Anybody have any helpful, calming words?

I'm so freaked out about this election I can hardly stand it. All I can say is, if Trump wins, I'm glad I'm elderly and likely won't be around all that much longer. Helluva way to be thinking, thanks to the orange scourge of the century.

How can we look at this more....philosophically? Especially when Vance would be the alternative if Trump croaked?

OMG OMG OMG.

It's definitely nerve-wracking. I think Kamala's got this, though.

It's weird that she's actually ahead in almost every poll (albeit narrowly, so the margin-of-error kinda renders it moot) but it keeps getting reported like she's behind. It really is true that she's gotta do everything ten times as good as Trump to get half the credit. The double-standard is off the charts.

We'll see how the voting actually goes, but I think she's doing far better than the polls even indicate... and the polls say she's ahead.

The problem is, even if she's elected in a landslide the Trump cultists aren't going to accept it anyway. They're already gearing up to claim it's "rigged" -- which they'll do every time they don't win.

So, expect some terrorist activity on their part, because that's who they are now. They either win and become the Fourth Reich, or they lose and become an insurgency and a bunch of terror cells. So, that's the bad news.

BUT, it's better to have them losing and being terrorists, than winning and doing what they want. Because the level of horror will be less, and when they're terrorists... we get to fucking shoot them for doing it. And I absolutely think we should, if they try their January 6th shit again. Last time they pulled some shit, there was too much restraint, and only that scumbag fool Ashli Babbit got skulled for it. If it happens again... I'm for stacking 'em. I know they'll scream and try to make martyrs, but... fuck 'em, they're doing that anyway. We cannot trust them to be objective about their own actions, and if they're going to terrorize the rest of the country, then treat them like we would any other terrorists. And MAGA is very akin to ISIS at this point; radicalized religious fanatics whose "faith" is so inflamed and infected that they can't be reasoned with. Not all of 'em -- some are just confused idiots who like to "join" things and aren't intelligent enough to know when they're being conned, and if they don't hurt anyone, then they shouldn't be hurt, either. But there is a core that are so radicalized they'll get violent. And if they do, then what they're doing should be made real to them. And the MAGAs were not brought up in the same conditions as ISIS -- the MAGAs had a great life, even if they brattily complain about it, and they have a LOT more to lose, so if a few of them start meeting fatal results for their actions, they'll turn coward really fucking fast.

It's ugly and not something I hope for, but if they push it, then opening fire on 'em is what should happen. Their lives are not worth the lives they're threatening. And it may be all that teaches them anything. Conservatives have big throbbing amygdala... they respond to fear. So if they push it again, like they did last time, then the outcome should be a lot more deadly for them.

Because they have PROVEN can't be trusted to be honest with themselves, much less anyone else. They're still trying to claim "those were just tourists," ignoring all the footage of cops being beaten and people with pockets full of zip-ties hunting congresspeople. If they can't admit what those people were doing, then they can't be trusted to be honest about anything. So next time, meet force with greater force. Let them whine about it later. I could be wrong, and it's probably a good thing I'm not running things, but... I'm sick of 'em. They expect to be coddled, no matter how they behave, and I think society's being too lenient with 'em and that's why they're getting as emboldened and abusive as they are. Communities should not be terrorized by Patriot Front and Blood Tribe marching through their streets. That shit is beyond "free speech." That's clearly sedition. Treat it as such.

Anyway, so, yeah, "We'll get to shoot 'em" -- I'm very good at being comforting and encouraging!

But, I know, it's bewildering. It's very, very hard to believe that there are THIS many people in this country who are THIS stupid. It doesn't seem possible that anyone could ever NOT see through what Trump is doing. It's frustrating that we're all held hostage by... morons. But the craziness has been sanitized so gradually for them, it's just kind of crept up on them. They've gotten used to excusing things Trump does so much that now there seems to be no reason to stop. "We let him get away with A, B, C, D, and E, so... why not F?"

