General Trump hilarity free-for-all thread

[altered]

It's so tragic that PDS has to hear about peoples' gripes.  It's so fucking awful that he has to endlessly listen to shit that NOBODY IS ACTUALLY SAYING.  I mean, aside from AM radio jocks.  I feel just rotten about how PDS's quality of life has dropped based on this entire fiasco, and I hope that Laurie Schlessinger and Sean Hannity can help him out by owning the libs about all of this.

I wanted to say this, but I wanted to say it with my ass, and it's hard to get your point across with your ass without a keyboard you can /feel/.

Thanks for covering me

[The Johnny]

The usual bullshit. Talking about slavery as if it had happened to them rather than having ended 30 or 40 years before the oldest people in the world were born. Blaming the continued existence of racism and sexism on people talking the wrong way and rolling out new politically correct terms to replace the old ones (or sometimes refurbished variants of really old ones; how is the term "people of color" any better than the term "colored people", how the fuck is talking like Yoda going to help anybody!? Politically correct speech is just a cheap easy pseudo-solution to a complex problem, the societal equivalent of trying to cure cancer by reciting long-winded prayers). Acting as if the KKK et al were representative of white people (which, BTW, is buying into the KKK's propaganda). Generalizing from isolated incidents. Acting as if non-minorities collectively comprised some kind od illuminati-like secret society that controls everything in an organized fashion. Affirming the consequent (All the politically powerful people are white men. Joe the Bum is a white man. Joe the bum is politically powerful).

Stuff that, while harmless (unlike the right's bullshit which is often actively harmful), is nevertheless really really stupid and undermines people's ability to take the left seriously.

Like, your perspective seems a bit tainted by a type of reductionism that i would like to call "presentism" (as if present reality is the only factor in peoples lives, and history or the past is a non-factor)... native americans or american-indians, whatever theyre called, still indirectly suffer from having been massacred and their lands being taken away, in which their ancestors trauma was so great that even today theyre the population with the worst problems of alcoholism besides eastern europeans from war-torn zones. Then, besides transgenerational scars of trauma, theres the transgenerational economic factors and accumulation of capital, in which one group enriched themselves at the cost of another group, guess whos children or grandchildren will be at a disadvantage?

PC speech and terminology i dont see how it has anything to do with the matter? That seems more of an issue of discussion framing and group identity, more than self-victimization. And i might be wrong, but i really doubt that anyone thinks that changing the use of words is the end solution for racism/sexism.

And i mean, the KKK are PRETTY CLOSE to being the representatives of white people just from the fact that Trump got elected as president... its been interpreted that Trump won, primarly as a revenge vote for having a "negroe" Obama in office for two terms, and such "offense" couldnt go unpunished.

And well, sure, theres white poor people that are just as fucked as minorities, BUT if i was presented with a number of babies, and required to make a bet just based off of race on who would be more likely to succeed, i would hands down always bet on the white baby, not because hes superior or whatever, but because statistically hes more likely.

So maybe i can understand the left's approach to issues as sometimes being obnoxious or innefective, but thats completely different from "playing victim".

[altered]

Also, never forget sometimes the best way to get someone's attention is to be fucking obnoxious. Obnoxiousness is a skill to be honed for maximum utility. It is probably the first skill an agitator should learn, no matter their cause.

Admittedly, there is the old trap of having your only tool be a hammer. And I forget what all is in my toolbox sometimes, so something about sharpness, lightbulbs and cupboards probably also applies.

ETA: That statistically increased likelihood for the white baby is more a function of a fantastically racist system run by fantastically racist people. Take that out of the picture and... well, we don't know.

The best data we have is historic Timbuktu, a bastion of wealth and knowledge from the confluence of early Islamic mathematicians and the absurdly lucrative salt trade. It was probably predominantly black, though it's hard to be entirely sure due to a dearth of historical data (thanks to, huh, /slavery/) and the Arabic — wouldn't ya know it, /slavetrade/.

It's almost as if throughout history African nations and people and cultures have been fucked over by multiple world powers, east and west.

