Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Rolan7]

Trump was at his finest that one time at the Convention when he used a teleprompter. Ah those were the day.

Teleprompter for President.

His team has done very well.  And a major plank (or "wood mulch coalescing into paper") was that he'd be a good manager, picking out the best experts to advise him.
Except some of his cabinet picks are *obviously* unqualified.  Just, obviously chosen for agenda, or campaign promises, or plain favors to business pals.
Between that and the continued political gaffs, he really did fail already.  It's not like he's going to turn out to be a masterful commander in chief.  And whatever the state of his personal finances (which afaik he still won't share), his businesses have consistently failed, so I doubt he's going to be an economic mastermind either.

The one hope was that he'd pick actual experts, and maybe be charismatic with other world leaders.
Well, that or appoint himself to the Supreme Court or something

Anyway, back to catching up...  Should only take a few days...

[Rolan7]

Oh shoot, that wasn't even the main thing I was replying to.  Here's the first half:

WASHINGTON — President Trump vowed Thursday to overturn a law restricting political speech by tax-exempt churches, a potentially huge victory for the religious right and a gesture to his political base.

Mr. Trump said his administration would “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches from engaging in political activity at the risk of losing their tax-exempt status.

Motherf-
Ah, whatever.  Churches always did it anyway, with impunity.
Like I personally photographed and shared earlier, on the day of the primaries, right outside a voting station:  http://imgur.com/a/L6W7X
At least this way people can't point at unenforced laws and *claim* church and state are separate.

 Leaked Draft of Trump’s Religious Freedom Order Reveals Sweeping Plans to Legalize Discrimination

If signed, the order would create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity.

cool

I...  should probably address this in other threads, or not at all.  But yeah.

[Reelya]

Pretty snazzy art on the latest copy of Der Spiegel:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Descan]

considering one of the talking points surrounding him was that he is a "real great businessman because of how much more money I made from the cash my dad gave me," that's a straight-up insane thing. cuz, iirc, if he'd just stuck it in an indexed fund, he'd have made much more than he did by trying to actually invest and build and manage on his own...

[chaoticag]

 Leaked Draft of Trump’s Religious Freedom Order Reveals Sweeping Plans to Legalize Discrimination

If signed, the order would create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity.

cool

I...  should probably address this in other threads, or not at all.  But yeah.

Counter-argument, laws that aim to make your life harder and the lives of those you know harder are still fitting in a politics thread. I'd even say it fits perfectly.

[Reelya]

Yeah, where gender issues are impacted by politics, that is actually a politics issue, because it's not a problem that's solved by e.g. education and understanding, but by voting.

[Max™]

I know, it's just that even right after Toni Morrison said that, people took it as a complement. It wasn't. It was a statement of how completely side-swiped Clinton was during his impeachment proceedings, and how every single action he took prior to these events ignored in favor of focusing on something that was truly inconsequential.

She wasn't saying that he was black, but that he was being treated like one.

(I had no idea she said it, and am not even sure who she is, I meant he was too cool and affable to be an old white dude, the lacking complement there being that old white dudes aren't cool, see: Trump)

Edit: Ah, a novelist, I'm damn near illiterate outside of the scifi/fantasy realm.

[Frumple]

considering one of the talking points surrounding him was that he is a "real great businessman because of how much more money I made from the cash my dad gave me," that's a straight-up insane thing. cuz, iirc, if he'd just stuck it in an indexed fund, he'd have made much more than he did by trying to actually invest and build and manage on his own...

Yeah, pretty much. Perhaps the best(?) part of that latter bit is that he's actually spent time badmouthing those sorts of investors before, if my memory's working at the mo'. I mean, that's probably not saying that much, because there doesn't seem to be much that he hasn't, but *shrugs*

I guess to an extent you can't entirely blame people that bought that line, though. Most of the US electorate probably has a fair bit of trouble wrapping their heads around what a 40-100 million starting fund (and business connections gratis, and more than one bailout, and...) and several decades to grow exactly means, so far as dosh generation goes. Or even just a vague idea, for that matter (which is about where I'm at, tbh). Or had paid much/any attention (at least of a financial nature) to people working from similar (or worse off) starting points that (significantly) outperformed the guy. When you've got basically zero background to contextualize a conman, it becomes a lot easier for 'em to get away with an appropriately related lie, and largely harder to really fault the person buying it for falling for it. Eh.