For instance, this weekend Trump had what is basically a Nazi rally. He went around wearing Proud Boys colors instead of his usual stuff (which is akin to Hitler showing up in SA uniforms). The rally's opening act was a guy telling "jokes" about how Puerto Rico is an island of garbage, how he doesn't want any immigrants at all, and even the old "Black people love watermelon!" jokes.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/comedian-trump-rally-makes-racist-jokes-latinos-puerto-rico-rcna177514

MAGAs are already defending this guy. And it's really not defensible. They're all like "You need a sense of humor!" (because if you don't think bigotry is "funny" then it's your fault, right?) Or they're claiming Trump didn't know about it, when the jokes were typed in by his people on a teleprompter. He knew. And nobody else at the rally called the guy out. The guy was one of the first people to speak, and none of the people who followed him, including Trump, called it out. They just laughed. And then they yelled their other Nazi shit, like "America is for Americans!" and claimed Kamala Harris is "the devil" and has a "pimp," etc.

Trump couldn't call it out, anyway, because earlier in the week he had said that America was "the garbage can of the world" because we take in immigrants. That's right -- immigrants are "garbage" as far as he's concerned. Not just illegal ones, either -- he didn't differentiate. Republicans will make the claim, "Oh, I'm not against immigration, I just want it to be legal" - yeah, bullshit, buddy. Not true. That's been made abundantly obvious.

ANY of that stuff would have finished a normal campaign. Remember how Mitt Romney's whole campaign was thrown into turmoil because he said something goofy about "binders full of women" and his remark about the "47 percent"? Major scandals at the time. It wouldn't even get noticed now. Now Trump says far worse things fifty times a day and none of the MAGAs (and even few of their opponents) say much of anything because everybody's gotten used to the awful. At least, they've gotten used to it when it comes from Republicans. If Kamala Harris makes anything that can be twisted into any kind of misstep, though, oh HO, they will rail about that like it's the worst thing that ever happened.

They're spending all their time trying to decide if she's black or not (notice she hardly ever talks about her race, while it's the first thing Republicans mention) or whether she worked at McDonalds or not. There's no real reason to doubt her, but regardless, WHO FUCKING CARES? All the legit issues to discuss and that's what they want to talk about? It's because they know their base doesn't understand policies and such, anyway, so they give them something dumb that their goldfish-like minds can contemplate.

Sadly, around half of our country just threw away all their sense, all their morals, and embraced their own vileness, just because they wanted to "belong" to something. They didn't want to be left out, no matter how stupid they had to be to do it. And they got such a hard-on for playing "team sports" with politics that they have to HATE people for... nothin'. Objectively, for any sane person, there's no reason to hate either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. Oh, there's plenty of things that could be disagreed with -- that's true of everybody. I don't care if someone finds fault with a policy or whatever, even if I disagree with 'em. But there's nothing about either person that's really despicable.

But, because their own candidate IS despicable, and obviously so, they have to go whole-hog and invent things.

They're in a cult. I'm not sure there's any hope for a lot of 'em. It would take heavy deprogramming to get them out of there, and ya can't deprogram anybody unless they consent to it, so... we're just gonna be hostage to the country's dumbest, worst people for a while, until they eventually just die off.



It's small comfort, but there have seldom been any spots in history where it's been clearer who Team Good Guy is. History is going to be VERY harsh on the MAGA movement, and the people who belonged to it. If they lose, they'll actually get off lighter, because if they win, they're going to rack up a much bigger bill. I'd rather not have it happen, because I love the country far more than I hate the Republicans, but there will be a certain satisfaction in watching the idiots learn exactly how goddamned stupid they are, despite the pain it causes all of us. I don't know if it'll get as bad as I think it will, but if Trump gets in you're almost certain to get:

(A) a destabilized Europe, and the end of America being a beacon of freedom, because Trump WILL sell out Ukraine, as well as Palestine, all because he wants Putin to be his "fwiend." Trump will ally America with pariah nations, and we'll become one ourselves. Europe will band together to pick up the slack and will start filling the role that America once did. They will get stronger, while we decline. The Middle East used to be a leader of the world until radicalized Islam dragged them backward. America is about to make that same mistake, but with radicalized Christianity.

