Trump's Election an Echo, Not Foreshadowing

musterion

Well-known member
It's one thing to lie to oneself. It's something else again to assume you've conned everyone else into believing your lies.
 

Town Heretic

Out of Order
Hall of Fame
It's one thing to lie to oneself. It's something else again to assume you've conned everyone else into believing your lies.
You can't really lie to yourself. At best you can be unaware of what you actually believe, I suppose, the way you likely believe you're being reasonable, I hope.

To answer less charitably, but with clarity, it's one thing to question the character of someone else without reasoned cause and another thing to illustrate your own in the attempt. The other thing being, of course, the advance of an unintended irony.

I wondered about you after you missed my joke at the expense of the left (the 2nd Amendment bit) to get your knickers in a twist because I noted that most people on either side of the aisle aren't rioters and looters. Apparently the thought of crediting anyone outside of your blinkers with even the least admirable quality was too much for you. Too bad. It reduces your opportunity for genuine conversation because you can't see beyond those assumptive blinkers and your efficacy beyond the converted because of your methodology and what it speaks to.

For anyone else, left or right, avoid the extremes. Many a decent fellow has succumbed, as musterion illustrates with his bit of temper (see: idiot) and present distortion, to the self-marginalization of its impact. This post will likely be followed by a few harrumphs in support by exemplars of that very thing, tale wagging, after a fashion.
 

ok doser

lifeguard at the cement pond
worth a listen - unfortunately they don't do transcripts - i'm gonna look for this guy's books


Sooo… what just happened?

That would be a good question to put to the guy who wrote What's the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won The Heart of America.

Donald Trump took seriously something that the Democratic Party likes to brush off, which is the increasing desertion of the party by working class people — and the way the Democratic Party has abandoned working class interests.
- Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank is one of the canniest political commentators in the United States — a fair, but fierce and often humorous critic of Washington's political establishment, both Democrat and Republican.

His most recent book is the very timely Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?

Donald Trump comes across as a kind of buffoon, the hair, the egotism. But there's some canny political strategy here. His emphasis on trade, on NAFTA. It was Bill Clinton that did it, over the objections of organized labour, the voice of the working class. He ran a steam-roller over these people and got NAFTA done. That was the great betrayal.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayed...emocrats-betrayed-the-working-class-1.3847670



http://www.cbc.ca/radio/popup/audio...etrayed-the-working-class&contentid=1.3847670
 

ok doser

lifeguard at the cement pond
Turns out my brother was "relieved" of his tax return - which they badly needed - because he'd signed up for Obamacare.

bammycare :nono:


what an absolute disaster

just one of many reasons that bammy will go down in history as the worst president ever


second only to trump! :banana:
 

Town Heretic

Out of Order
Hall of Fame
No, it was simply in response to an idiot.
The irrationality and temperament of that is only surpassed by the further insight into what constitutes your mindset.

Your point, such as it is, is easily proved: find reports of lower and middle-class liberals who work hard for a living and often live paycheck to paycheck, who signed on for Obamacare, got screwed by it, BUT were thankful for the screwing and ended up even bigger koolaid drinkers than before. Go.
Only an idiot or the sort of cartoon character you see in lieu of really paying attention, someone with no substantive understanding or worldview would pin their ideological philosophy on the success or failure of a single notion within it, if they had that view. I'm a moderate, so I'm aligned with what seems reasonable and best to me in either party.

Had you asked, a thing too often absent in the assumptive zealot, I'd have said of the president's health care act what I've said to any number of friends on the right, that I believe an intelligently regulated use of markets is the best answer, that conservatives are almost as responsible for this mess by not wading in at the outset, elbow deep, with genuine ideas and better approaches, instead of playing politics and letting this result happen.

No one on the Right cares what the you think of the Right.
No one on the hard right cares for any other voice. It's part of your problem. You aren't really listening/spend most of your time projecting, which is why you attack other conservatives as RINOs.

Your opinion is irrelevant because we know all you want is our complete destruction as a political force.
That victim/paranoid mentality is the other. Rather, I'd like to see the extremes of both philosophies reigned in by people who can hear and can advance the welfare of the nation.

When it comes from you? No, I give it no credit at all. You've got others on TOL bamboozled by your vocabulary and wit, and your "reasoned moderate" schtick, but some of us see you for what you are.
Said the guy I just removed from my friends list. Or, you're a bit like a couple of others that were on that once. Your revisionist history aside, what changed is that at some point we came into conflict and then your mindset did to you what it does to most zealots.

