The Trump Presidency, Season 2

[Lori Claremont]

Also: Continue to go fuck yourself, Google.

Google updates maps to show Lake America in the U.S. — but Canadians are now seeing it, too

Just one more reason to avoid anything that has anything to do with Google...

 

[Sid]

Well, I'm sure some percentage of the world originally responded with "I didn't know there was a Lake Ontario..."

Well, half of the world population has an IQ below average, so don't color me surprised.

 

[Noodles]

Instead of the lakes spelling HOMES, they now spell SHAME

 

[Free]

Good to know law enforcement under Trump continue in their efforts to make crime a thing of the past. Because nothing will be considered a crime any longer.

At the FBI, a history of hiring prostitutes or stealing from employer may no longer be a barrier to being hired

The FBI previously refused to hire job applicants if they admitted to hiring sex workers or stealing from an employer — or engaging in acts of bestiality.

Today, those acts, which are mostly illegal across the country, are no longer automatic deal breakers for applicants to the nation's top law enforcement agency.

In June, the FBI quietly lowered some of the standards it uses when it conducts background checks on would-be federal agents and other personnel. According to multiple sources briefed on the matter, the FBI did so to facilitate hiring in some cases, even if candidates acknowledged they engaged in sexually deviant activities or stole from an employer.
The move comes as the FBI has lost scores of employees through firings, retirements and resignations since the start of the Trump administration.

Any specific areas of...illegality are we loosing up on that could still make ones coworkers squirmish?

The new standards also specifically address applicants who have engaged in past acts of bestiality or animal cruelty – saying they may still be considered for the bureau as long as the incidents took place before the age of 18, the sources said.

Yeah, ok...

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Life after Maga: the group offering an ‘exit ramp’ for rightwingers questioning Trumpism

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Rewatching Babylon 5. JMS used the idea of the banality of evil effectively in that series. We almost never see President Clarke doing evil things. The big bad is far away. The Post Office clerk is right there. Instead we see a progression of people just doing their jobs, staying out of politics, making the machine work one tiny step at a time.

Don't forget about Nightwatch in B5.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Life after Maga: the group offering an ‘exit ramp’ for rightwingers questioning Trumpism

This is a really good description of MAGA's psychological hold on people. It's all too easy for me to lose sight of this due to sheer exasperation with the results of the Trump presidency that we're all experiencing. Yes, there are many people who are simply upset that Trump's policies are hurting them instead of others, but that's not all of them.

Forlano and her group borrow a framework used in addiction and recovery circles, treating the psychological grip of constant fear-based media and conspiracies like a disease. The mechanism is neurobiological, she said: people who consume a steady diet of fear narratives become fearful in general, adopt a “with us or against us” mentality and start treating loved ones as threats.

“The mind is functioning as a dope seeker,” she said, craving the next piece of alarming news the way an addicted brain craves its next hit. Forlano is careful to note that holding certain political beliefs doesn’t make someone diseased; the compulsive, threat-seeking pattern layered on top of those beliefs is what the group tries to address.

Having been an Outsider since I was a child, I have only an intellectual understanding of what it means to be deeply and emotionally immersed in an IRL community and then find the courage to leave it. I'm not a joiner, I'm skeptical, I'm quick to break connections that become problematic. That history can make me unsympathetic to the people who are belatedly waking up to the horror and danger of Trump & MAGA. I'm glad there are support groups that can help people make that journey, cause I'm still wrestling with how, if ever, to forgive them for this.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

This is a really good description of MAGA's psychological hold on people. It's all too easy for me to lose sight of this due to sheer exasperation with the results of the Trump presidency that we're all experiencing. Yes, there are many people who are simply upset that Trump's policies are hurting them instead of others, but that's not all of them.