E: Though, all that said, if someone of voting age hasn't realized that someone saying they're a great businessman is probably lying, they may have some problems of one sort or another. Just... throwin' that out there.

[Reelya]

Wonder how long it'll take people to realize that Clinton being the "first black president" wasn't a complement.

While the original speaker may not have meant it as such, it is hard to deny that Clinton made a strong connection with black Americans that previous Presidents didn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison#Early_life_and_career

For context, the whole story is here.

In writing about the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, Morrison wrote that, since Whitewater, Bill Clinton had been mistreated because of his "Blackness":

"Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

The phrase "our first Black president" was adopted as a positive by Bill Clinton supporters. When the Congressional Black Caucus honored the former president at its dinner in Washington D.C. on September 29, 2001, for instance, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the chair, told the audience that Clinton "took so many initiatives he made us think for a while we had elected the first black president."

In the context of the 2008 Democratic Primary campaign, Morrison stated to Time magazine: "People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race."

But the problem is that she, as a writer didn't really make that clear at all from what she wrote. How you intended something to come out is irrelevant if something clearly different came out of your mouth.

[misko27]

 Leaked Draft of Trump’s Religious Freedom Order Reveals Sweeping Plans to Legalize Discrimination

If signed, the order would create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity.

cool

I...  should probably address this in other threads, or not at all.  But yeah.

Counter-argument, laws that aim to make your life harder and the lives of those you know harder are still fitting in a politics thread. I'd even say it fits perfectly.

Yeah, where gender issues are impacted by politics, that is actually a politics issue, because it's not a problem that's solved by e.g. education and understanding, but by voting.

Rebuttal: this thread has no pretensions to be "the one-stop shop for everything American Politics related", nor does it have any notion of being "The Platonic Ideal of American Politics Discussion". It's the Ameripol thread. It exists because Americans (and non-Americans) want to talk US politics. This particular iteration was originally founded purely as a containment thread for American politics overflow. It follows rules that the "ideal" American Politics discussion would not follow, such as "Must follow forum guidelines" and "must remain civil and of a chill composure". Or in the words of Toady just 28 pages ago, "If there's room for a reasonable discussion, we can continue to have this thread."

If someone would rather address something in a dedicated thread rather than here, it's probably for a good reason. Conversely, I'm not convinced that keeping a topic here would do more good than harm.

[Reelya]

But when a sub-topic is specific to America, and it's about what politicians are doing, then I'd say it belongs here and doesn't necessarily need to shift over to e.g. Gender.

After all, we're talking about a Trump executive order and how that's going to affect people's rights specifically in the USA. Just because those people are Transgender this time rather than Black or Muslim shouldn't mean the issue is met with "hey keep that out of AmeriPol, it's gender-related".

 I'd really prefer that the general gender thread isn't overloaded with Trump-related news, thanks. Also, it's easier to not replicate "what Trump is up to" if we put any Trump-related things in here. Otherwise you'd have people in 12 different threads all discussing the same Trump-related stories.

[misko27]

Ahh but the specific thing that brought up the discussion did not seem (key word here, since they didn't continue the discussion; and I, for one, am not a mind-reader) as if it was going to be about Trump, but rather the Rolan's response to Sergarr's very ambiguous comment about the discrimination law. It's difficult to tease out the meaning, admittedly, but that was perhaps the point and problem.

Debating Trump and his law is Ameripolitically correct (Trademark! Intellectual Property! Catchphrase!), but a debate divorced from the political aspects is not. It looked like the discussion was going to focus on Sergarr's (or Rolan's?) views on gender and how that related to the law, rather than the law itself, and that should go in gender, because the argument would (presumably?) focus on gender and interpretations and personal opinions and such, while the politics and Trump part would be only incidental.

I demand Lord Protector smjjames decide.

[PTTG??]

Can we make a new thread for discussions about whether or not the topic of sexual identity is relevant for discussion on the Ameripol thread?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Can we make a new thread for discussions about whether or not the topic of sexual identity is relevant for discussion on the Ameripol thread?

*eye twitch*

[Max™]

Can we make a new thread for whether or not discussions on the sexual identity of MSH's eye twitch is suited for AmeriPol?