November, 2016 archive
The Unifier 0
Click to see the original image.
There are dark times ahead, but Noz managed to find one bright spot for someone.
The Art of the Con 0
Mostly I’ve avoided news articles claiming to know why the election turned out the way it did. Too many of them smell of “I’ve got a deadline and have to write something.”
I think that this one, though, is onto something.
Aside:
What I’m waiting for is an analysis of what went wrong with the polling, not that I paid much attention to it. I hoped it was correct, but I had a bad feeling about this election for months. To echo what Chauncey Devega said, I thought that racism, America’s original sin and lasting stain, would play a much larger role than many expected.
I think it’s far to early for reasonable analysis of the polling failure, but it does seem as if the “Likely Voters” classification was way off
Floodgates 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Elizabeth J. Meyer looks at the wages of Trumpery. A snippet:
First, we have to be able to put these behaviors in context. I have been researching and writing about biased harassment in schools since the early 90’s, and never have I seen so many documented incidents covered in the media in such a short period of time.
It’s just starting.
You’ve Heard of White Flight? Learn about White Fright. 0
Think of the television shows you see. How often are black and brown persons depicted as gangsters, tattooed gang members, terrorists, druggies, and convicts? How seldom are they normal working folks trying to get along?
Growing up as a Southern Boy, I knew many black folks–not well, mind you, but at least I knew them–who worked hard and lived clean.
When my mother went to the hospital to give birth to my brother, a black lady came to look after me. When my father needed a new septic tank dug, a black man helped him dig it. My first playmate was a little black boy who lived on a corner of the farm.
I was too young to know prejudice and so was he. Then we got old enough to go to segregated schools, and we both learned it.
Had I grown up in some all-white wasteland, the one Badtux alludes to, I wouldn’t know better and might believe what I see on my television. I know better, but many don’t.
I once read an interview with a black actor, I can’t remember who I wish I could, who said that, when a black or brown man comes to Hollywood, he quickly realizes that his first roles will be as thugs and gangsters. Mark you, this isn’t an indictment of television and movies. Hollywood is a mirror.
A deeply racist society is the cause. This doesn’t mean that every white American is overtly racist, though many are, as the news shows more and more. It does mean that racism is baked into the system from education to housing to law enforcement to name an institution.
If you cannot accept that the United States of America is a deeply racist society, for all the “diversity” you might see in commercials, you do not accept reality and will never understand Trumpery or today’s Republican Party.
Light Bloggery 0
It’s decompression time.
Celebrants 0
Field chronicles the exuberance of the Trumplings.
Backfire 0
Garrison Keillor suggests that the election won’t work out well for Trump voters. A snippet:
To all the patronizing BS we’ve read about Trump expressing the white working class’s displacement and loss of the American Dream, I say, “Feh!” — go put your head under cold water. Resentment is no excuse for bald-faced stupidity. America still is the land where the waitress’ kids can grow up to become physicists and novelists and pediatricians, but it helps a lot if the waitress and her husband encourage good habits and the ambition to use their God-given talents and the kids aren’t plugged into electronics day and night. Whooping it up for the candidate of cruelty and ignorance does less than nothing for your kids.
Do please read the rest. I expect that, a year from now, it will prove to have been prescient.
Facebook Frolics 0
I doubt that there’s anyone whose disdain for all things Facebook exceeds mine, but, really, Facebook is a symptom of stupid, not the cause of it.
Full Disclosure:
I have a Facebook account. If I didn’t use it to pimp this blog, I would have abandoned it long ago.