Having been an Outsider since I was a child, I have only an intellectual understanding of what it means to be deeply and emotionally immersed in an IRL community and then find the courage to leave it. I'm not a joiner, I'm skeptical, I'm quick to break connections that become problematic. That history can make me unsympathetic to the people who are belatedly waking up to the horror and danger of Trump & MAGA. I'm glad there are support groups that can help people make that journey, cause I'm still wrestling with how, if ever, to forgive them for this.

Totally agree on all points. I think my ability to forgive really depends on their individual motivation for supporting Trump. A lot of Trump supporters KNOW he is pointlessly cruel, and that's the part they like until it turns on them. They do not deserve forgiveness in my view. But I can forgive people who were just REALLY ignorant. A lot of young people in particular basically grew up in a well sealed propaganda bubble, and are earnestly confused by what is going on. Being hateful is much less forgivable than just being ignorant. Milo Yiannopoulos is a good example of a shitbird who loved the cruelty until the leopards ate his face.

I think many on the left have trouble emphasizing what it's like to be in a total propaganda bubble and/or grow up in a cult. I really think most of the world's population is in just a bit of a bubble, and it can take a lot of time and EFFORT to unlearn things. Obviously it's much more extreme for some people, but I think most of us can relate to this to at least some extent.

For example, I grew up with a lot of free market dogma and a lot of American nationalist propaganda being taught as fact. Adding new information is often a lot easier than realizing a ton of "education" was just wrong. Even after a big change in world view, it can take time to figure out every little teaching that was actually wrong.

This experience of world view collapse is of course much sharper for people who've been in a full blown cult. I've heard a bit about how people leaving the Jehovah Witnesses essentially have to relearn EVERYTHING about history and science since the cult just teaches everything wrong. Relearning everything can take years of confusion even after the come to terms with the fact that the cult was wrong. I also remember reading about some people who left the Westboro Baptist Church and still being confused about random absurd "facts" they were taught to believe about gay people. It's just not really feasible to accept all at once that EVERYTHING you were taught was wrong.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Milo Yiannopoulos is a good example of a shitbird who loved the cruelty until the leopards ate his face.

He's a grifter, plain and simple. He started out writing a blog for the Telegraph in London, got fired from that, started his own online magazine which soon went bust, leaving a lot of contributors unpaid, then fetched up in the US working for Breitbart, got fired from Breitbart ...

 

[Free]

Let's not forget what drew Milo into American conservative circles was the whole Gamergate shitstorm.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

He's a grifter, plain and simple. He started out writing a blog for the Telegraph in London, got fired from that, started his own online magazine which soon went bust, leaving a lot of contributors unpaid, then fetched up in the US working for Breitbart, got fired from Breitbart ...

He of course never had any substance. His entire schtick while in the US Conservatives was playing what I refer to as "demographic chess." He thought he could say racist stuff as long as he fetishized black men. He thought he could attack women due to being kind of gay, etc. It was nauseating how many idiots bought that bullshit.

I was just thumbing through his wiki and holy shit.. his positions and rationale for them is even more incoherent than I remembered. He's like if the dumbest American conservative redneck stereotype was blessed with a nice crisp British accent that Americans stereotype as being intelligent.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

Paramount, CBS, Trump, and the Ellisons: The Ultimate Corruption - The American Prospect

A new documentary, ‘Murdering 60 Minutes,’ brilliantly connects the dots.

prospect.org

The new merger, which is temporarily on hold due to lawsuits from some states' AG's but I think will ultimately go through, HAS to be one of the largest Anti-Trust violations ever. It makes Ma Bell look like a small company. IF we ever get rid of this pestilence, we need to go HARD on monopolies, but most especially those created for propaganda and destruction of First Amendment purposes.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

He's a grifter, plain and simple. He started out writing a blog for the Telegraph in London, got fired from that, started his own online magazine which soon went bust, leaving a lot of contributors unpaid, then fetched up in the US working for Breitbart, got fired from Breitbart ...

Jeezus! How do you get fired from Breitbart ???

 

[Free]

Jeezus! How do you get fired from Breitbart ???

