The Swing of the Pendulum

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Donald Trump is the president that America has earned. "He's not the hero we need right now, but the one we deserve." He's the American Dream; a Brawndo-drinking Monopoly Man who wants to bring down the IRL banhammer on the noobs and the trolls. He's a celebrity who rode into Washington on the back of a gold-plated dinosaur, firing AK-47s into the air and shouting about grabbing Mexico by the vaheena. He couldn't get any more American if he continuously shat out nothing but macaroni and cheese.

This is Necessary Disorder in the face of Too Much Order. It's the swing of the pendulum.

America has rarely preferred to Play It Safe, and that's exactly what Clinton's election would have been. The country was getting too complacent, too bored. What, with all this progress and tolerance, if we weren't careful, we'd have wound up turning into Canada!

There is, of course, a very real societal problem that comes with too much progress, and that's a nation of spoiled, entitled children who think it's their God-given right that you recognize them for the special and quirky unique snowflakes that they are. College campuses saturated with students invoking the Right to Not Be Offended. An Internet that replaces discussion with downvotes. Tapas.

Trump's America^TM is the kick in the pants we need to appreciate how far we've come. Nothing makes you appreciate something more than the fear that it might be taken away.

Personally, I'm not afraid. Maybe that's because I'm a poor, white, cis male with nothing to lose and enough video games to keep me entertained for the next four years, but I've seen the pendulum swing enough times to know that the system is resistant to radical change, even when the swing is violent and swift. Besides, our New Abusive Stepfather would be insane to completely take away our allowance, unless he wants the nuclear rage of a hormonal, Molotov-wielding teenager on his hands. I doubt that the total-leveling of every major city in the country by riots is something the next administration is particularly interested in being held responsible for.

Well, that, and the Democrats have an entire Fire and Ice anthology they can refer to for a fillibuster.

No, if Clinton had won, it would just be Reruns of the Same, a long and drawn-out melodrama against a Republican-controlled Legislative Branch, fighting tooth and nail just to barely pass an emasculated, poorly implemented, and half-assed Universal Basic Income as a last-ditch effort to fight the automation takeover of the inevitable Singularity. But at the cost of just one more high-budget season of The Apprentice, we get to clean the pipes of the DNC, whip it into shape for taking back the House and the Senate, and Lovable Socialist Grandpa will have had enough time to groom Tulsi Gabbard for the role of someone who actually deserves to be the first female American President.

See you all in 2020. That's probably how long it's going to take me to finally finish Fallout: New Vegas, anyway. And if I'm wrong and the real-world of four years from now looks exactly like the barren landscape of 2277, at least we'll have gone out with a bang... just the way the Founding Fathers intended!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Donald Trump is the president that America has earned.

More like the president that white America has earned.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

Donald Trump is the president that America has earned.

More like the president that white America has earned.

If you think they will be immune to the clusterfuck you have far more confidence in Trump's abilities than I do

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Donald Trump is the president that America has earned.

More like the president that white America has earned.

If you think they will be immune to the clusterfuck you have far more confidence in Trump's abilities than I do

Um, that isn't what was said.

Imagine you fucked up bad and they're going to send you to prison.  Your neighbor, who had nothing to do with it, made the poor decision to be born Black, so they chuck him in jail with you.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

Donald Trump is the president that America has earned.

More like the president that white America has earned.

If you think they will be immune to the clusterfuck you have far more confidence in Trump's abilities than I do

Don't worry! The perceived racism will be neutralized by actual racism!

[LMNO]

Chinagreenelvis, your compassion and empathy ports seem to be jammed.

And it looks like your selfishness restrictors need recalibration.

You might want to make some modifications to your system. 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I love how many white people are blaming non-whites for Trump's election.

"They didn't even vote!"
          \


Yeah, well, I mean, all those restrictive voter ID laws that Republicans have been frantically passing for the last eight years couldn't have had anything to do with reduced voter turnout in this election.

But sure, do go on holding us responsible for the decisions of white Middle America. It's clearly our fault. We EARNED Trump.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Or just pretend we don't exist, since that's apparently easier.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

Chinagreenelvis, your compassion and empathy ports seem to be jammed.

And it looks like your selfishness restrictors need recalibration.

You might want to make some modifications to your system.

It's hard to exhibit compassion for people who make their decisions based on lies, or to feel empathy towards people who allow themselves to be lied to.

Selfishness is a survival mechanism when you see two halves of a country doing everything they can do dehumanize the other.

The world will be fine. Or it won't. Sit back and enjoy the chaos. One-sided solutions don't work; unless they involve dropping atomic bombs.

[LMNO]

I see you agree with my assesment, if not my recommendation.

Good to know. I will update my priors, and respond accordingly in the future.

[Salty]

Chinagreenelvis, your compassion and empathy ports seem to be jammed.

And it looks like your selfishness restrictors need recalibration.

You might want to make some modifications to your system.

It's hard to exhibit compassion for people who make their decisions based on lies, or to feel empathy towards people who allow themselves to be lied to.