(B) horrors and levels of cruelty never before seen on these shores. The deportation of migrants and demonization of them will make Manzanar look like Disneyland. There is no way to do that neatly, or cleanly. It's going to be ugly, and conservatives -- and conservatives alone -- will forever have it hung around their necks.

(C) Economic upheaval. Trump is incompetent. Last time he took credit for Obama's economy (conservatives cheered for consistently lower numbers than Obama pulled in... after constantly complaining about Obama -- one reason they have zero credibility now) and then blamed the pandemic when it wrecked. The pandemic certainly didn't help, but it was headed down before COVID. He'll have little excuse this time. Unless there's another pandemic, of course, and since Republicans are flat-earthers now and don't believe in science, that's possible. MAGAs will cut him a lot of slack because they always do -- they're trained like dogs -- but eventually it'll take such a bite out of 'em they'll HAVE to despair, and the Republican party will die off.

(D) Scandal, scandal, scandal. Trump is a criminal. He surrounds himself with criminals. They aren't even very good at it; he only gets away with it because the Republican base has become so morally bankrupt, as well as idiotic.

Bad thing is, it won't matter, because they'll have the voting system so rigged it'll be like Hungary. Hungary is so heavily gerrymandered and rigged that Orban's opposing party would have to win about 85% of the votes to unseat him... and that's what Repubs want to do here. It's already tilted in their favor, anyway, with the idiotic electoral college bullshit.

Thing is, a lot of people are realizing this now, and I don't think they'll be quite as stupid as they have in the past. I think Kamala is going to perform a LOT better than the polls are showing... even though they're showing her with an edge. Hard way or not, on a long enough timeline, we WILL defeat this shit. Fascism always ends badly. Trump's supporters ARE on the losing end of things... it's just a question of when and how.

But there are good signs.

Anecdotal evidence: a lot of Republicans I know down here are WAY off the bandwagon now. The only people I know of still voting Republican are the really hardcore stupid people. I was a little surprised last week when my co-worker (who is dumb as shit -- people all over the building marvel at how stupid this woman is, she's famous for it) got in an argument with her mom on the phone. Originally, my co-worker wanted Hillary to win because she thought Trump was awful. But my co-worker is utterly mindless and crazy-religious, and so she's bought into the religious bullshit around Trump. She literally thinks she won't be here a year from now because she'll have been "raptured."

Anyway, she's close to 65 and still calls her mom like she's five. I hope her mom lives a really long time, because without her, this woman's doomed. Her right-wing brother takes massive advantage of her and turns her (and his mom) into other "wives" -- not sexually, but everything else. He basically enslaves 'em. Anything my co-worker buys he takes away because he has 11 kids, so he "needs it worse than she does." He does all kinds of other really pathetic things to keep control over her, and she never fights back because her doormat religion taught her to "never usurp authority over a man."

So, anyway, she was talking to her mom on the phone, and I'm having to hear all this whether I like it or not... and she starts in on the election, spouting right-wing bullshit.

And, surprise surprise, her mom starts fighting back! So my co-worker's going "It wasn't an insurrection, the cops invited them in!" (yeah, because what're ya gonna do when faced with a hundred violent people carrying melee weapons?) and "He's NOT a bad person! He's not! I don't know where you're getting your news! I know... I know! I know he does bad things, but Jesus is working through him! No! He's NOT bad!" And "I don't know how you can say that! We'll be a third-world country! ... Mom, it's going against GOD to think that way... I don't know where you're hearing this! He's... the Constitution's not important, these are the end times!" And blah-blah-blah.

Now, her mom is also a hardcore right-wing nut, but apparently she finally hit the last straw and just broke.

Another friend's right-wing mom quit her church and went atheist over Trump, because she figured out if her church got fooled over such an obvious con man, they got fooled over ALL of it. This friend of mine was always a Republican, though not a crazy one. Up until Trump he'd voted for the Libertarian candidate. Now he votes Democrat and is desperate for them to win. He swears if Trump wins he's moving to another country because he thinks this one's going to go full-Nazi-Germany. He plans to be out before the inauguration because he thinks assets are gonna get seized and such pretty quickly... he's more alarmist than me. BUT, he's pretty sure it won't come to that, because Kamala will win.

