Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

zoux, wj and fishmech were definitely the worst and only wj is still around cspam, pretending to be a leftist

Condiv posted:

deteriorata still roams free and is as condescending and idiotic as when he was declaring hillary inevitable and the greatest candidate of all time

Taintrunner posted:

Everywhere on the internet and in real life was like this. It was a loving cult, all to make an infinitely rich and powerful white woman with blood on her hands out to be some savior of all humanity. loving absolute mass derangement.

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

fishmech stuck around until it became apparent hillary had lost and i told him to never post in cspam again. zoux left after he self owned

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

zoux, wj and fishmech were definitely the worst and only wj is still around cspam, pretending to be a leftist

Streak posted:

I knew Hillary sucked rear end but thought she would win because America can't possibly elect a retarded pissbaby real estate mogul, right? Hhahahhahaha gently caress I was so naive

MaxxBot posted:

These forms sucked so, so bad in the months leading up to the election. The lengths people would go to in defending abuela were nauseating, even people who made it clear they were going to vote for her were pilloried for dare saying she was anything other than a great candidate and strong progressive.

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

zoux, wj and fishmech were definitely the worst and only wj is still around cspam, pretending to be a leftist

really queer Christmas posted:

it also took months for me to believe that cspam had actually changed into what it is now - which is the good politics forum.

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

fishmech stuck around until it became apparent hillary had lost and i told him to never post in cspam again. zoux left after he self owned

Crowsbeak posted:

Wasn't the toxx rule over if you paid for a nasty women or Bad hombre tag?

MaxxBot posted:

There was also that Mulva dude who would brag about how rich he was

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

zoux, wj and fishmech were definitely the worst and only wj is still around cspam, pretending to be a leftist

GalacticAcid posted:

computer parts

Corky Romanovsky posted:

goons are pretty bad w.r.t. bragging about wealth etc

SKULL.GIF posted:

Phone posted:

is ezra klein or matty the patron saint of d&d?

Gio posted:

february: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/how-america-made-donald-trump-unstoppable-162952/amp/

good article imo, especially in retrospect

quote:

President Donald Trump.

A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events – an early primary catastrophe, Mike Bloomberg ego-crashing the race, etc. – this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised.

It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.

quote:

In Greenville, Donald "The Front-Runner" Trump started off the debate by jumping on his favorite wrestling foil, Prince Dinkley McBirthright, a.k.a. Jeb Bush. Trump seems to genuinely despise Bush. He never missed a chance to rip him for being a "low-energy," "stiff" and "dumb as a rock" weenie who lets his Mexican wife push him around. But if you watch Trump long enough, it starts to seem gratuitous.

Trump's basic argument is the same one every successful authoritarian movement in recent Western history has made: that the regular guy has been screwed by a conspiracy of incestuous elites. The Bushes are half that conspiratorial picture, fronts for a Republican Party establishment and whose sum total of accomplishments, dating back nearly 30 years, are two failed presidencies, the sweeping loss of manufacturing jobs, and a pair of pitiable Middle Eastern military adventures – the second one achieving nothing but dead American kids and Junior's re-election.

Trump picked on Jeb because Jeb is a symbol. The Bushes are a dissolute monarchy, down to offering their last genetic screw-up to the throne.

Jeb took the high road for most of the past calendar year, but Trump used his gentlemanly dignity against him. What Trump understands better than his opponents is that NASCAR America, WWE America, always loves seeing the preening self-proclaimed good guy get whacked with a chair.

quote:

"My mom is the strongest woman I know," Jeb continued.

"She should be running," Trump snapped.

quote:

It's simple transitive-property rhetoric, and it works. The press went gaga for Rubio after Iowa because – why? Because he's an unthreatening, blow-dried, cliché-spouting, dial-surveying phony of the type campaign journalists always approve of.

And when Rubio gets exposed in the debate as a talking haircut, a political Speak n' Spell, suddenly the throng of journalists who spent the past two weeks trying to sell America on "Marcomentum" and the all-important "establishment lane" looks very guilty indeed. Voters were supposed to take this seriously?

Trump knows the public sees through all of this, grasps the press's role in it and rightly hates us all. When so many Trump supporters point to his stomping of the carpetbagging snobs in the national media as the main reason they're going to vote for him, it should tell us in the press something profound about how much people think we suck.

quote:

"Trump has also promised to use tariffs to punish companies," wrote David McIntosh in the Review's much-publicized, but not-effective-at-all "Conservatives Against Trump" 22-pundit jihad. "These are not the ideas of a small-government conservative … They are, instead, the ramblings of a liberal wanna-be strongman."

What these tweedy Buckleyites at places like the Review don't get is that most people don't give a drat about "conservative principles." Yes, millions of people responded to that rhetoric for years. But that wasn't because of the principle itself, but because it was always coupled with the more effective politics of resentment: Big-government liberals are to blame for your problems.

Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame. For a generation, conservative intellectuals have successfully pointed the finger at big-government-loving, whale-hugging liberals as the culprits behind American decline.

But the fact that lots of voters hated the Clintons, Sean Penn, the Dixie Chicks and whomever else, did not, ever, mean that they believed in the principle of Detroit carmakers being able to costlessly move American jobs overseas by the thousands.

quote:

He used a German term, backpfeifengesicht, literally "a face in need of a good punch," to describe Cruz. This may be overstating things a little. Cruz certainly has an odd face – it looks like someone sewed pieces of a waterlogged Reagan mask together at gunpoint

quote:

This is part of a gigantic subplot to the Trump story, which is that many of his critiques of the process are the same ones being made by Bernie Sanders. The two men, of course, are polar opposites in just about every way – Sanders worries about the poor, while Trump would eat a child in a lifeboat – but both are laser-focused on the corrupting role of money in politics.

quote:

Trump will surely argue that the Clintons are the other half of the dissolute-conspiracy story he's been selling, representing a workers' party that abandoned workers and turned the presidency into a vast cash-for-access enterprise, avoiding scrutiny by making Washington into Hollywood East and turning labor leaders and journalists alike into starstruck courtiers. As with everything else, Trump personalizes this, making his stories of buying Hillary's presence at his wedding a part of his stump speech. A race against Hillary Clinton in the general, if it happens, will be a pitch right in Trump's wheelhouse – and if Bill Clinton is complaining about the "vicious" attacks by the campaign of pathological nice guy Bernie Sanders, it's hard to imagine what will happen once they get hit by the Trumpdozer.

quote:

If it comes down to a Sanders-Trump general election, the matter will probably be decided by which candidate the national press turns on first: the flatulent narcissist with cattle-car fantasies or the Democrat who gently admires Scandinavia. Would you bet your children on that process playing out sensibly?

quote:

The triumvirate of big media, big donors and big political parties has until now successfully excluded every challenge to its authority. But like every aristocracy, it eventually got lazy and profligate, too sure it was loved by the people. It's now shocked that voters in depressed ex-factory towns won't keep pulling the lever for "conservative principles," or that union members bitten a dozen times over by a trade deal won't just keep voting Democratic on cue.

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

just lmao if you were not absolutely loving furious with hillary, the dem establishment, and all the succ pundits on 11/9 and the days following jesus christ i was so pissed at all these chodes who spent those last months telling everyone how bad she was gonna beat trump and how she was the best candidate ever

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

just lmao if you were not absolutely loving furious with hillary, the dem establishment, and all the succ pundits on 11/9 and the days following jesus christ i was so pissed at all these chodes who spent those last months telling everyone how bad she was gonna beat trump and how she was the best candidate ever

SKULL.GIF posted:

GalacticAcid posted:

I’ve posted this before but lol

anime was right posted:

i remember 11/9 pretty vividly. i just kind of stared into space all day and yet it was still yesterday in my mind.

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

I'm glad that Hillary is running, and in particular that Trump is running, because now we're finally gonna complete the reshaping of the party coalitions that might have otherwise dragged on for another couple cycles until Republicans nominated some other protectionist-populist who finally pulled the white, working-class vote away from Democrats for good. That was always gonna happen sometime, we've just had it happen faster than expected.

If this election were Mitt Romney vs. Joe Biden (or pick your favorite "generic" candidates), I think we'd be seeing results very similar to what we are seeing now. It's a valid point that Hillary is less able to capitalize on Trump's failings than a more talented campaigner like Obama could have, and I think that there's candidates who would be doing better in the horse-race than Hillary is now, but I'm hoping that the end-result of this is actually a long-term positive for Democrats and liberals, in that it helps us finally put the Dixiecrat firmly in the past and allows us to move forward without that anchor weighing down the party.

anime was right posted:

i remember 11/9 pretty vividly. i just kind of stared into space all day and yet it was still yesterday in my mind.

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

just lmao if you were not absolutely loving furious with hillary, the dem establishment, and all the succ pundits on 11/9 and the days following jesus christ i was so pissed at all these chodes who spent those last months telling everyone how bad she was gonna beat trump and how she was the best candidate ever

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

just lmao if you were not absolutely loving furious with hillary, the dem establishment, and all the succ pundits on 11/9 and the days following jesus christ i was so pissed at all these chodes who spent those last months telling everyone how bad she was gonna beat trump and how she was the best candidate ever

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

agreed, only hillary losing to trump unleashed the appetite for socialism we see today

Taintrunner posted:

I laughed so loving hard

what a broken loving devil nation

Matt Zerella posted:

I said it earlier but watching everyone in my office gathered around the TV in the conference room weeping was extremely cathartic to me. I just laughed internally, made myself a coffee and posted away in the primordial Succ Zone ethers.