Donald Trump - MAGAtwat news and discussion

[Serge Forward]

The Village People are playing Trump's inauguration, we are definitely in the dumbest possible timeline

Village People, Carrie Underwood to perform at Trump inauguration

The Village People -- the group behind "Y.M.C.A," a staple of Donald Trump's rallies -- said Monday they have accepted an invitation from the president-elect to perform at events connected to next week's…

www.france24.com

To be fair, it's not really the Village People, it's just one Village Person and some random blokes.

 

[Lord Camomile]

Where did I say that I expected it to be over as soon as possible?

I didn't.

I said that I would like it to be over as soon as possible. That's not the same thing.

No, sure; I guess it wasn't so much I thought you were saying that, but more curious as to whether you had any thoughts on how this thing you would like to see might actually happen.

 

[ATOMIC SUPLEX]

He was actually saying "big league" but that is a phrase with which many non-Americans may not be familiar so it was heard as "bigly".

I've only heard Americans use it, Seth Myers, SNL, Stephen Colbert.

 

[ATOMIC SUPLEX]

To be fair, it's not really the Village People, it's just one Village Person and some random blokes.

I thought they had earlier told him he couldn't use ymca for rallies. Maybe just the writers?
Be weird if they play but can't use any of the songs.

 

[two sheds]

Last I heard the (remaining?) Village Person was pro Trump and said they weren't gay and he'd sue if anyone said they were gay.

So they weren't gay.

 

[Serge Forward]

Dp

 

[Serge Forward]

I believe the sole remaining member of the VP is straight. Several of the others in the group were gay and out.

 

[Wilf]

The Village People are playing Trump's inauguration, we are definitely in the dumbest possible timeline

Village People, Carrie Underwood to perform at Trump inauguration

The Village People -- the group behind "Y.M.C.A," a staple of Donald Trump's rallies -- said Monday they have accepted an invitation from the president-elect to perform at events connected to next week's…

www.france24.com

'In the Nayveee.... if I didn't have a heel spur'.

 

[Rompipalle]

No, sure; I guess it wasn't so much I thought you were saying that, but more curious as to whether you had any thoughts on how this thing you would like to see might actually happen.

No. I don’t much care what happens and I can’t do anything about it anyway.

 

[Wilf]

I don't know and to be honest, I don't really care all that much.

I think Trump is a complete fool and the next four years as likely to be as much a shitshow as his previous tenure. I'd really just like it to be over as soon as possible. On that basis, I'm really not interested in speculating upon what his followers think and may or not believe about anyone else.

You seem to be saying you are not interested in the thing you are making multiple posts about.

 

[Rompipalle]

I've only heard Americans use it, Seth Myers, SNL, Stephen Colbert.

Indeed. I’m not sure if it is part of everyday parlance for everyone but I guess some Americans must be familiar with it.

I think I came across the expression colloquially once in a novel I read in my teens but the only other time I’ve heard it used was when it was explained that this was the phrase Trump had used, which had been misheard and reported as “bigly”.

I’ve similarly head of “Little League” which is something to do with kids’ baseball, I think - although I’m sure someone will correct me if that’s wrong - so maybe “Big League” refers to baseball too?

 

[Rompipalle]

You seem to be saying you are not interested in the thing you are making multiple posts about.

Please don’t twist my words or try to be a smartarse.

I’ve said that I would like the next four years of US politics to be over and done with as soon as possible. I’ve also said that I’m not interested in how that might happen, so if you or anyone else is trying to goad me into saying anything that can be misinterpreted or which will prompt a further round of questioning, then think again. I’m not biting.