I do know that Daily Kos, every day, has diary after diary about how this thing's going to be a landslide for Harris. I've got my doubts it'll be a landslide, but I do think she'll win. And if she doesn't, Trump and the current crop of Republicans are very incompetent. They'll screw up their own plans. They always do.

In any case, Daily Kos can cheer you up better than me, most likely. I'm better at just railing against the bad guys... It's definitely a partisan site, but the people there are usually reality-based, and have sound reasoning, so it may be a good thing to hang out there 'til the election.

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2024/10/27/2279915/-I-Look-at-the-Polls-and-I-See-a-Landslide

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/28/2280315/-What-I-noticed-in-the-wealthiest-Milwaukee-suburb-of-Whitefish-Bay?utm_campaign=trending

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/28/2280392/-Pre-Election-Survey-with-78-247-Sample-Size-Kamala-51-vs-Trump-47?utm_campaign=recent

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/27/2280123/-Early-voting-47-Dem-44-Rep-9-Ind-is-voting-61-35-Harris-Trump?utm_campaign=trending


There's still a lot of hope out there. It's just going to be nerve-wracking for a while.

Oh wow, that really comforted me, z, as you knew!  HAHAHAHA

Seriously,  I do appreciate the effort, and of course agree with the vast majority of what you said, and have for years.  But speaking of years, you're younger than I so there'll be more time for you to witness the demise of the idiot magas and their relegation to the trash heap of history.  At least I can hope my son will live that long.  Meanwhile, I worry more about tomorrow.

That said, I'd love to believe that you, and most of the talking heads on MSNBC  -- which I had largely quit watching because they were SO one-sided, but have returned to for the same comfort I've asked of this tiny group -- are correct when you posit that Harris is doing a lot better than the polls portray.  AND I hope she hits it out of the park tonight at the Ellipse - while also hoping she has a highly effective bulletproof surround.

The best thing in the world one can hope for would be a blowout for Harris in the Electoral College, even though Trump and Johnson are whispering about some secret that one can only surmise means a major disruption to the certification of the vote if/when Trump loses, big time or otherwise.  

And whom do we have watching out for us in times like this?  Certainly not the Supreme Court.

OK, enough from me.  Again, I do very much appreciate your eminently articulate and logical post AS ALWAYS, z, and am going to take your suggested advice and bookmark dailykos, which believe it or not I'd never visited before.

Heaven help us all - except I don't believe in heaven. It's now or never, and only the voters can forestall the pending demise of democracy.  Get thee behind us, stupidity!!!!

Yep, I've been watching a lot of MSNBC, too... for a very weird reason. I have one of the worst cable companies in the world. Because of that, there's a very strange phenomenon happening: my TV in the front of the house (where I watch most of the news while cooking, eating, etc.) no longer gets CNN. CNN was my preferred news channel just because all the lefties think it's a right-wing channel, and all the right-wingers think it's a left-wing channel, so that must mean it's more balanced than most.

But, the channel slot -- we'll say it's channel 42 -- now gets The Hallmark Channel.

If I go to the TV in the back of the house, which I primarily use to watch DVDs, channel 42 is still CNN. Make sense of that if you can; I can't. The same channel slot, in the same house, on the same system, is two different channels?

Anyway, the TV up front also doesn't get FOX... not that that matters because I wouldn't watch that, anyway. There's no sense in watching a channel that does nothing but lie. So, I've had to default to MSNBC, which still comes in up there. I don't like it as much because it is one-sided, although nowdays there really is only one side that makes any sense. The GOP is devoted to nonstop lies and crazyshit, so... there's not a lot of worth in listening to them, anyway. So, MSNBC it is. And though they're one-sided, I do fact-check 'em, and they aren't lying. They're leaning more to the left, yep, but they aren't falsifying anything that I've caught 'em on. They do leave a few things out, which isn't great, but, it's not the same modus operandi as FOX.

