AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Now that absentee and abroad ballots are finally being tallied, Hillary is winning by over 1.5 million votes, BY FAR the largest popular vote margin in American history (the next biggest was Gore's half a million over Bush). http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/poli ... /94214826/

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary- ... d=43667918

http://www.aol.com/article/news/2016/11 ... /21611007/

I could keep linking articles but I'm not going to because you can look it up yourself at this point.

Also: I didn't get to vote because my state's voter ID laws prevented me from doing so. I was registered and eligible, but my state requires that you have a current photo ID whose picture closely matches your current appearance with accurate up-to-date information on it, and it must be the permanent laminated copy you get from the state, not the paper you get while you wait for yours to be mailed out.

And although it's the law that you be allowed to go vote, in practice, that's not how things work in many places. Saying "you can't fire someone for taking time to go vote" only works if you have a way to force them to admit that that's why they fired someone, and you can't. Because of at-will employment laws, your employer is not required to provide a reason for firing you, and since they can fire you for "any or no reason except as protected by law," they can just say they felt like it for no particular reason even if asked by a lawyer or judge and at that point you've just wasted your time and cheddar and fucked up your employability because now no one wants to hire you; you're clearly one of those finicky "I have rights" types that's not worth the trouble.

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Finally, Steve Bannon, Trump's pick for Senior Counselor in his cabinet, is the one of the acknowledged leaders of the alt-right movement. His news website, Breitbart, frequented almost entirely by violent, sexist, racist, homophobic neo-nazis, features such thinkpieces as:

"How To Make Women pop flyin': Uninvent The Washing Machine And The Pill" (excerpts: "In fact every study shows the same thing: as women become freer, richer, better educated and have more choices, they get progressively more miserable. ") ("In fact, [housework is] one of the most important things a woman can do with her life and may be one of the only things women can actually do better than men." )

'Gay rights have made us dumber, it's time to get back in the closet'

"Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew"

"Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy"

'Trannies whine about hilarious Bruce Jenner billboard'

'Suck it up buttercups: Dangerous Faggot Tour returns to colleges in September'

"Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?"

'Science proves it: Fat-shaming works'

"There's no hiring bias against women in tech, they just suck!"

"Does feminism make women ugly?"

"The Smartest People In The World Are All Men"

"Here's Why There Ought to Be a Cap on Women Studying Science"

"It's Time To Be Honest About Women's Football" (quote, "Now, I know the polite thing to do is to pretend it’s just as thrilling as the men’s version. But I’m not trying to sleep with any blue-rinse bints on Gender Studies programmes, so I don’t have to pretend to like terrible things just to get a shag.")

"Feminism And Islam Both ‘Set On Destroying The American Way Of Life’"

Inb4 "He didn't personally write those articles! Just because he owns the website and puts his name on it doesn't mean he should be affiliated with what his employees write!", which... Yes. Yes, I absolutely can, and it is nothing but reasonable of me to do so. He owns this website and pays these people to be writers on it and either directly approves the articles himself or pays someone to do so with the understanding that he has absolute veto power and control over the direction the website takes in its tone and content.

Maybe start protesting against the electoral college before you lose the election next time. System's been around quite a while as far as I understand.

And people protested it the last time it fucked up when Gore lost far as I know. Nothing happened.
Before that everything was hunky dory and Electoral college and popular vote matched for over 100 years. Last time it didn't match before Gore was in the 1800s. People don't see a reason to protest a system as long as it works as intended, and if you did anyway, people would call you a whiner.

That is the problem yeah, people just don't care unless it's something flashy like a kid being shot in the street.

On the contrary:
www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/
www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/

(why does [url] not work anymore?)

A candidate winning does not automagically make their views acceptable. Yes, Trump was legitimately elected. No, that does not mean people can't protest his policies (until he bans protests anyway).