You can take what I have said at face value or you can go and howl at the moon if you prefer but I have made myself quite clear already… to anyone who isn’t spoiling for a reaction or an argument.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I seem to have kicked off entirely a different discussion to the one I was actually trying to refer to. I’m not talking about the sense of self or the agency of the self. I’m talking far more prosaically about how the self is constituted. There is such a strong tradition in both modern society and contemporary psychology to treat the individual agent as separate from their context that the assumption barely even gets noticed, let alone questioned. This implicit assumption is that there is a bounded individual that has wants and preferences and emotions and thoughts that arrive independently from other individuals and are enacted strategically upstream from the individual’s behaviours. These is the dualities I am referring to (mind/body and content/process respectively). But for a lot of reasons blah blah blah the assumptions rapidly fall apart when you interrogate them. In truth, all our wants, preferences, emotions, thoughts, aims, beliefs and you name it are mediated through the cultural artefacts we engage with and developed through. There are no desires or aims upstream of behaviours and actions, like some kind of unidirectional flow. The desires and the actions, the context and the behaviours all occur in reciprocity with each other.

Fair enough. I think I misunderstood. Yes, we exist in our relations with others and it is necessary to make sense of individual actions within the social context. In fact, it is hopeless to try to make sense of individuals without considering that context.

Would you say that psychology is getting worse in this respect? RD Laing got some things wrong, but his insistence that you cannot hope to understand mental illnesss without considering a person's wider social context and history is surely right. That was 50 years ago.

 

[spring-peeper]

Indeed. I’m not sure if it is part of everyday parlance for everyone but I guess some Americans must be familiar with it.

I think I came across the expression colloquially once in a novel I read in my teens but the only other time I’ve heard it used was when it was explained that this was the phrase Trump had used, which had been misheard and reported as “bigly”.

I’ve similarly head of “Little League” which is something to do with kids’ baseball, I think - although I’m sure someone will correct me if that’s wrong - so maybe “Big League” refers to baseball too?

Tom Cochrane thinks it is hockey expression

 

[Humberto]

Fair enough. I think I misunderstood. Yes, we exist in our relations with others and it is necessary to make sense of individual actions within the social context. In fact, it is hopeless to try to make sense of individuals without considering that context.

Would you say that psychology is getting worse in this respect? RD Laing got some things wrong, but his insistence that you cannot hope to understand mental illnesss without considering a person's wider social context and history is surely right. That was 50 years ago.

We're physical beings though. BigMoaner says, kick him in the shin and see how zen you are.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

We're physical beings though. BigMoaner says, kick him in the shin and see how zen you are.

We are physical beings. And we are social beings. So there is a physical and social context to all of us. If I unddrstand kabbes correctly, he is saying that both of these are ignored in much contemporary psychology. I don't know enough about contemporary academic psychology to comment on that, but it rings true.

 

[Wilf]

Please don’t twist my words or try to be a smartarse.

I’ve said that I would like the next four years of US politics to be over and done with as soon as possible. I’ve also said that I’m not interested in how that might happen, so if you or anyone else is trying to goad me into saying anything that can be misinterpreted or which will prompt a further round of questioning, then think again. I’m not biting.

You can take what I have said at face value or you can go and howl at the moon if you prefer but I have made myself quite clear already… to anyone who isn’t spoiling for a reaction or an argument.

The bit I was referring to was in your exchange with hitmouse below. You were asked about how Trump voters might be feeling about the effects of the economy on them. You said you don't care, which is up to you of course. However, Trump voters feelings of insecurity and what had actually been done to their area economy and lives was the very thing being discussed.
In the end I'm not massively fussed if people want to just use this thread to vent, sheesh a message board ain't that important (sacrilege!). But I do think it's better when there's some common engagement.

I mean, I don't really pay enough attention to be able to cite specific examples, but I'm sure there are probably loads. But more than that, I was just suggesting you could use your imagination to think about how you might react in that situation?

I don't know and to be honest, I don't really care all that much.

I think Trump is a complete fool and the next four years as likely to be as much a shitshow as his previous tenure. I'd really just like it to be over as soon as possible. On that basis, I'm really not interested in speculating upon what his followers think and may or not believe about anyone else.

 

[story]

I confess that I’ve not been looking at the Trump stuff since the election. I decided, and allowed myself, to look away between then and the inauguration, because from now on it’s going to be exhausting and miserable.

I’m gonna look at this thread to pick up on stuff.

But for right now, here’s a quick list of what Trump says he’ll do on Day One.

Published in Time on Jan 13. So presumably about as up to date and accurate as we can get right now.