(I will say that nothing in the world is more boring/irritating than "Morning" Joe blathering endlessly about sports... that guy gets some buzz off of repeating the same goofy "sports lingo" phrases over and over, it's so corny. There's really nothing to say about sports, anyway -- "If Team A scores more points than the teams they play against, they'll have a good year! How exciting!" I'll admit, I've never been a big sports fan. Watching D students clap skulls over the placement of a bag of air on a field of grass just does nothing for me. I liked playing football on the playground -- mostly because I enjoyed the violence -- but I never got into it once we had to put on pads and shit).

Anyway, it's really looking like Trump's tactic right now is filling his very-impressionable overly-trusting not-at-all-bright cultists with the idea that he's gonna win easily... because I'm pretty sure Trump thinks he's going to lose. They're hoping to create an insurgency. If they can't rule the country, then they don't want there to be one.

The polls can't be trusted because they're so flooded with bogus right-wing polls that get blended into the aggregate, so the collected data can't really be trusted anymore. Despite that, Harris is still ahead in most of 'em. And Alan Lichtman's "keys" method has her winning, and he's only been wrong once (when Dubya stole the election from Gore). Then there's the "betting market," which has become absolute bullshit. There are a few millionaires pumping big money into that thing to create fake odds, trying to make it look like Trump's winning. A lot of those markets are owned by Peter Thiel (the guy who "created" J. D. Vance's weird ass) so he can throw all the "money" in there he wants and not actually have to pay it off. They're hoping to depress Democratic voter turnout, as well as create a narrative for Trump's supporters that they were "robbed" when Trump loses.

Trump's supporters are like little children. They like to be told stories. And the story that "Trump is way ahead" is being built for them, so they'll be angry (and thus manageable and useful) if he loses. The Republican party doesn't give a damn about this country anymore (well, a few do, but they've left it -- Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, etc.) and they know they've done little to recommend themselves, so all they have left is... make their base HATE a bunch of stuff that they don't understand. "The left," "woke," "D.E.I," "C.R.T.," you name it -- you can hardly find a Trump supporter who can define any of it, but they know they're supposed to hate it, and so they do. And they stay on their "team" even if their team does nothing good for them. Honestly, if conservative voters were results-based, the Republican party would have been run out of the South decades ago. We are the most conservative states, and we get the worst results in the country on everything. I've detailed that here a thousand times so I won't bore y'all with it again, but... it's facts.

The thing is, all of this is terrible for the country. But the Republican party has given up on the country. They say they "love America" but if you look, they want to change everything about it and turn it into something it never was. They keep bringing Viktor Orban in, like Hungary is a model for anything. Hungary is a disaster. https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/08/hungarys-new-state-danger Republicans count on their base to be too stupid to understand that, so they just bait 'em with "we won't let anybody but whites live here, we'll shove the gays back into closets, and we'll put those women in their place" and the little bigots are happy. I've got cousins in Hungary and even though they're conservative, they see the place has become a nightmare and they want out... but they're stuck there. That's the thing about authoritarian regimes: when you want out, you find it's not easy. Republicans here have NO IDEA what they'd be giving up.

And, they've started idolizing Putin. Which is majorly fucking weird.

I don't know if Trump and Elon Musk are actually working for Vladimir Putin, but it's hard to think of what they'd be doing differently if they were.

Like Biden or not, anybody sane will have to acknowledge that it was genius to arm Ukraine. Biden outplayed Putin every step of the way. We've crushed one of our main rivals without having to put any of our troops into harm's way. Russia was once feared militarily -- not anymore, their military's been so decimated they're having to go to a draft and they've gone begging to a punk little country like North Korea for help. Putin's reduced to making nuke threats because... that's all he's got. He's got nothing to go toe-to-toe with the U.S. and NATO with, if it came to that. Hell, Ukraine destroyed Russia's navy... and Ukraine doesn't even have a navy! Russia's also been gutted economically. They've gone from a major competitor to not-even-near-peer status. Meanwhile, we've strengthened our alliances, built a strong future trading partner with Ukraine, and put China on notice that the same thing could happen to them. Whatever anybody thinks of Biden, that was a master stroke.

