Trump number 8

[sponk]

The fucker's retweeted Hopkins twice in one day. Once including her calling Khan "nipple height" and once attacking Merkel because a German got hacked up by a Syrian refugee. At risk of invoking the wrath of mental health charities I have to say he's a div who's gone schizo

[Urinal Cake]

This is what Americans want hell it's what most people around the world want. A loudmouth leader putting one race first, a stud and putting uppity minorities and countries in their place.

This is the behaviour that Anglophone countries thought they were above in many ways or atleast had the good sense to hide away but not really.

[olliebean]

This is the behaviour that Anglophone countries thought they were above in many ways

You have heard of the British Empire? Putting uppity minorities and countries in their place was pretty much our brand for a couple of centuries. Still is in the heads of a lot of Brexit supporters.

[Pearly-Dewdrops Drops]

Just a couple fun stories to round out the week from Are Brave Boys in ICE:

Mentally-ill diabetic man who has lived in the United States since the age of 6 months forcibly deported to Iraq, a country he has never set foot in, with nowhere to live and dies shortly thereafter: https://twitter.com/MariManoogian/status/1159265246525231105

Hundreds of undocumented workers forcibly arrested in Mississippi on first day of school such that children return home to find that their parents have simply vanished: https://twitter.com/AlexLoveWJTV/status/1159264049105973248

[Moribunderast]

Just a couple fun stories to round out the week from Are Brave Boys in ICE:

Mentally-ill diabetic man who has lived in the United States since the age of 6 months forcibly deported to Iraq, a country he has never set foot in, with nowhere to live and dies shortly thereafter: https://twitter.com/MariManoogian/status/1159265246525231105

Hundreds of undocumented workers forcibly arrested in Mississippi on first day of school such that children return home to find that their parents have simply vanished: https://twitter.com/AlexLoveWJTV/status/1159264049105973248

The comments in the thread about the abandoned kids are terrifying. America is in the grip of a fearsome streak of cruelty at the moment, or so it seems to me from the outside looking in. So many people reacting with happiness or derision at things that I'd thought would be unanimously seen as horrific.

There's always been American Exceptionalism but this feels different. I wonder if it can ever be halted or repaired after the Orange One has gone. I fear it may be his lasting legacy and gift to the world.

[The Culture Bunker]

There's always been American Exceptionalism but this feels different. I wonder if it can ever be halted or repaired after the Orange One has gone. I fear it may be his lasting legacy and gift to the world.

It's a weird one, and I do wonder if it is fuelled by a widespread conviction when there's any kind of bad news (ie shooting sprees) that "nothing like this could ever happen to me/anyone I care about". I assume there's the same concept when they think about health care - "it's bad when people get cancer and can't afford treatments and their insurers refuse to pay out, but that won't happen to me".

[Pearly-Dewdrops Drops]

I think the answer is that the corporate mass media and the tyranny of two-party politics are too much for human beings' frail lizard brains to handle and it leads to genuine psychosis in a lot of people who becomes very invested for one reason or the other at destroying the other side.

We all live in Baudrillard's hyperreality and we are all fucked.

[phantom_power]

There is also the fact that some people are just ignorant, racist empathy voids

[phantom_power]

They have been released

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-49283157

[Paul Calf]

'Temporarily'. They'll come back to mop them up when the cameras have gone and the white people have lost interest and moved on to something else.

[kngen]

Hundreds of undocumented workers forcibly arrested in Mississippi on first day of school such that children return home to find that their parents have simply vanished: https://twitter.com/AlexLoveWJTV/status/1159264049105973248

I don't ever recall a news story making me cry at any point in my life, but this did. Just pure, needless spite based on the whims of a thick bigot with dementia. And all the usual craven cheerleaders are lining up with their specious justifications. I don't know how this country will ever come back from this. I really don't.

[jobotic]

Cunt posing with a shit eating grin and a thumbs up with a baby whose parents have been murdered because of him as a prop.

And no one gives a fuck.

[bgmnts]

Twitter going fucking mental over that.

[Hank Venture]

America is a deeply sick society. I've taken flack for this before, but Americans are just ... off. Like, you'd think they would be rioting in the streets, or at least voting, but no, most apathetic populace of any modern democracy, surely? They just don't care. What do Americans actually care about?

[Monsieur Verdoux]

eh it's the same in pretty much every other affluent country

[bgmnts]

Nah France is, or at least was I've not followed, flying the flag for mass protest with the jaunes. And we like a good protest every so often.

Hell, didn't even America have their Occupy thing a while back? These things just aren't newsworthy, is all.

Anyway America cares about guns, an absurd standard of living, having 3 cars and race.

[Hank Venture]

eh it's the same in pretty much every other affluent country

Nah. Other countries are bad to a certain degree, in certain facets, but the US really is an outlier in how much of a grotesque circus it is. The healthcare debate, for instance.

