The Lamentations Of The Women

Meghan Murphy, the feminist publisher who thinks a “curfew for men” and “an end to masculinity” are urgently necessary, has also figured out the real reason for last night’s events.

Curse the Pale Male Hegemon.

Rose McGowan’s Twitter is good for a laugh. Won’t someone think of the poor Hollywood actresses ?

Dewey Defeats Truman!
Heh. I can’t help feeling it’s a tad symbolic.

some kind of episode
The melodrama, it’s delicious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFqZhadwvG0

Midterms “optional” due to students’ emotional trauma.

Oh dear. A brief visit to Facebook alerted me to the fact that my normally rational sister is having a bit of a meltdown herself.
I think I’ll steer clear for a while. {o.O}

And Julia has a point.

When does the raping and pillaging begin?

Donalds President Trumps reaction?

I guess we will see a lot of SJW meltdowns for a while. Tee hee … .. …
You think the hysteria over Brexit was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet…

We didn’t this internet thing back then, but I distinctly recall very similar horrified reactions when “Ronny Raygun” was elected in 1980.
We were all doomed. Seriously. There was no doubt in their minds.
>_< (I don't believe for a moment that Trump is the "next Reagan" - hell, many of Trump's supporters have loudly denounced Reagan as a "progressive liberal" (?) - but the absurdly over-wrought reactions are strikingly similar.)

I distinctly recall very similar horrified reactions when “Ronny Raygun” was elected in 1980.
He was a “fascist god” according to happening pop combo Heaven 17.

This was Gil Scott-Heron’s view. Much. much funkier than Heaven 17. Equally as wrong.

MSNBC is taking it well.
https://twitter.com/JCinLDN/status/796234581758410756

Of course the Media, having completely botched their election coverage and predictions, will now expect us to pay great reference to their forthcoming “What It All Means” and “Whither America” articles.

So, looks like Trump won white working class, white college-educated, young whites, and old whites. #ElectionDay
Oh, you mean the majority of people who still get up and work for a living rather than trying to ‘vote’ themselves a share of their neighbor’s earnings.

For Matthew Goreman, this is the “…end of the age of enlightenment”.

When does the raping and pillaging begin?
Well, I’ve had a haircut this morning and am looking pretty good. So… whenever suits, really.

…then why can’t you do the same, with your superior intellects and expensive college degrees?
Because:

IAintHappy ‏@AvgDude
@iowahawkblog Urban democrats think if they piece together the right string of epithets to insult rural whites, that they’ll get their vote.

Just in case you were wondering, this is the typical basis on which a lot of these women were voting.
Catastrophic for America that they lost, I’m sure you’ll agree.

For the Guardian’s Deborah Orr, it was all about the genitals.

For Matthew Goreman, this is the “…end of the age of enlightenment”.

Let me be contrarian (Trump has empowered the troll in me today) and suggest that that’s actually a good thing!
The people who coined the term “Enlightenment” were engaged in propaganda. “Dark Ages” has now mostly gone out of use, and “Enlightenment” will hopefully follow it for much the same reason: it’s shitty history to name your time periods thinly veiled versions of Age Of Stupid People followed by Age Of Smart People. Moreover…

“The enlightenment happened in the 18th century for a reason, education, facts!” said “It’s embarrassing that we don’t care about this anymore.”

Another thing that happened around then, which fanboys of the “Enlightenment” don’t like to talk about so much, was a lot of witch-burnings. Yes, those greatly increased in frequency after the end of the Middle Ages. (Various people put the end of the Middle Ages around 1453 for Byzantium, 1492 for Columbus, or 1500 for a round number – pick your poison, you won’t find a high rate of witch-burnings before either one.) The Renaissance and the Enlightenment were the time when witches began to seem a lot more plausible, because alongside “reason, education, facts!” was an increasing amount of discovery of weird powers and mechanisms and forces. Tons of woo like mesmerism sprouted up in the 18th century, right alongside things which actually panned out like (the formal study of) magnetism. Proto-science, woo, witch-craft and witch-hunting largely grew up together.
(I would also like to say that “facts” probably doesn’t mean what Goreman thinks it means. I’m sure he likes the word. But imagine Trump going “I have great facts, I have lots of facts, I have the best facts” a few times until you reach semantic satiation on facts, and you’ll hopefully see that liking the word isn’t really credit to team.)
Other things happening around then were the mass draft, the rise of state-nationalism (cue Napoleon), the use of “education” to foster nationalism, the rise of the Prussian education system designed to make soldiers rather than men of learning, and a bunch of other shit that led to a lot of people dead and a lot of borders forcibly redrawn.
Of course I greatly prefer the material technology of 2016 to that of 1699. But if I’m to consider the social order, 1699 being after the Peace of Westphalia that damped down religious war but before the great rise of ethnic war – well, on that score, what has the 18th century done for me recently? Because as I read it, the complaints against Trump are by and large about how he might upset the social order, not that he’s a Luddite who wants to ban ipads and shut down silicon valley.
America was still Great at the time, too. Great Britain, that is.