(The sarcasm and bile directed mostly at PDS, not you Johnny.)

[Cain]

Hey now Roger, it's not like current day wealth disparities can be directly traced to slavery or anything.  Black people just need to whine less.

But how is anyone that is still alive in any way accountable for that?

Through perpetuating a system where that continues to impact on black people to this day?

I mean, duh?

[Doktor Howl]

It's so tragic that PDS has to hear about peoples' gripes.  It's so fucking awful that he has to endlessly listen to shit that NOBODY IS ACTUALLY SAYING.  I mean, aside from AM radio jocks.  I feel just rotten about how PDS's quality of life has dropped based on this entire fiasco, and I hope that Laurie Schlessinger and Sean Hannity can help him out by owning the libs about all of this.

I wanted to say this, but I wanted to say it with my ass, and it's hard to get your point across with your ass without a keyboard you can /feel/.

Thanks for covering me

This is why I bought  the good keyboard.

[Doktor Howl]

Hey now Roger, it's not like current day wealth disparities can be directly traced to slavery or anything.  Black people just need to whine less.

But how is anyone that is still alive in any way accountable for that?

Through perpetuating a system where that continues to impact on black people to this day?

I mean, duh?

Be kind to our sea lion friends.

[LMNO]

The usual bullshit. Talking about slavery as if it had happened to them rather than having ended 30 or 40 years before the oldest people in the world were born. Blaming the continued existence of racism and sexism on people talking the wrong way and rolling out new politically correct terms to replace the old ones (or sometimes refurbished variants of really old ones; how is the term "people of color" any better than the term "colored people", how the fuck is talking like Yoda going to help anybody!? Politically correct speech is just a cheap easy pseudo-solution to a complex problem, the societal equivalent of trying to cure cancer by reciting long-winded prayers). Acting as if the KKK et al were representative of white people (which, BTW, is buying into the KKK's propaganda). Generalizing from isolated incidents. Acting as if non-minorities collectively comprised some kind od illuminati-like secret society that controls everything in an organized fashion. Affirming the consequent (All the politically powerful people are white men. Joe the Bum is a white man. Joe the bum is politically powerful).

Stuff that, while harmless (unlike the right's bullshit which is often actively harmful), is nevertheless really really stupid and undermines people's ability to take the left seriously.

Wow.



There's a lot to unpack here, but I'd rather just set it on fire.

[Cramulus]

The usual bullshit. Talking about slavery as if it had happened to them rather than having ended 30 or 40 years before the oldest people in the world were born. Blaming the continued existence of racism and sexism on people talking the wrong way

the continued existence of racism and sexism is about people thinking the wrong way. Better language is one way of addressing it.

but we also live in a world where speech is a form of action

It's hard to visualize a world where racism has ended but people still use racist language. Combatting racist language is one form of making the world less racist.

and rolling out new politically correct terms to replace the old ones (or sometimes refurbished variants of really old ones; how is the term "people of color" any better than the term "colored people", how the fuck is talking like Yoda going to help anybody!?

There's something to be said for a group choosing the name they want to be called, instead of everybody insisting on using the name that was in use when they weren't allowed in the same pool as white people.

a recent Contrapoints video talks about this -- she calls out this George Carlin bit where he is complaining about how airlines started saying "People with special needs can board the plane first", whereas they should have just told the TRUTH which is to call them CRIPPLES. These PC people are ruining everything!

Except not everybody that needs to board the plane first is crippled. Some might be elderly, or pregnant, or sick, or any number of things. Also, the word CRIPPLE has a lot of emotional baggage attached to it, it makes people feel bad to be called a cripple.

So why would we stick with a word that's innaccurate and makes people feel bad? Is it so bad to say a few extra words? Everybody who's "anti-PC" has this "Hard Truth tellin" vibe to their arguments .. but isn't the deeper truth that they don't actually care how those people feel?

[LMNO]

Not to strawman or anything, but PDS: did you protest when gay people said they didn't want to be called "faggot" anymore?

