POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Gilrandir]

Besides taking him out of context as Samurai touches on, Homer Simpson isn't the role model you want to emulate.

A guy that has a house, two cars, a family, and sleeps all the time at work doing nothing - everybody wants to live like Homer.

[ReluctantSamurai]

A guy that has a house, two cars, a family, and sleeps all the time at work doing nothing

I'd say that pretty accurately describes most of our Congress people, at the moment. For a growing number of Americans, many of whom have already lost their job and health insurance to recession, their house or apartment to foreclosure, and family members to COVID....not so much.

[Gilrandir]

I'd say that pretty accurately describes most of our Congress people, at the moment.

You mean Republican Congress people. It is they who cheat on their wives and kick puppies. Democrats are more of Ned Flanders kind of guys.

[ReluctantSamurai]

You mean Republican Congress people.

Incorrect. I meant ALL of Congress. If I had wanted to target just Republicans, I would have referenced the GOP only...

It is they who cheat on their wives and kick puppies.

Poor attempt at sarcasm. There are plenty of examples of corporatism, corruption, and criminal activity amongst Democrats, which is again why I referenced the ENTIRE Congress.

Democrats are more of Ned Flanders kind of guys.

Been watching a lot of The Simpson's lately, I see. It's no wonder you have such a fantasy world-view of America...

[ReluctantSamurai]

At some point in the next few weeks, there should be consideration given to a thread covering the new Biden/Harris administration, yes? Cabinet nominations, for instance, are currently ongoing and certainly generating a lot of controversy.

Just a thought...

[Idaho]

I don't know anything about the author, but I tip my hat to a quality bit of 18th century political satire:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...rom%20%251%24s

The president of the United States very often saw beautiful things that did not exist. He was able to admire legislation he had passed that he had not passed; he was able to see corners being turned that were not being turned; he loved to see how beloved he was in polls that turned out not to be polls. One day, he saw something new and beautiful. He saw he had plainly won the election...

[ReluctantSamurai]

The motives behind this are obvious, the intelligence of the congress members, is not:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-supreme-court

More than 120 Republican members of the US House of Representatives formally asked the US supreme court this week to prevent four swing states from casting electoral votes for Joe Biden to seal his victory in the November election, a brazen move that signals how the Republican party has embraced Donald Trump’s baseless attacks on the American electoral system.

The request from 126 GOP members – nearly two-thirds of the Republican caucus – came in support of a lawsuit Texas filed earlier this week that sought to block the electoral votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia, all states Biden won in November. The lawsuit also won support from top House Republicans.

The lawsuit has already been thrown out by SCOTUS, but the brief signed onto by these 126 in support of that suit is....

Among the 126 lawmakers who signed on to the brief is a particularly puzzling group: 19 Republican members of Congress who represent districts in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin.

Those members all appeared on the same ballot as the presidential candidates and all but one were elected under the same rules to which they are now objecting.

So for the record, these 18 Republicans want to invalidate election results for Joe Biden due to "irregularities", but that their own results, which occurred on the same ballots, are not affected by those very same "irregularities".
And these supposedly intelligent people want the 20+ million people in the four states targeted, to buy that as a coherent argument. Sounds like the brief was prepared by Giuliani or the Kraaken herself....

Most of the lawmakers who supported the effort are far-right conservatives from deep red districts that voted for Trump. But collectively, their support for the lawsuit meant that more than a quarter of the House, including the California congressman Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader, believe the supreme court should invalidate the votes of tens of millions of Americans.

The Guardian contacted the offices of all 18 of those Republicans who won re-election to ask if they believed there should be further investigation into their electoral victories in November. None of them responded to a request for comment.

Yep....Republican lawmakers are such a great bunch of people, that every effort should be made to bend over backwards to work with these morons, despite the fact they want to destroy democracy. Here's an idea:

Put these idiots on trial for sedition.

[Hooahguy]

At some point in the next few weeks, there should be consideration given to a thread covering the new Biden/Harris administration, yes? Cabinet nominations, for instance, are currently ongoing and certainly generating a lot of controversy.

Just a thought...

You're more than welcome to make that thread yourself

[Gilrandir]

Incorrect. I meant ALL of Congress. If I had wanted to target just Republicans, I would have referenced the GOP only...

There are plenty of examples of corporatism, corruption, and criminal activity amongst Democrats, which is again why I referenced the ENTIRE Congress.

You don't say! I'm getting pretty much disappointed in Democrats and Samurais! Next thing you would say that both of them can go back on their word and return to the thread they said they would not.

