Do you want Trump dead from the Virus?

Yes or No?

  • I want that man dead

  • I hope he pulls through


Results are only viewable after voting.

version

Well-known member
Some people think they're working together and the idea is by playing both sides they're always on the winning one.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
yeah, but she just a 15 year old kid. in a pretty big spotlight.
I feel sorry for her. The photos I've seen of her make her look like a 35-year-old getting ready to hit the town after her second divorce, which may sound like a harsh dig but isn't meant like that - more like, how can a kid from a family like that have any kind of normal childhood and adolescence?

And it doesn't even bear thinking about what it must have been like growing up in the Trump family itself.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Only through pain does the doss cunt human ever learn. You don't want them dead. You want them maimed, limping, barely able to speak. Aghast at their own narcissism revealed. Like Scientology, pulling the final, highest grade secret special trick out of the bag, so the cunt concerned exhales all their pain out in one last breathe of futility. And if that doesn't work, shooter in the clock-tower, brains blown everywhere live on tv. Then they can say he had the best brains, the finest brains they ever saw.

That's why i'm on the fence re-voting.
 

borzoi

Well-known member
I feel sorry for her. The photos I've seen of her make her look like a 35-year-old getting ready to hit the town after her second divorce, which may sound like a harsh dig but isn't meant like that - more like, how can a kid from a family like that have any kind of normal childhood and adolescence?

And it doesn't even bear thinking about what it must have been like growing up in the Trump family itself.

people are also weirdly obsessed w teen girl saviors. same thing w/ greta thunberg. no knock on either of them but it's embarrassing, all these 35 year olds in DC and NY media going "a child shall lead us! this is just like the hunger games/harry potter!".
 

Leo

Well-known member
yeah, trump will never learn, grown, change. in fairness, 74 year old guys in general don't change.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
He hasn't been truly maimed yet, but i agree with you both overall.

Anti-social personality types turn pain into a game. They manipulate the threshold away onto others. Was tempted to buy the niece's book, but that's a guaranteed gore-fest of psychological abominations. Get enough of that at work.
 

borzoi

Well-known member
it's interesting here and in other areas to see who trump inspires the most visceral gut-level hatred in. ime people over 40ish really loathe the guy in a way that's not shared with any other president and really focus their bile and hatred on him. whereas for people in their 20s who grew up with bush -> obama -> trump it's not pronounced in the same way.

like i despise trump and everything he stands for and will probably have a barbecue if he dies of covid but i have less of a visceral hatred for him i think precisely because he stands for the moment the mask completely came off america. he's just so grotesque that I and most people i know can find the gallows humor in it. everything horrifying that he does is kind of balanced by something that you have to admit is funny.

whereas when i think of bush and especially his cabinet killing thousands of people in the middle east to line their bank accounts and then being totally accepted back into liberal society and appearing on CNN and writing bestselling books, all with this veneer of patrician statecraft and expertise that conceals that they're just as evil in their hearts as trump & co...THAT makes my blood boil. at least with trump no one is pretending (although i'm sure he'll be instantly canonized if he dies).
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Yeah I can only speak for myself here, but Trump was inaugurated when I was 19, I think, right before I started paying attention to and learning about politics. So I don't really have a frame of reference. Grew up in a pro-Obama atmosphere so there was little to no politics at home, everything going smoothly behind the scenes and out of attention.

Guess that could be part of why Trump doesn't arouse hatred in me - but then again, I can't think of a human that does. Maybe I'm just naive though. (edit: he does arouse hatred in virtually all of my family members though)

Rather, he strikes me as someone who had, and has, the wherewithal to do almost whatever he wants, so in a way he's only as bad as the system that de facto condones it, no? The system, such as it is, under this label, under that pretense, by whatever ostensible means, selected him, and the recognition of that is surely followed by a reckoning with it.

But I guess your point @borzoi is that the pretenses have been largely dropped, a hand forced by Trump, and that the populous is grappling with some destabilized political reality? Or do you think enough people have connected the dots and understand that Trump is doing transparently what many others have been doing behind the veneer? Or do you not think that is a useful connection to make?
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
who trump inspires the most visceral gut-level hatred in
he doesn't inspire that kind of hatred in me. not least because he isn't worth it.