Selfishness is a survival mechanism when you see two halves of a country doing everything they can do dehumanize the other.

The world will be fine. Or it won't. Sit back and enjoy the chaos. One-sided solutions don't work; unless they involve dropping atomic bombs.

Well, here it is, that subtle difference.

When I was younger, say, before I came to this forum, even for a time afterward, I would have felt the same way, most likely. Revel in the chaos, man, America is getting what it deserves, what it asked for.

This poisition can only be held if those holding it are safe. Sit back, crack open a beer, and watch the fun. Except the fun isn't so super awesome when people you love are in danger. My GF for example is very ethnically ambiguous. She's a racial Rorschach test. I take that fear and amplify it for those who don't live in a safe haven like PDX, or I imagine what it would be like for rural OR to come all up on here, and SUDDENLY it's not really so much fun anymore.

[Ben Shapiro]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Donald Trump is the president that America deserves.

[The Wizard Joseph]

Chinagreenelvis, your compassion and empathy ports seem to be jammed.

And it looks like your selfishness restrictors need recalibration.

You might want to make some modifications to your system.

It's hard to exhibit compassion for people who make their decisions based on lies, or to feel empathy towards people who allow themselves to be lied to.

Selfishness is a survival mechanism when you see two halves of a country doing everything they can do dehumanize the other.

The world will be fine. Or it won't. Sit back and enjoy the chaos. One-sided solutions don't work; unless they involve dropping atomic bombs.

Well, here it is, that subtle difference.

When I was younger, say, before I came to this forum, even for a time afterward, I would have felt the same way, most likely. Revel in the chaos, man, America is getting what it deserves, what it asked for.

This poisition can only be held if those holding it are safe. Sit back, crack open a beer, and watch the fun. Except the fun isn't so super awesome when people you love are in danger. My GF for example is very ethnically ambiguous. She's a racial Rorschach test. I take that fear and amplify it for those who don't live in a safe haven like PDX, or I imagine what it would be like for rural OR to come all up on here, and SUDDENLY it's not really so much fun anymore.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

When I was younger, say, before I came to this forum, even for a time afterward, I would have felt the same way, most likely. Revel in the chaos, man, America is getting what it deserves, what it asked for.

This poisition can only be held if those holding it are safe. Sit back, crack open a beer, and watch the fun. Except the fun isn't so super awesome when people you love are in danger. My GF for example is very ethnically ambiguous. She's a racial Rorschach test. I take that fear and amplify it for those who don't live in a safe haven like PDX, or I imagine what it would be like for rural OR to come all up on here, and SUDDENLY it's not really so much fun anymore.

I'll do my best to respond to this since it appears to be an honest attempt at furthering discussion. If it is, I appreciate the quotation.

I understand the fear, but more importantly, I understand the power of fear. The natural response to fear is to combat the focus, but I think the appropriate response to fear is to determine whether or not the fear is justified. Where does it come from? On what information is it based?

As LMNO pointed out in the Misinfo thread, the way voters feel about the facts is a bigger determinant in how they will vote than are the facts themselves. It doesn't matter whether there is more crime or less crime; if people feel like crime is up, they will be afraid, and they will act on those feelings.

It's easier to lament "what the world is coming to" than to determine whether or not the world is objectively better or worse than it was before.

In 2015, there were a reported 7,121 victims in single-bias hate crimes across the entire United States. In a population of 320,090,857 people, the chances of being the victim of a hate crime for any single person in the U.S. is 0.002%.

Since obviously being non-white increases those chances, let's look at Muslims, a group whose victimization increased by 67% of that year. With an estimated 3,335,000 Muslims living in the U.S. in 2015, 21.9 percent of the reported hate crimes were anti-Islamic. According to the numbers already cited, that means that probably about 1,559 Muslims were the victims of those crimes.

This means that in 2015 - the highest year on record for anti-Islamic hate crimes since 2001 (and still about half) - the chances of being the victim of a hate-crime for any given Muslim in the U.S. was 0.04%.

In 2015, 38,300 people were killed in traffic accidents, which means your chances of dying in a vehicle crash were 0.01%.

That's a difference of 0.03%. Yes, it means that if you were Muslim, you were four-times as likely to be the victim of anti-Islamic hatred than you were to die in a car accident, but considering how often we drive our cars and how rarely we die in them, it should really put things in perspective about how afraid anyone should be.

This isn't even taking into account that only 37.4% of those crimes were assault - which puts those odds for Muslims at almost exactly the same as dying in a vehicle accident.

All of this data says at least two things:

• 9/11 made people hate on Muslims way harder than Donald Trump's campaign.
• Cars are still far more likely to kill you than racists.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." -Franklin D. Roosevelt

[LMNO]

Ooh. Swing and a miss. Perhaps a foul tip.

I think the final dot to connect might be what a Trump/GOP administration will do IRL with all this false fear.  A high level analysis of sociology isn't gonna help my friends who are really actually going to be affected by the decisions about to be made.

And that makes you incredibly insensitive.