Ugh.

Also Jack Kingston may be the worst of them all. is argument last night was that if Trump was Racist he would have been sued for it by now and thus he's not racist.

Literally the first time Trump ever showed up in the newspapers was because the DOJ sued his company for discrimination. In the 1970s.

yea, but but but it was a class action lawsuit and not directly to Donald!

you're one of the worst offenders, b_i, you're smart and well educated and yet you bend over backwards to make teh donald look like a stand up guy. even as you acknowledge his utter stupidity, you do it.
I hope your children have a future they dont end up blaming you for

That's some Chinese proverb-level burn, shit.

You guys have to remember, Obama pissed ALOT of middle class white people off over his 8 years in office. Moving out of NY taught me that. There is alot of people who also don't care what he says because they hate how much of cesspool DC was and still is. Half the country still is gonna support him because they don't care what he says.

A friend of mine who is a trump supporter sees is this way, He said " well he isn't wrong, those places are shitholes"

your friend pretty much proves my point, but like I said to burt, this country was built, and imo achieved no small feats of greatness , by people who came here from shithole countries.

Its a terrible reflection on us that trump feels justified in this kind of commentary. We are already reviled all over the world and sooner or later, we'll be on the short end of the power stick.

I'm reading the David Foster Wallace essay on McCain 2000 (there are a lot of names for this apparently) and I think there are a lot of parallels there for Bernie 2016 and even Trump 2016, the way they attracted voters to their campaigns.

RE the names: It was called "The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub" on publication, "Up, Simba" in the book Consider the Lobster, and I'm reading the version called "McCain's Promise". I was confused when I saw it was in Consider the Lobster because I listened to the audiobook of that. Little did I know that was an abridged reading of the book.

You have to remember that a literal majority of those people also believed he was secretly not American. So that's where their logic and moral centers are at.


Spend a good 25 years in the plains and you'll start to really appreciate how little factual information ever gets through, and just how thoroughly calculated conservative spin actually decides that worldview.

Just because a worldview exists doesn't mean it is reasonable, rationale, valuable, or fair.


Not half the country supports him.


To say that a place is run down or less developed than we are is not the same as saying "because that country is poorly off, we shouldn't be accepting any more immigrants from there." I say again, Donald Trump's entire point was that he saw a reason to exclude those people from pursuing America as a place to live. In that context, "shithole" isn't meant to make a point about the nation (or continent) but rather the worth of the people.

Agreed.

Why is this so hard for almost everyone to grasp?

This is coupled with looking upon Norway as a more acceptable place for people to come from. We know what he means. The frequent critique that he's not going to change is true. He was this kind of guy, saying this kind of stuff, when he was in the pages of the New York Post in the 90s, and he's that same guy now.

The people I don't understand are those who attempt to explain away these constant comments from him as not being racist in nature, and that this part of his personality isn't a large part of his appeal. I would think that amount of spin would make people exhausted by now.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that I think he is stand up guy or advocate for him. What I advocate for is rationalist, evidence-based assessments of the moral gray area of our reality and I rarely see that when it comes to Trump. It's mostly emotional and often groupthink. I find the man is an embodiment of much of what is problematic about our culture, but that doesn't mean he is always wrong, nor does it mean I feel the need to 'resist' (or impugn the motives) of everything he does, and I do question if the popularity those things are a result of people feeling so shamed by their common identity with him that there is a sense of urgency to distance themselves from him and in course rejecting any objective analysis of what our current state actually is. So I'm sorry if it bothers you that I don't scream at the sky every time some 70+ year old trust fund real-estate developer says ignorant, bigoted things, and please don't take the absence of reactionary condemnation that as an endorsement of those views. You and I hold most views in common, we just arrive at them in very different ways.



I hope my children are capable of discerning the level of importance in life of bulllshit on an unofficial pearl jam messageboard

it's not even official

the thing is i dont scream at the sky every time trump opems his mouth , ive been largely silent about him, here and out in teh reality verse.
I do, however, become dumbfounded at the level of completely unprofessional behavior that trump has been not only allowed as president, but wholeheartedly agreed with, there has to be some boundary, somewhere, that has to be adhered to by rational thinking, moral people.
I keep coming back to the idea that the office of the President, regardless of what party, has an obligation to set the standard for how the world perceives our country, and ultimately how we perceive ourselves. Do we all truly want to be small minded, selfish, racist big mouths?
Every incident like this from trump, and there's been a good number of them so far, only lowers the bar further for the next guy (because god forbid women run the country, but different argument), which i don't look forward to if that's MY future.

There's times when moral outrage is the only rational choice available. I don't mean this one stupid comment from a stupid man, i mean nothing but outrageous stupidity that's been encouraged and supported and gets transmuted into the dumbing down of the society, making us all small minded, mean hearted people who can't abide any variations in the culture. I dont even have kids and it still scares me.

Also, dumb pearl jam message board be damned, i don't care about that. I care about smart people talking about impactful events without acknowledging there's some dark implications behind them.

There is some irony that those who agree with the "shithole county" comments would likely agree that Trump himself is from a shithole city.

he's from atlanta?