IN OTHER NEWS: but yea both candidates were equally bad for the country and the world no really

I must have missed the part where anyone was arguing about whether or not he followed the rules. You can wholeheartedly believe he's an asshole that should not be trusted with power, due to prejudice and near-sociopathic lack of empathy, but still know that he won according to the rules of the system. I don't LIKE it, but I fully acknowledge that he was elected by at least one measure. So now the course of action is to keep an eye on him and attempt to avoid or undo any poor decisions he or his atrocious cabinet members will try to make.

I don't see how a need to adhere to an established system is cause for this outburst. You are throwing a tantrum like a child, due to one forum member's vote, and a couple of other people saying "but that makes him a dick..." I get that you mentioned being autistic, which will present emotional difficulties that I can't understand without knowing you in person, but you are clearly also someone with an established sense of reason. I wasn't knocking your pessimistic view on its own, it's that you are calling everyone an idiot for thinking otherwise. You are acting as if there is no one in the world who agrees with you. Recall that the portion of the electoral college he won by is not indicative of an actual population majority. Yes, things might go poorly for a while, but that's why we correct mistakes to avoid making them again.


Also, remember that a lot of people weren't voting for Trump BECAUSE he was a bigot and a fuckwit, but DESPITE that. Because to them and their estimations of the future, he (at the time) seemed like a better alternative than Hillary (which doesn't mean they actually liked him). Up until he started appointing god-awful people for his cabinet, there was actually a small chance that he would tone down the act and be a decent policy maker, even if he was a terrible person. There were a few reasons to vote for him that had nothing to do with prejudice of any kind (largely to do with his plans for what to do with the economy/infrastructure within the U.S.) It's just that for a lot of people with a sense of empathy and caution in foreign relations, the potential negatives outweighed those reasons.

So in Not-America news, it was recently revealed that the South Korea presidency has been secretly run by a psychic lady who helped the President contact her dead mother.

I'm honestly at a loss for words for this whole year. Like Jesus Christ, what is even happening anymore?

You mean like Trump throwing a tantrum when Obama won by nearly 5 million votes in 2012, saying that he only won because the Electoral College cheated to help him, and railed about how much he hated the EC before the recent election, but on November 15th reversed his stance to say that it's actually genius and if you disagree then fuck you? (It's totally not because he's losing the popular vote! No! He's always loved the system.)



Syo, not everybody with concerns is, like, whiner pissbaby tumblrinas. If you look closely, many of us are gay, trans or non-christian. We have more reason than most to be alarmed and concerned by current social trends, and we're not alone in our concern. Actual historians and political analysts have repeatedly expressed concern about the rapidly multiplying similarities between Trump's politics and behavior, the responses of his supporters, and the changing social climate, and the rise of historical fascist powers.

I personally spent my childhood being violently physically assaulted by people for being Jewish; the town I grew up in had a heavy neo-Nazi and extremist Christian population. Teachers would falsify my grades or take the entire class on field trips except for me, they would take me aside in private and hit me, they would tell me if I tattled bad things would happen and my dad couldn't be a teacher in their town anymore. When I went to the pool, the teen lifeguards would force me off the high dive or hold me underwater until I started to drown. Once they made me let them cover me with tanning oil on a hot day and when I finally got home, my skin was purple and cracking in places. I had to walk by myself because no one in town would let mom work there so she was constantly gone working an hour away, and they only tolerated dad because he had a master's degree and they needed a teacher. A local church convinced my only friend to lure me inside and they did bad things to me in there, including trying to forcibly baptise me. On my sixth birthday, a gang of angry teens followed my dad home from school with the intent to beat him for being a Jew, then discovered he had a little girl they could hurt instead. They asked me outside to play, and when they got me alone, they dragged me into an alley and took turns beating me until my Mom came and chased them away.

These things were parts of everyday life for me, and none of them ever got in trouble. The few times we tried, it backfired and the people who were at risk of being penalized started hurting me more, so I stopped telling my parents what was happening to me. The same kinds of things happened to my dad when he was a kid. My mother has already been verbally abused and threatened since the election and people have started side-eyeing my dad, too.