the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

Lamentations? Sure. http://www.npr.org/2016/11/09/501382650/clinton-backers-gather-at-wellesley-college-to-watch-returns

This is what a mental breakdown in an echo chamber looks like
Blimey. She’s a charming and rational person.

What a beautiful day! David, I can tip you soon. I had been holding off because of my coming Obamacare bill was going to be insanely huge. Repeal and Replace is going to happen thank goodness!

Now Laurie Penny is “ashamed to be white.”
Of all the things for which she might feel shame, she picks that.

This one!
I… don’t think I can top that.
Have some cake.

Blimey. She’s a charming and rational person.
Wait, I thought I read another progressive tweet where, among the F-bombs and expressed desires to perpetrate anal rape on half the US populace, Leftists were defined as the group of “love and inclusion.” Am I missing something?

Could Trump’s first health plan reform-related action be to offer free psychiatric care and personality disorder treatment (and maybe free medicinal marijuana) to leftists? Please? Soon?

More on-topic, it looks like there’s at least one pundit who managed to call the election accurately:
http://shanghaiist.com/2016/11/07/monkey_picks_trump.php

You think the hysteria over Brexit was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet…
Some of the (millions of) tweets flying about this morning were absolutely identical to those on the morning after the Brexit vote, along the lines of “This was the day hate won, the day racism and misogyny won”
I was on CiF trying to patiently (and with no gloating*) explain that calling everyone racist and then misogynist all day every day was predictably losing it’s effect as a political strategy.
But I was wasting my time with these rather distressed souls, who wear their contempt for others like a badge of honour. They’re deeply invested in the whole game. Alas for them the game may be up.
*I’m not even particularly a Trump supporter, I’m just fed up with the type of politics I’ve just outlined.

Somewhat unbelievably, this is the top rated comment at the Guardian:

[Reagan] was a “fascist god” according to happening pop combo Heaven 17.
They were ‘Crushed by the Wheels of Industry’, no doubt a corruscating critique of Fatcha, although they never struck me as your typical horny-handed sons of toil.

My favorite car forum features many lefties, including horrendously mal-informed global lefties, and the garment-rending will probably continue all day. Lovely. I can’t imagine why, but I keep being reminded of Robert Chambers’ The King In Yellow. Can’t imagine why.
“This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with its beautiful stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth–a world which now trembles before the King In Yellow.”
Oh right, the hallucination, unraveling of reality, unending terror and disquiet, descent into madness, fear of nebulously pale things… that would be it. The King In Orange?

Every single time a conservative of even the most milquetoast stripe wins anything at the national level, we hear how frightening this is, how this is a physical danger to whichever identity groups are trendiest at that moment as well as to world peace at large, how democracy is in serious danger, and how even those who did not try to stop it (by having the gall to vote Libertarian or Green, this year) is complicit in racist sexist fascism.
Every single time, in every single Western democracy, for every single election of my life.
And if you suggest “you know, gratuitously insulting your opponents rather than realizing you can like and respect someone who disagrees with you is a losing strategy,” most decent lefties (yes) will agree unconditionally but you will lose friendships from people who at least pretend to believe you’re Julius Streicher. Then they’ll call you a fear-monger.
At this point, all we can do is stick up for those decent lefties, vote for what we believe in, and laugh at the garment-rending maniacs.

Meanwhile, the election result has left this fearlessly progressive young lady too traumatised to do her job today – i.e., shoehorning leftist identity politics into film coverage and thereby making it tedious and dogmatic. Apparently, she can’t even handle leaving the office: “I can’t face this alone.”
I’m Canadian and there was nothing like this when Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister. It’s curious how one part of the political spectrum has disproportionately got shit to do on a Wednesday.

