a message to the millions of mini-Trumps behind him.
Picture first tweeted — with obscene pleasure — by former Red Sox star Curt Schilling, who is now a Trump supporter, far right radio host, and, he says, a potential political candidate.
Bad times.
Here’s something to take our minds off the election for a few minutes – or maybe just my mind: an article by Ellen Granfield posted at Everyday Feminism that recycles some so 1990s ideas about science. Some bad so 1990s ideas about science.
It’s posted at Everyday Feminism, so Twitter trolls are screeching that this kills feminism dead. (Yo, Everyday Feminism isn’t even feminist, let alone representative of all feminism. Feminism has an anti-science irrationalist wing, but that’s far from all of feminism.) But it was reposted from The Establishment. The Establishment is that site where Aaron Kappel wrote that appalling piece bashing feminism because one woman asked him clumsy questions about his “identity as non-binary.” Publishing the piece discredits The Establishment and Everyday Feminism, but it doesn’t leave a mark on feminism in general.
So let’s see Ellen Granfield’s so last century thoughts on science:
Modern, mainstream science finds itself deeply embedded in a supposedly objective, quantifiable worldview – one that is at best faulty, and at worst, is a form of scientism which denies new findings.
There was the idea of continental drift, you see, which was ridiculed and then later accepted, which is
a stark reminder that the course of human history is not governed by objective truth of any kind, especially in the history of science; the truth is always shifting.
Emphasis hers.
Right. People are wrong about one thing for a short period of time, and it turns out they’re wrong – and that demonstrates that ALL IS RANDOM AND SHIFTING.
I kid. No it doesn’t.
Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince discuss this phenomenon vis a vis paranormal discoveries in their book The Forbidden Universe, which contends that “the view of the universe emerging from the latest scientific discoveries, particularly of quantum physics and cosmology, can be seen to vindicate the ancient Hermetic belief in an evolving, living, conscious universe.”
Seriously, it’s not 1993 any more.
One of the most obvious examples of scientism today is the theory of evolution, which is still upheld as the dominant explanation of how life generates itself. The problem is that biologists still can’t answer the most basic of questions involved, including the origin of life itself, sexual reproduction, or how species originate.
Oops.
The political fight over curriculum between religious Fundamentalists and neo-Darwinists has pushed any meaningful discussion of this topic off the table, as mainstream science remains stubbornly fearful of giving up ground if they admit that there are serious controversies raging around the theory of evolution as the catch-all explanation for our current existence.
It leaves no room for the possibility of Intelligent Design Theory, which posits “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause.” IDT is often made synonymous with creationism – neo-Darwinists argue that it’s just Creationism in disguise – but there are many scientists and philosophers alike that believe IDT is just as compelling a theory as evolution for “the way things are.”
This doesn’t discredit all of feminism, because it’s not all of feminism what wrote it or published it, but it sure as hell does discredit Everyday Feminism and The Establishment – if they had any credit to dis, which in my book they didn’t. In short, boo on them for publishing that garbage.
There’s a lot more, and it’s even worse. There’s some ranting about science’s rude insistence that the heart is a pump and only the brain has intelligence, and the importance of intelligence in the cosmos as a whole, and similar profundities. (Nothing about brain cells in the gut, though. Is she gutphobic?) Very distracting stuff.
H/t Helen Dale
It’s going to be a long day.
What will Trump do if he loses? Nobody knows. My prediction? It will be some form of bad.
The son he punched to the floor in front of the son’s classmates when he was at university tells us that if the loss is big enough Puncher Trump won’t fight it. Big of him. Not yuge, but big.
For months, the Republican nominee encouraged his supporters to mistrust Tuesday night’s results, suggesting the election could be rigged, possibly as part of an intricate scheme involving African-American voters in Philadelphia, Latinos in Nevada, a cabal of international bankers, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, the cast of Saturday Night Live, the FBI, and a dozen women pretending to be victims of his sexual crimes — all working in tandem to execute Crooked Hillary’s plan to end U.S. sovereignty.
Then, at the final presidential debate, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace gave Trump an opportunity to save that red meat for the base and pose as a reasonable politician. But for once, the GOP nominee didn’t take the bait. Instead of assuring Wallace and America that he would concede the election if he lost, Trump promised to keep the nation “in suspense.”
So, on Tuesday morning, MSNBC’s Willie Geist gave Donald Trump Jr. an opportunity to repent for his father’s sin.
“Can you say here right now, if Hillary Clinton is a clear-cut winner tonight in the Electoral College, your father will concede the election in a speech tonight?” Geist asked.
“Of course,” Donald Trump Jr. insisted. “All we’ve wanted is a fair fight.”
Nonsense. They’ve wanted far more than that, and gotten it. They wanted to stir up rage and hatred at all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, and they’ve got their wish.
But Trump Jr. proceeded to explain why his father might be justified in saying the 2016 election was an unfair fight. Specifically, Trump Jr. cited conservative provocateur James O’Keefe’s latest discredited videos, which purport to show Democrats scheming to bus voters across state lines (GOP voter-suppression efforts, inadequate measures to accommodate participation among the disabled, and the fact that we hold elections on a workday did not make his list).
“You know, we just want a fair system,” he said. “Some stuff is going on. I don’t know if it’s enough to move elections. But we’ve seen states, you know, a few thousand votes can make a difference.”
“If he loses, he will concede tonight?” Geist asked, again.
“If he loses and it’s legit and fair and there’s not obvious stuff out there,” Trump Jr. replied, “without question, yes.”
Trump worked hard to get his fans to intimidate voters. He’s not the one who gets to wonder if the election is legit and fair.
While the GOP standard-bearer has spoken a bit less about voter fraud recently, his closing argument centers on Clinton’s corruption and the rigged system that enables it. And it’s difficult to see how that argument leaves room for anything but the most perfunctory endorsement of the election’s legitimacy.
“The FBI, the director, was obviously under tremendous pressure,” Trump toldsupporters Monday. “She still deleted them after getting a subpoena from Congress. I mean, that’s a crime! What happened? That’s a crime! You don’t even need the new stuff. She shouldn’t be allowed to run.”
Says the liar, thief, cheat, pussy-grabber, bully, fraud.
Ultimately, should he lose, it may not matter what Trump says. The damage is done, regardless. For a year and half, he’s inundated his supporters with apocalyptic rhetoric about how his loss would both threaten every right they hold dear and show that those rights can no longer be secured through democratic means — because his defeat would prove that their “democracy” is a sham.
And more.
Man yells "assassinate that bitch" as Pence talks about Clinton and Benghazi in Manchester, NH.
— Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) November 8, 2016