[Montmorency]

A guy that has a house, two cars, a family, and sleeps all the time at work doing nothing - everybody wants to live like Homer.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Being 1-51 pretty much ensures you get fired in the sports world. Hopefully, this is that last nail:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ection-results

Trump had long expressed hope that a disputed election would go before the supreme court, to which he appointed three justices during his term, ensuring a 6-3 conservative majority. Earlier on Friday he tweeted: “If the Supreme Court shows great Wisdom and Courage, the American People will win perhaps the most important case in history, and our Electoral Process will be respected again!”

It didn't take courage, but SCOTUS showed wisdom and kept the electoral process respected for at least the next 4 years.

Donald J. Trump---YOU'RE FIRED...

[Montmorency]

Being 1-51 pretty much ensures you get fired in the sports world. Hopefully, this is that last nail:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ection-results



It didn't take courage, but SCOTUS showed wisdom and kept the electoral process respected for at least the next 4 years.

Donald J. Trump---YOU'RE FIRED...

Some Republican reactions (you can't even use the word "kayfabe," because this is all simultaneously a put-on and a manifestation of deeply-held belief):





Do your part, service guarantees citizenship etc. etc.


I took the time to finally read Michael Anton's notorious "Flight 93 Election" essay from 2016, in which he argued, well, that Trump vs. Clinton was analogous to the choice between letting a plane crash into the Capitol and violently seizing control of the craft (of state!) and driving it into a ditch. (Anton was rewarded with some positions in the Trump government.)

This excerpt struck me:

Whatever the reason for the contradiction, there can be no doubt that there is a contradiction. To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs—to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.

Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. ...If your answer—Continetti’s, Douthat’s, Salam’s, and so many others’—is for conservatism to keep doing what it’s been doing—another policy journal, another article about welfare reform, another half-day seminar on limited government, another tax credit proposal—even though we’ve been losing ground for at least a century, then you’ve implicitly accepted that your supposed political philosophy doesn’t matter and that civilization will carry on just fine under leftist tenets. Indeed, that leftism is truer than conservatism and superior to it.

Um, yeah? Facts don't care about your feelings? And your values are dogshit...

This old but evergreening piece further reinforces my ineluctable sense that, conservative ideologies being discredited by the events of the 20th century and beyond at least as comprehensively as one could ever hope Marxism to be, conservatives have had no choice but:

1. Retrench their conservatism
2. Dissociate from reality
3. Embrace revanchist fascism

What makes this era in American history different from post-WW1 (globally) is that most people with conservative instincts* have dismissed the first option but looked at the latter two and said '?Porque no los dos?' - before liquidating the spiritually-treasonous essence within them that made itself known by its Spanish-language irruption. :P

The (one might call) auto-Orwellianism is equally important to and somehow integral to the fascism, in a way that it may not have been before.


*Social conservatism, for whatever reason, has a strong tendency to overrule non-conservatism in other spheres for a given individual

[Pannonian]

The (one might call) auto-Orwellianism is equally important to and somehow integral to the fascism, in a way that it may not have been before.


*Social conservatism, for whatever reason, has a strong tendency to overrule non-conservatism in other spheres for a given individual

What's auto-Orwellianism? Pardon my lack of understanding, but my experience of Orwell is principally coloured by his essays on leftism in England, so I may have a different impression of what Orwellianism means that other people do.

[Crandar]

With the Texas lawsuit, most focused on sleazy Paxton, but the statistics cooking was even more comical. One in a quadrillion and the Bolsheviks still won.

Well, our convicted Nazi gangster also succeeded in running away, despite the police announcing that his chances were fewer than one in a trillion. Granted, a trillion is a significantly smaller number than a quadrillion, but it shows that you can never be certain with Socialists and National-Socialists.

[Montmorency]

What's auto-Orwellianism? Pardon my lack of understanding, but my experience of Orwell is principally coloured by his essays on leftism in England, so I may have a different impression of what Orwellianism means that other people do.

Aw, come on man, you've seen the term "Orwellian" deployed in media. It usually has its ultimate derivation from his single work "1984", and while the term is more diluted and generic in colloquial usage, I'm using it in a sense that picks out important features of the 1984 governing ideology and the concerns about political language and totalitarianism Orwell had as a thinker. Orwellianism then is the top-down manipulation of language and thought with the design of eliminating the possibility of dissent or disloyalty. This can involve the twisting of language into a set of partisan shibboleths rather than communicative tokens, the simultaneous or serial adherence to mutually-exclusive ideas or beliefs, and their coordinated and centralized inculcuation into the populace by a domineering government or party establishment. Among other things.