[Monsieur Verdoux]

The healthcare debate is obviously grotesque but I wouldn't say that it's something that people are apathetic about

[Hank Venture]

It took until Bernie Sanders for it to become a viable policy position, and he alone basically forced it. And even now, as people are dying because they are rationing insulin, Biden is leading in the polls. And a Trump reelection is a very real possibility. Last time, the voter turnout was 55%. 

I just saw a news article in which an elderly couple did a murder-suicide to medical bills. It's sick. America is a sick country. Mass shootings is another one. You can't convince me that all countries are basically equally bad.

[Monsieur Verdoux]

Well no, obviously neither I nor anyone else would ever claim that, but I thought your point was that they have a particularly apathetic and indifferent populace, which I don't think is notably more true of the US than anywhere else. The people who can't pay their healthcare bills, which is a massive number of people, are certainly not indifferent to the healthcare issue. The political system is indifferent to those people, and that's a way in which the US is notably more broken than other countries

[Pearly-Dewdrops Drops]

I think the United States is appreciably worse in certain ways because of the grotesque media in this country, but it's also worth pointing out that the UK continues to prop up a party actively trying to dismantle the NHS and turn the UK into the United States. Arguably the only reason the UK has national healthcare is because they had to rebuild after WW2 while the US did not, sort of like the handful of American social programs that were passed during the Great Depression and never would have been enacted in any era since.

[Urinal Cake]

It's a historic decision (to put healthcare in the hands of employers rather than government) that the USA is still grappling with. It still primarily affects the unemployed and other disadvantaged- the losers.  It's not much better in other countries where public healthcare has been chipped away from the most disadvantaged since they're least likely to be listened to.

Part of it is inertia. It's harder for the government to get rid of something than ignore the pleas of the public.

[Fambo Number Mive]

The White House is circulating drafts of a proposed executive order that would address allegations of anti-conservative bias by social media companies, according to a White House official and two other people familiar with the matter — a month after President Donald Trump pledged to explore "all regulatory and legislative solutions" on the issue.

None of the three would describe the contents of the order, which one person cautioned has already taken many different forms and remains in flux. But its existence, and the deliberations surrounding it, are evidence that the administration is taking a serious look at wielding the federal government's power against Silicon Valley.

"If the internet is going to be presented as this egalitarian platform and most of Twitter is liberal cesspools of venom, then at least the president wants some fairness in the system," the White House official said. "But look, we also think that social media plays a vital role. They have a vital role and an increasing responsibility to the culture that has helped make them so profitable and so prominent."...

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/07/white-house-tech-censorship-1639051

[bgmnts]

A white house official said "liberal cesspool of venom".

1: Have they been on Twitter?
2: Abysmal.

[Head Gardener]

[steve98]

What a beautiful Tweet; so nice.

EDIT. I see it's a parody account (Well done though)

[Head Gardener]

[jobotic]

Have we had this already?

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/08/08/trump-brags-about-crowd-size-during-el-paso-hospital-visit-nr-bts-vpx.cnn

[Ferris]

White House lobbying foreign governments to deny access to US citizens. Not just US citizens, but US Representatives. This is beneath contempt - just when you think he can't sink any lower.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/world/middleeast/trump-israel-omar-tlaib.html

I don't have anything to say, really. This hyper-partisanship and petty weaponized nastiness won't end well. It also won't end with Trump, now that he's shown it's effective.

For all the posters on here who say "ooh an establishment Dem would be just as bad" you may be right on some things, but they wouldn't be gleefully stoking the discord in the United States to anything like the same degree. I'd argue that change in discourse will cause long-term devastating structural shocks in the US government at all levels - if the other side are the absolute enemy who must be crushed at all costs then you'll never see another bill go through Congress again.

[Pearly-Dewdrops Drops]

White House lobbying foreign governments to deny access to US citizens. Not just US citizens, but US Representatives. This is beneath contempt - just when you think he can't sink any lower.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/world/middleeast/trump-israel-omar-tlaib.html

I don't have anything to say, really. This hyper-partisanship and petty weaponized nastiness won't end well. It also won't end with Trump, now that he's shown it's effective.

For all the posters on here who say "ooh an establishment Dem would be just as bad" you may be right on some things, but they wouldn't be gleefully stoking the discord in the United States to anything like the same degree. I'd argue that change in discourse will cause long-term devastating structural shocks in the US government at all levels - if the other side are the absolute enemy who must be crushed at all costs then you'll never see another bill go through Congress again.

True, but it's literally been this way, and the legislature has been dysfunctional, for decades now. The only major legislation in the last 30 years (?) was Obamacare, which was a repackaged Republican proposal from the 90s and even so has been heralded as satanic communism.