Blah, blah, blah. The point of all of this is that it didn't take much for people to feel allowed to do that stuff to us before, and it won't take much for them to feel allowed to do it again. The people feeling empowered by the new trends they see going on might not start with us this time, but when you've been in that position, where someone is allowed to hurt you because no one is inclined to help, you cannot, you cannot tolerate it happening to others. And we won't.

It doesn't matter if the majority wouldn't go out of their way to hurt us if the majority also won't go out of their way to help us.

Although yes, we are angry that, yet again, the EC has put a Republican in office despite them losing the popular vote, most of the protests going on around the country are protests against specific ideologies. When you say "let's see what happens" and roll over for the sake of "getting along"-- i.e. not being the first ones on the shortlist for abuse-- you give bigots permission.

But at this point, nobody is going to believe us unless things jump the rails all at once. And even if they do, I'm absolutely sure that someone is going to blame it on Obama, or black people, or Muslims, or whoever the target du jour is.

Just keep in mind the people you threw under the bus to get there, when the time comes.

No I mean how this system was known widely in advance and how people are only protesting against after their candidate lost. It's too late now. Even if you do manage to change the system for the better (which I naively hope happens, but putting it to solely to the popular vote would not be an improvement, your entire system is completely fucked to the core) it's not going to change the results of the election. Of course Trump isn't going to speak out against the system that won him the election, he's not a complete idiot.


I feel like I need to repeat that I do not support Trump. I'm not pop flyin' that he won the election. I didn't like Clinton but I would've preferred her over Trump. I very much understand people being upset about Trump becoming president. But. If people truly want to change this world for the better, they need to grow up and be realistic. Trump is going to be president for the next 4 years. No amount of protesting is going to change that. Stop protesting against his presidency because you're only painting yourself as unruly rioters with no clear direction. Protest his policies, organize yourself, make sure you have a clear and realistic message. Stop portraying every one who disagrees with you as bigots because you will win no support for your cause, only further animosity.

This is very much aimed against the Democrats, who should look towards their own internal problems as to why they managed to lose against a rambling baboon instead of blaming everything under the sun rather than their own incompetence.

Okay. That's reasonable. I mean, I really hate having to cater to respectability politics, but I know that a lot of what you're saying is true.

I just can't go through what happened to me again. I can't. And I can't let it happen to anybody else. I know what it feels like to be everybody's punching bag, and have the people who are supposed to protect you shrug and look away or even join in. That feeling of powerlessness, that feeling of helplessness, that feeling of being less than human, less than animal, does permanent damage to a person. There's nothing like it. Some people come out of those experiences ready to lash out and spread some of the hurt they were forced to endure, because the lesson they learned from that experience was that the cruel can have whatever they want. Others come out of it like I did, agonizingly sensitive to other people and unable to cope with anything until they get it under control, and instantly inflamed by seeing other people go through what we did. My family finally moved away from that town when I was 12, to somewhere safer for us, but for years I couldn't watch the news and had to censor content for my own wellbeing, because every time I saw some story about someone going through something like I did, I relived it again in their shoes. I guess that if I spoke to someone about it now I would probably have been diagnosed with PTSD of some sort.

Sorry I lashed out at you. I know that your points are sound and that this is just how things are for now. I know that in many ways the mainstream Democratic party is a massive failure. I just don't know what to do about it, and when I look around, I see so few people who care about what this whole thing is doing to people like me and my family or friends. It's a slap in the face. Even if Trump's victory was due in large part to the neglected blue collar and working class turning to him out of anger and frustration, his victory still loudly proclaims that we live in a country where this many people are perfectly okay with electing someone who says the things he says and does the things he does, and that many of them even admire it, and the message is that we are even less safe than we thought we were.