Auto mean "self" and as a prefix usually signifies reflexivity. Where Orwellianism is definitionally vertical ("top-down"), to the point of being one of the original allegory's weaknessess according to many critics, auto-Orwellianism would be horizontal. It would be self-directed but also social and communal in replicating Orwellian processes. If there is a conceptual distinction between insurgencies with charismatic leading figures (e.g. Garibaldi, Mao, Castro) and those organized around "leaderless resistance" (e.g. Islamic or white supremacist terrorism in theoretical, idealized forms), in analogy auto-Orwellianism would kind of map onto the latter.

While the traditional Orwellianism of course remains an essential feature of movement conservatism and the Republican Party (can you get a purer case study than the Pennsylvania GOP trying to argue against the constitutionality of a law they unilaterally passed a year ago?), we have entered into the queer circumstance of elites and common clay alike becoming equalized through this cognitive horizontalism. Each individual becomes an agent of their own indoctrination as well as the interpenetrative maintainance and development of group norms and ways of knowing. As, for example, seen in Fox News' struggle to avoid falling into the whirlpool of its viewership's moods even as it continues to pursue its mission to hierarchically shape their worldviews and agendas. Despite its strong Murdoch-influenced editorial bent, the audience increasingly shapes the nature and scope of the content an organization like Fox is prepared to generate. I was actually shocked and thankful Fox News quickly (if VERY equivocally) pivoted away from Trump as soon as the voting was done and has at least reprogrammed to devote more time to attacking pandemic regulation and the - presumptively - incoming Biden administration. Had they not called Arizona early (apparently with Daddy Murdoch's personal approval) and instead went full bore on the election being stolen by George Soros, the ChiComs, the Venezuelans, urban socialists, Pelosi, AOC, Harris... we would be in a distinctly worse place today (and tomorrow).

So, like, imagine if Big Brother spent all day watching TV and posting on social media, the Inner Party forgot if or whether they were at war with Eurasia or Eastasia, and the proles got agitated enough about rumors of traitors in the Party allowing Emmanuel Goldstein to chill out at a London townhouse that someone at the Ministry of Truth decided it was true and the government, with Big Brother's approval, leveled half a city borough trying to root him out. Someone should write that book...

Which, to be reductive about my themes these past years, TLDR: They're all bug**** crazy now.

It's worth studying how conscious lies and pretensions become mass delusion.


Reflecting further on the Flight 93 essay - and I was remiss in not establishing what Flight 93 the author referred to - this end-of-era Soviet protest song is pretty much what all the reactionaries are singing along to.

Colonel Vasin has come to the frontline
And brought his young wife along
Colonel Vasin has rallied his corps
And told them: "Let's go home"
We fought this war for seventy years
We were taught that life is a fight
But the intelligence has just reported
We fought ourselves all this time.

And I have seen generals
They drink and eat our death
Their children are going crazy
Cause there's nothing left that they don't have
And our land lies in rust
Our churches are burnt.
If we want to have a home to return to
Now is the time to return

Our train is on fire
There are no buttons to push
Our train is on fire
There is no place to run to
Long ago this land was ours
Before we got trapped in this war
And it will die if it is nobody's
It's time for it to be returned

And the torches are burning around us
It's the rallying of all perished troops
And people who shot our fathers
Are now making plans for our youths.
We were born by the sound of marches
We were threatened by jail
I say it's about time we stopped crawling.
We have returned to our land.

It's barely metaphorical for Confederate rage, just tweak the lyrics slightly.

With the Texas lawsuit, most focused on sleazy Paxton, but the statistics cooking was even more comical. One in a quadrillion and the Bolsheviks still won.

Well, our convicted Nazi gangster also succeeded in running away, despite the police announcing that his chances were fewer than one in a trillion. Granted, a trillion is a significantly smaller number than a quadrillion, but it shows that you can never be certain with Socialists and National-Socialists.

I hate to break it to you, but this has been the received wisdom for years.

At some point in the next few weeks, there should be consideration given to a thread covering the new Biden/Harris administration, yes? Cabinet nominations, for instance, are currently ongoing and certainly generating a lot of controversy.

Just a thought...

A Trump Thread was started on Jan. 20, 2017, so we might as well start a Biden thread on Inauguration Day.

I don't know anything about the author, but I tip my hat to a quality bit of 18th century political satire:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...rom%20%251%24s

It's Petri, she's the resident satirist at WaPo.

Yep....Republican lawmakers are such a great bunch of people, that every effort should be made to bend over backwards to work with these morons, despite the fact they want to destroy democracy. Here's an idea:

Put these idiots on trial for sedition.

I noted sometime in the past two years that our winning the governor's office in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in 2018 offered us an appreciable security in flipping those states back. Lucky breaks and tiny margins in multiple states were our shield this cycle. But Democrats can't be expected to win decisively every time.

Republicans know that treason doth never prosper, for if it do...