You "resign" after a video surfaces of you stating that sex between adults and children (around age 13yo) could be considered consensual.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

You "resign" after a video surfaces of you stating that sex between adults and children (around age 13yo) could be considered consensual.

It has to be between adult male and 13 yr old male. It's clear that the entire MAGA/Republican establishment is fine with sex between adults and 13 yr olds as long as it is a male adult and female 13 yr old.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

You "resign" after a video surfaces of you stating that sex between adults and children (around age 13yo) could be considered consensual.

The deportation of Milo Yiannopoulos signals a rupture within Maga

Yiannopoulous’s comments, which he later apologized for, are not so far out of line from what some on the far right have said about child marriage, or the need to encourage childbirth among teen girls. But Yiannopoulous was talking about boys, not girls, and by then the Maga movement he had helped to galvanize no longer needed him. There were already plenty of Milo imitators, eager to see a rival deposed and ready to fill his grotesque niche.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

It has to be between adult male and 13 yr old male. It's clear that the entire MAGA/Republican establishment is fine with sex between adults and 13 yr olds as long as it is a male adult and female 13 yr old.

Beat me to it. They unironically think "pedophilia" is only when it might be kind of gay and outside of marriage. A lot of Evangelicals seriously have no concept of consent or age gaps. If it's within the realm of biblical marriage, it's a-okay. When they use words like "grooming" or "pedophile" they are actually co-oping modern secular terminology they don't grasp.

The deportation of Milo Yiannopoulos signals a rupture within Maga

But Yiannoupoulous’s downfall is more than just another case of the Maga revolution eating its children. His abrupt arrest and deportation seems, instead, like the product of a bigger rupture within the Trump movement, wherein the isolationist, anti-Zionist, and increasingly antisemitic faction is in revolt against Trump and the neoconservative, expansionist and pro-Israel and pro-military adventurism wing that persuaded him to go to war with Iran. As the unpopular, unwinnable war drags on, sending prices soaring and making it seem more likely that irate voters will look to punish the Republicans in the November midterms, fingers are pointing within the Maga coalition, as major players look to dilute their own responsibility and find someone else to blame. Milo’s deportation might be just one instance in the much uglier fight to come as these figures seek to throw one another under the bus. If they were honorable people, after all, they wouldn’t be in the Trump camp in the first place.

I think they are REALLY reaching here. I agree there is a growing divide in MAGA, but I think this article failed to explain what Milo's downfall has to do with it. The fact that MAGA turned against their token gay boy was extremely predictable; and not really relevant to the more real divide over wars, Israel, and the fact that MAGA economics is actually running our economy into the ground.

 

[Free]

Of course Milo was talking about boys, and never brought the other sex (note I avoided "gender") into the conversation. And not just because he was talking about his own experience, although he does love to talk about himself to the nth degree so focusing on his own encounters naturally leaves us out of the equation

Although it is interesting how often he enjoys talking about women, especially the "deeply physically unattractive" birth control taking ones who don't get that a feminism is a cancer.

As for his deportation, I think I agree with Laura Loomer's take, which is SHE is responsible for it. That, and the fact Milo has been heavily involved with Marjorie Taylor Greene (sorry, I mean Marjorie Traitor Brown). So once he understood one of his personal turncoats could be even marginally harmed by it, Trump OK'ed it.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Trump's Cuba sanctions are impacting a sandwich shop in Ireland because it sells Cuban sandwiches. Like, it's not owned or run by Cubans, "Cuban" is literally just the name of the style of sandwich they make.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Trump's Cuba sanctions are impacting a sandwich shop in Ireland because it sells Cuban sandwiches. Like, it's not owned or run by Cubans, "Cuban" is literally just the name of the style of sandwich they make.

I'm wondering if this is why Havana Club rums are available from most UK supermarkets and online liquor stores but not Amazon UK. I realise there's a US trade embargo with Cuba, but that doesn't affect the UK.