Or, to play along with this new narrative of yours, yes, yes, others were seduced by reason and humor. But not you. :plain: You keep tilting at that windmill then, must. Sad to see it, but not particularly surprised.
 

ok doser

lifeguard at the cement pond
Your point, such as it is, is easily proved: find reports of lower and middle-class liberals who work hard for a living and often live paycheck to paycheck, who signed on for Obamacare, got screwed by it, BUT were thankful for the screwing and ended up even bigger koolaid drinkers than before. Go.

tumblr_noys8mkgT11s0my1wo1_250.gif
 

ok doser

lifeguard at the cement pond
oh wait


HUMPHRIES: The “Obama will pay for my gas and mortgage” lady has now turned on him


You gotta remember Peggy Joseph! She’s the Florida woman who said after an Obama speech in 2008: “I won’t have to worry about puttin’ gas in my car, I won’t have to worry about payin’ my mortgage.”

Now even SHE has turned on the president and has seen the light shining as bright as the hot sun on a non-man-made globally warm day.

In the upcoming documentary “There’s No Place Like Uopia,” filmmaker Joel Gilbert found Peggy and was surprised to learn that the former Internet phenom is now strongly ANTI-Obama!


http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/15/humphries-feel-good-story-peggy-joseph/




 

ok doser

lifeguard at the cement pond
Trump's presidency! :banana:

The complete destruction of the Democratic Party! :banana::banana:

The complete supremacy of the Conservative/Republican agenda! :roses:
 
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musterion

Well-known member
Oh, I get it now. A leftist TOL "friend" has written me off and un-friended me over this election.

On the other hand, my brother -- who used to have much in common with TOL unfriend -- and I will now be on speaking terms again.

I'm okay with how all this shook out. :)
 

Arthur Brain

Well-known member
You can't really lie to yourself. At best you can be unaware of what you actually believe, I suppose, the way you likely believe you're being reasonable, I hope.

To answer less charitably, but with clarity, it's one thing to question the character of someone else without reasoned cause and another thing to illustrate your own in the attempt. The other thing being, of course, the advance of an unintended irony.

I wondered about you after you missed my joke at the expense of the left (the 2nd Amendment bit) to get your knickers in a twist because I noted that most people on either side of the aisle aren't rioters and looters. Apparently the thought of crediting anyone outside of your blinkers with even the least admirable quality was too much for you. Too bad. It reduces your opportunity for genuine conversation because you can't see beyond those assumptive blinkers and your efficacy beyond the converted because of your methodology and what it speaks to.

For anyone else, left or right, avoid the extremes. Many a decent fellow has succumbed, as musterion illustrates with his bit of temper (see: idiot) and present distortion, to the self-marginalization of its impact. This post will likely be followed by a few harrumphs in support by exemplars of that very thing, tale wagging, after a fashion.

Musty seems to think anyone not leaning to the far, far right is a "leftist", although even then he doesn't really have any kind of grip on what even 'liberals' think for the most part...
 

Town Heretic

Out of Order
Hall of Fame
Musty seems to think anyone not leaning to the far, far right is a "leftist", although even then he doesn't really have any kind of grip on what even 'liberals' think for the most part...
I was just telling a friend of mine, who is as right entrenched as anyone I can think of here, that the whole Must business had me reconsidering a thing that needed it. I'd gotten into the habit of thinking that the hard right is largely comprised of the sort of person who is comfortable with immediately disparaging character instead of addressing content, or easy with combining the two. Someone ironically lacking demonstrable character in the effort.

But that's not really fair. What I think happens to many on the hard right is that if most of the people they argue with, differ strongly and often with, will tend to be as zealously assured from the left (and in forum life and with social media at large the most vocally political tend to be polarized) and that there's a human tendency to see everything as a piece, to create a rule that absent serious and steady examination will blind you to another truth: there are people who will disagree with you by degree on any number of positions who might agree with you on others. People are complicated. We have to resist the impulse to stereotype.

Zealots have a hard time with that...so X won't credit me with honesty because if he does then he has to complicate his worldview. And his experience tells him that his world view is correct...except his experience is distorted by the rule he created and that he's locked himself into. . .The fact remains that I'm a gun owning opponent of abortion who simply doesn't subscribe to the Trump as solution agenda, isn't hard wired into every conservative position, sees a great deal of good as well as folly in much of what the left has to offer, and who believes that working together, taking the best that both have to offer, has been responsible for most of what truly works to the betterment of our system.

If that's too complicated for someone they really don't have a conversation I'd be interested in having.
 

Town Heretic

Out of Order
Hall of Fame
Oh, I get it now. A leftist TOL "friend" has written me off and un-friended me over this election.
No, that's your stereotype doing your thinking for you. A moderate who you just called dishonest found that dishonorable and ended the pretense you had entered into of friendship. I disagree with any number of my friends, some of them profoundly, but I don't discount or disparage their integrity. That you're comfortable with that tells me we have a different definition and litmus.

I'm okay with how all this shook out. :)
Of course you are, and that's one of the sadder points of the day.

Edit: And so the signature line I've had in place for months.
 
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