[altered]

PDS is a presumably living, probably breathing example of the damage that centrism and libertarian sympathies do to the frontal cortex of the brain. In a few years he'll be saying there's good white nationalists and why do you want to hurt their feelings by associating them with the shitty ones?

He should be framed and hung in a gallery of gruesome disease photographs, castings and other terrible examples of the dangers of modern living. A cautionary tale, shown to children who start listening to Burzum, reading Ayn Rand, or supporting tax cuts on the rich.

[Pergamos]

Hey now Roger, it's not like current day wealth disparities can be directly traced to slavery or anything.  Black people just need to whine less.

But how is anyone that is still alive in any way accountable for that? That's the part that bugs me. Even if people are still being very indirectly victimized it's not like any of the people responsible for it are still around to extract compensation from. Slavery has already ended, and the people responsible for it are all long dead. It may be true that black people are poor because their ancestors were poor because their ancestors' ancestors were slaves, but dwelling on the instigating factor that started it isn't going to do a damn thing to end the cycle of poverty. Dwelling on slavery is a distraction from ongoing problems like the discriminatory hiring and housing policies mentioned later in that same article and, most importantly of all, the general lack of upward economic mobility for the poor

Because black people aren't just poor because of slavery, rich white people are rich because of it too. 

[Doktor Howl]

PDS is a presumably living, probably breathing example of the damage that centrism and libertarian sympathies do to the frontal cortex of the brain. In a few years he'll be saying there's good white nationalists and why do you want to hurt their feelings by associating them with the shitty ones?

He should be framed and hung in a gallery of gruesome disease photographs, castings and other terrible examples of the dangers of modern living. A cautionary tale, shown to children who start listening to Burzum, reading Ayn Rand, or supporting tax cuts on the rich.

Concur. 

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

Hey now Roger, it's not like current day wealth disparities can be directly traced to slavery or anything.  Black people just need to whine less.

But how is anyone that is still alive in any way accountable for that?

Through perpetuating a system where that continues to impact on black people to this day?

None of them are perpetuating slavery though. You're moving the goalposts. I'm not saying that they can't complain about things that are actually still things like unequal sentencing, and police brutality, and employment discrimination. There's definitely still various forms of race discrimination and mistreatment out there but chattel slavery is not one of them and it hasn't been one of them for 150 years. They passed a constitutional amendment banning it, that's the strongest thing that the government can do. There's things they can do against other forms of discrimination, but there's nothing they can do about slavery specifically that hasn't already been done.

[The Johnny]

The only one making a statement that racism and wealth inequality perpetuates slavery is actually you, as a strawman. Nobody else said it.

[altered]

Let's chop PDS's wank hand off then tell every doctor he can go to that that hand is his wank hand and he likes to spank it to deformed squirrels falling out of trees, so that his wank hand is impossible for him to replace with a prosthetic.

Let's get it put into law that PDS and his descendants can not replace a lost wank hand, because they're degenerates and can't be trusted with that power.

Then since he lacks one hand, even if it is his disgusting private time hand, he'll end up forced into working jobs where hand loss is common, since he's already gotten one to go missing, where's the harm, right?

His descendants will join the family business of chainsaw catching for loggers in the Amazon, and each of them will in turn lose their wank hands before they so much as get a chance to use them. It is illegal for them to replace them, so just as soon as they learn that maybe dear ol dad's career fucking sucks, they end up locked into it.

One hundred years from now, when all the perpetrators of this hilarity are long since dead, PDS would prefer we don't worry about the new, equality focused version of the law, whereby loss of wank hand is simply made illegal for everyone, and you must spend a token amount on a simple prosthetic.

Even though his kids can't afford it because they've all been catching chainsaws for peanuts in the tropical wilderness and had to spend their life savings getting the guinea worm and screwfly infestations dealt with, so they're unable to buy a prosthetic or even just make a new wank hand out of rusty wire, foam padding and duct tape, its not discriminatory anymore and everyone responsible for it is dead anyway so it's all just fine.