First off, people are protesting his policies, not just the fact that he won. They're showing that his ideas and his choices are unacceptable, and that they will never accept someone like him as their leader. Also, I can't help but take umbrage at how you say that they're "painting [themselves] as unruly rioters." While I of course condemn the actions of the violent ones, you are aware that the violent protesters aren't representative of everyone who protests Trump and his policies, right? What about the many people who protest him peacefully? Is it their fault that the media seems obsessed with covering the violent protests while ignoring the peaceful ones? Perhaps instead of telling people to stop protesting because that might portray them in a certain light, you should see what you can do to help people see that Trump's protesters aren't all violent looters.

Second, telling people to stop calling Trump supporters bigots is a pointless thing to say. Even if they aren't bigots, their actions have helped bigots. By voting for him, Trump's supporters displayed a near-sociopathic lack of empathy towards people of color, women, LGBT+ people, foreigners, and non-Christians, even if they themselves aren't consciously bigoted against any of those people. Yes, being confrontational towards them just makes them more defensive, but as I've said before, they just don't listen to you when you try to talk to them respectfully. Those who aren't consciously bigoted against those groups are too deeply seated in their own willful ignorance for a gentle approach to be effective. Furthermore, they have done all those groups I mentioned a tremendous disservice by voting for Trump, and they need to be made to understand how horrible their actions were. Or do you have some idea of a way to approach these people that will magically make them see the error of their ways without pissing them off or making them see you as weak?

Of course. That's precisely what I'm saying. The violent, but also the non-violent extremist protesters (that demand Trump step down as president-elect) ruin the efforts of the sensible ones. I did not mean to imply there were no sensible protesters, to be clear.


And what could I possibly do to accomplish that? The media is always going to focus on the violent and the extreme, because that's all people care about. Nothing you or I do will change that. And I'd like to point out that I did not ask for people to stop protesting, I asked for people to start protesting in a constructive manner.


On your second point, I don't think we will see eye-to-eye on this matter. I understand that you're disillusioned, but I have to keep believing logic, reason and level-headedness will eventually prevail for my own sanity.

Gotcha. Thanks for clearing that up! Although I should mention that many of these people don't expect him to willingly step down (like that would ever happen). However, they know that there are several states (including Pennsylvania) that don't require their electors to vote the same way as the state. They hope that their protests will catch the attention of these electors and convince them to vote in accordance with the popular vote instead of the state vote on December 19th. I personally don't see it happening, but still.


I'm not suggesting that you try to completely change people's interests or how the media covers news; that's impossible. I meant try thinking of what you can do on a smaller scale to fight ignorance. For instance, if you see someone who does think that Trump's violent protesters represent all of his protesters and people should stop protesting entirely, you could try to inform them of how most of the protests are peaceful and talk about the specific policies they're protesting (which, let's be honest, are pretty much all of his policies). I can't guarantee that they'll listen; like I said, a lot of Trump's supporters and apologists are too mule-headed to consider that they might be wrong. But there's a chance that you could help someone gain some perspective, and that's something we desperately need these days.


When I said "instead of telling people to stop protesting," I was referring to this:

I kinda screwed up by forgetting about the next line. Sorry 'bout that.

If we assume what you say is true, that it's impossible to have a level headed argument with them and shouting at them and calling them bigots is actually deteriorating the situation, that one should try something else? I mean, none of those two options are helping and one is actively making your position worse. Have you tried not engaging with them at all? By attacking their position like you do now you only legitimise it, making them further entrenched.

Ignoring them might not help in the absolute short term, but it might win in the longer term. You should rather focus on the ones that haven't taken a "side" in the debate. Try to win them over with persuasion and grace. At some point your demography will grow and theirs will suffer as recruitment falters.

Sure, keep on demonstrating against the actual policies, but attacking the voter base has never solved a problem.

I agree that we should try to respectfully engage those who haven't taken sides. While I don't see how you couldn't have taken a side at this point unless you're living under a rock, there's still hope for them. But I wasn't talking about them. Ignoring the people who do support Trump isn't going to make them or their views go away.