“…we hear how frightening this is…”
Is it Soviet-era agitprop-level though, or just from the same sort of people?

Meanwhile, the election result has left this fearlessly progressive young lady too traumatised to do her job today…
I, for one, am at a loss to know how the world will continue without the enrichment brought by an unknown blog.

In this election we pulled the emergency brake. Let us hope it does some good.

I thought this might be worth passing on- it’s a repost of a repost (I read it BTL over at The Spectatorin a piece by Matthew Parris), but it sums up nicely why the “liberal consensus” (how’s that for an oxymoron, anyway) seems to be out of favour with the electorate:
“1. STOP, for the LOVE of GOD, STOP peddling identity politics. Trump voters – working class people – despise it. They know what you’re doing – it’s obvious.
2. STOP treating ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion as a proxy for class warfare; you are trying to displace them by creating a new under-class and stoking ethnocentrism, gynocentrism and tribalism for the purpose of manufacturing a new electorate and a globalised, supranational governance that NO-ONE wants.
3. STOP speaking about groups, start speaking about individuals (you know, actual liberalism).
4. Stop polarising ALL debate. Just because you aren’t rabidly pro-feminism, it doesn’t make you a misogynist. Just because you aren’t rabidly in favour of the EU, it doesn’t make you a fascist. Just because you don’t support black lives matter, it doesn’t make you a white supremacist. Just because you don’t support SSM, it doesn’t make you a homophobe.
5. Stop pushing mass immigration for the purposes of creating a new electorate. They know what you’re doing. Every minority group in the UK is opposed to mass immigration. Even Hispanics are opposed to mass immigration, and are more conservative – on a policy basis – and religious than white males.
6. Stop preaching cultural relativism; if you oppose something for one identity, oppose it for ALL identities. Murder doesn’t suddenly become more acceptable because the perpetrator is Islamic; sexism doesn’t become more acceptable because the perpetrator is female; racism doesn’t become more acceptable because the hatred is being spewed at white men.
Get it? Until all of this STOPS, until we start to assign rights and responsibilities at the level of the individual and not the group, until all of the incessant shaming, self-loathing and guilt-tripping subsides, this will get infinitely worse.”

Trump wins!
COMMENCE THRENODY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=IFb_AERKha8#t=39

Well, of two equally off-beam candidates, one of them had to win. That was sort-of predictable, wasn’t it?
As I’m not a precious-snowflake-SJW, the US election result didn’t send me into disfunctional melt-down. However, I do feel vaguely disquieted. There’s no way that, for instance, a President Trump can “bring jobs back to America” — not in significant enough quantities, anyway. What is going to happen when his supporters living in the rust belts discover that?
Now, over to our foreign correspondent:
Here in Yurrup, the otherwise charming owner of the local café was bending my ear today about Trump’s character failings. Back in June, she was equally affronted about the Brexit vote. And I had no hand in either outcome!

As I’m not a precious-snowflake-SJW, the US election result didn’t send me into disfunctional melt-down. However, I do feel vaguely disquieted. There’s no way that, for instance, a President Trump can “bring jobs back to America” — not in significant enough quantities, anyway. What is going to happen when his supporters living in the rust belts discover that?
The question, of course, is whether you want to pay the cost of bringing the jobs back. Crank up the tariffs on finished goods, incentivize domestic manufacturing, heck maybe even throw some subsidies around, and the factories will re-open… but it won’t be free.
It can be done, but like every other choice it comes at a price. Economically it doesn’t make sense. Socially, well, if Donald Trump became the American Charles de Gaulle, stranger things have happened…

Martin Shkreli trolls celebs:
https://twitter.com/martinshkreli/status/796217621649772545

The Lamentations Of The Women
. . . and others, as noted . . .

The Lamentations Of The Women
Morning, all.
Commentary at the time on the 2015 General Election.

“You think the hysteria over Brexit was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet…”
I hope the Democrats don’t try to pull that stunt the Remainers did and demand a re-vote…

By the way, hereabouts, this is one of the longer threads to follow a two-word post.
Clickbait smarter, not harder.

I doubt I’m alone in thinking that the level of outrage we’ve seen today – the indignation, bewilderment and various online meltdowns – implies both parochialism and a sense of entitlement.
Which takes us full circle, I think.