But if Trump came in... he'd rescue Putin. Why? Because Trump's got daddy issues and wants Putin to be his "friend" more than he wants to the United States to dominate and succeed.

Same deal with Gaza. One thing killing me is all these idiots saying they won't vote for Harris to "protest" for Gaza. Now, I'm all for the Palestinians -- what Israel is doing to them is horrible and that has to be stopped. I am also for crushing Hamas. Those two things are not incompatible. I'm not anti-Israel... I'm anti-Netanyahu. But if Trump comes in, he'll give Bibi carte blanche to do anything he wants. And if those protestors here try to do anything to complain about it, Trump will (try to) send in troops to bust their heads for it. They won't even get to protest it. They're cutting their own throats.

Anyway, I'm rambling, as I tend to do. But, I think most people understand the threat a second Trump term poses. And even people who don't pay attention to that are just tired of the boring old fool. I still feel pretty confident that he's going to lose.

I think it'll be a drawn-out process because Republicans will do anything they can to thwart it. And I think they'll pitch a bunch of fits and there'll be some Tim McVeigh idiots in the future. And we'll have to face down yet another fascist from their side in four years because now that the GOP has learned that their base will accept dictators, they won't give them any other option; Republicans always give their supporters the worst that they're willing to tolerate. But, the more terrorist stuff they do, and the more they push freedom-killing ideas, the worse their brand is going to look.

If Trump does win, the Republican brand will be destroyed. He will be a disaster. I just don't think it'll be worth it, wrecking the country to kill off a party. And they will mess around with the voting system so they'll be almost impossible to unseat... which will only inspire them to put less effort into doing a good job while in office. That's the real danger. I don't think Trump will declare himself dictator-for-life... but I do think the GOP will rig things where elections won't really matter. Hell, Trump hinted that, already:



They'll install whoever they want. They'll placate people by "letting" us all vote, but they'll do the counting and they'll win regardless of how the people voted. That's how it works in Russia, that's how it works in Hungary, that's what the GOP aspires to. They've given up on America.

But, they gotta win this election first. And, I could be wrong, but I don't think they will. I do think their losing will be super-ugly, though.

CNN was always my go to TV news channel as well, and I still watch it much of the time, except when they insist on playing longish bits of Trump rallies or when their invited token conservative talking head of the day gets too disgusting and isn't pushed hard enough with the facts.

All that said, I also used to turn almost exclusively to CNN.com to read news articles and watch videos, but now they've put up a paywall and it ticks me off, especially because a subscription automatically renews unless I remember to cancel (HATE that), and because I have to use a credit card -- doesn't recognize PayPal.  I refuse.  So now it's more MSNBC.com, plus I've added Daily Kos, NPR, and AP, for when I have time and patience.

Probably a silly question, z, but have you tried calling your cable company re the weirdness with channel 42 or whatever it is?  Alternatively, do you by chance, in your channel lineup, have a choice between SD and HD channels of the same programming, and have you tried the opposite one to get CNN up front? Still should be the same thing going on on the other TV.  Weird indeed.  I would call.  Maybe they can do a remote re-set of some kind.  But maybe you've tried this or have a good reason not to call at all.

On a separate matter, earlier today, in light of both the recent MSG bigotry display and Trump's outrageous shooting threat to Liz Cheney, I lost it in an email to old friends from many decades ago, who I learned are Trumpers.  They live in Ohio and we really aren't in regular touch, which explains why I didn't know this until relatively recently.  Anyway, I'm pretty sure I've shut the door on the relationship forever but, as my loyal son said when I copied him on today's correspondence:  "C'est la vie and good riddance, I say.  MAGAs aren't friends of America, so what kind of friends could they possible be to you?"   Gotta love him for his support, but it's still sad, even though we were mainly just people who had a partially shared past and some memories of happy days gone by.  So be it.

Keep on writing, z.  I hope you're reaching a lot more people than we know.