I'm 36, but the mask has been off America for me since I was a teenager so I didn't need some grotesque clown to rip it off. I came up in the anti-authoritarian left at the height of anti-globalization. liberals and in particular neoliberalism were always the enemy. Obama the centrist technocrat amping up the drone war etc was no great surprise. liberal society has always been a bullshit veneer. a century plus (going on two if you include filibusters, the Mexican-American War, etc) of military interventionism, banana republics, etc, generally to line someone's pockets. Smedley Butler - the most decorated Marine in American history - wrote a book about it called War Is a Racket - in 1935 (and he knew of what he spoke, having participated in virtually every colonial action and Banana War from the 1890s-1910s). since WWII direct military intervention has largely - not entirely obv - been replaced by outsourced coups and a rigged global finance system, but with basically the same results and for the same purposes. Tbc that's not anything unique to America, which is a mistake people sometimes make. That's what all empires do. China will be no better, and probably worse, if it supplants the U.S. as global hegemonic power.

otoh I don't find anything about Trump funny. gallows humor about the situation we're in more broadly, sure. Trump himself, no. he is, as @craner said, just a malignant iteration of a long tradition of American flim-flam men and snake oil salesmen who has been elevated to a position where he can wreak the maximum havoc. and while I ofc understand humor as coping mechanism it clearly also serves as a deflector shield for him from that havoc i.e. "he actively mismanged the pandemic resulting in probably tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths but also lol covfefe".

in general focusing on Trump the individual as opposed to the forces that brought him to power - either actively or by making it possible - is a huge mistake. it plays directly into the cult of personality he's been fostering since the 1980s. reverse the Baudelaire/Usual Suspects line "the greatest trick Trump ever pulled was convincing the American public that he was important".
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I'm 36, but the mask has been off America for me since I was a teenager so I didn't need some grotesque clown to rip it off. I came up in the anti-authoritarian left at the height of anti-globalization. liberals and in particular neoliberalism were always the enemy. Obama the centrist technocrat amping up the drone war etc was no great surprise. liberal society has always been a bullshit veneer. a century plus (going on two if you include filibusters, the Mexican-American War, etc) of military interventionism, banana republics, etc, generally to line someone's pockets. Smedley Butler - the most decorated Marine in American history - wrote a book about it called War Is a Racket - in 1935 (and he knew of what he spoke, having participated in virtually every colonial action and Banana War from the 1890s-1910s). since WWII direct military intervention has largely - not entirely obv - been replaced by outsourced coups and a rigged global finance system, but with basically the same results and for the same purposes. Tbc that's not anything unique to America, which is a mistake people sometimes make. That's what all empires do. China will be no better, and probably worse, if it supplants the U.S. as global hegemonic power.
ofc if you're already familiar w/that milieu that is mostly or all received wisdom

and I understand the the kind of disillusioned Clinton and Obama liberals @borzoi is talking about

whether their disillusionment extends past Trump and woke/MAGA (or however you want to frame that axis or axes) partisanship is another matter
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I'm also wary of "at least no one is pretending". first, it's not true - the pretending is just of a different kind.

second, it leads into (standard not directed at anyone disclaimer) an "at least he's honest about it" respect as if being open about corruption somehow makes it better or more honorable

third, pretending is important. if you pay lip service to human rights (or whatever x principle) you have to at least create the image of adhering to it. that puts a break on the worst venal etc impulses. if you openly don't care you can just do as you wish. the veneer is bullshit but in practice some mitigation is better than none.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
people are also weirdly obsessed w teen girl saviors. same thing w/ greta thunberg. no knock on either of them but it's embarrassing, all these 35 year olds in DC and NY media going "a child shall lead us! this is just like the hunger games/harry potter!".
Well I dunno about "saviour", exactly - clearly it's going to take a lot more than one rebellious teenager to stop this juggernaut. It's amusing to think of the embarrassment it must be causing the regime, but like I said, I mainly just feel sorry for her.
 

borzoi

Well-known member
yea to be clear i'm not talking about who is worse w/r/t body count or whatever nor am i saying the president is distinct from the larger force of american imperialism etc. i'm just talking pure gut reaction.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
i'm not talking about who is worse
yeah I know, that's not what I was talking about either

and yr feelings are of course valid no matter what they are like anyone's feelings

I was talking about my own feelings, the importance as always of situating Trump historically, etc

as not situating him historically - not saying that's you - is one of the main things that drives Clinton/O liberals to hate him in such a visceral, personal way
 

luka

Well-known member
to reconcile your desires with your conscience
I got that from Ellroy
then all energy is at your disposal
obesquious reality bends to your wil
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Yeah if the conscience is intersubjectively/socially substantiated (morality), it would be tougher to nudge/bend than desire, which is at least partially in the jurisdiction of the subjective/individual. So attempting to conform the latter to the former would be a more viable reconciliation than attempting to conform the former to the latter.
 
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