What Trump Says He Will Do on Day One

A look at the main things Trump has vowed to do on his first day in office, from pardoning Jan. 6 prisoners to closing the Southern border.

time.com

 

[kabbes]

Would you say that psychology is getting worse in this respect? RD Laing got some things wrong, but his insistence that you cannot hope to understand mental illnesss without considering a person's wider social context and history is surely right. That was 50 years ago.

Academic fields are also social contexts that are indivisible from culture. And they all now exist as modes of neoliberal domination, ie ways in which neoliberalism reproduces itself. Academic psychology has just done what academic physics or academic computer science or academic biomedicine has done in that regard — the funding, the metrics, the attention all goes to those whose work support the political project. Meanwhile, those who are critical of the political project and present with that challenges it are sidelined — not disagreed with, necessarily, just ignored, deprived of funding and not given professorships.

For example, if your system acts such that only quantitative measurements matter (such as making experiments into a gold standard or only paying attention to research that produces statistical outcomes), that sets the rules of the game. Those rules mean that only rationalist ontologies and positivist epistemologies are treated as valid. And that necessitates treating context as something to be operationalised away via sampling rather than as being the very object you should be interested in.

We’ve had 45 years of neoliberalism now and it tells. In my own research (which is self-funded and highly critical), I find myself placing a lot of reliance on great work that just kind of gradually peters out after about 2010. Some amazing papers from the mid-90s to the 2000s just haven’t been really followed up on at all. (In the anglophone world, that is. Fortunately, neoliberalism is not quite so embedded across the rest of the globe, and fortunately for me, it’s still standard to publish in English.)

 

[Yossarian]

The Jack Smith report is out - not sure if it contains any new information, but he sets out why Trump was prosecuted and why he thinks he would have been convicted

Read Jack Smith's final report on Trump's Jan. 6 case

The Justice Department released the special counsel's report on his investigation into Trump's interference in the 2020 election.

www.msnbc.com

 

[Yossarian]

Quite a strange moment in history really - a federal prosecutor releases a report explaining why a president is guilty of inciting an insurrection and trying to overturn an election, but he's going to be sworn in for a second term in a few days anyway and 99% of his supporters don't give a shit about what he did

 

[Rompipalle]

The bit I was referring to was in your exchange with hitmouse below. You were asked about how Trump voters might be feeling about the effects of the economy on them. You said you don't care, which is up to you of course. However, Trump voters feelings of insecurity and what had actually been done to their area economy and lives was the very thing being discussed.
In the end I'm not massively fussed if people want to just use this thread to vent, sheesh a message board ain't that important (sacrilege!). But I do think it's better when there's some common engagement.

That was not my response to the first part of his earlier post about the economy.

It was my response to the comment in his post #11, 422

 

[klang]

To be fair, it's not really the Village People, it's just one Village Person and some random blokes.

Let's beat them up anyway

 

[Rompipalle]

Tom Cochrane thinks it is hockey expression

Well, I wasn’t sure but evidently something to do with sport of some sort.

 

[ATOMIC SUPLEX]

Well, I wasn’t sure but evidently something to do with sport of some sort.

If he was saying 'Big League' and not bigly he probably meant 'major league'. As in "this kid is major league" "We are playing with the majors now", a baseball term (major league baseball being the premier league) that is used as an idiom for being successful in a carrier or just something super big "These wild fires are major league" "these wild fires are creating some major league problems".

I 'think' I might have also heard this as "we're heading for the big leagues now guys" . . . but 'big league' is not normal or correct, so it doesn't sound right. This is probably why he is mocked on most late night US talk shows for 'bigly'. I don't think this is just something the British misheard because they have never heard of baseball.

 

[Derek S-H]

I suppose the subtext of this debate is, "why would anyone vote for this person?"

I'm not that familiar with the American psyche, so will always try and contextualise it with what I do understand, which is living in the UK (albeit South East England). Here, there was a recent online petition to call another GE as Labour had "failed." As if 14 years of theft, decline and decay could just be magically erased instantly away.

There are people who seem to believe The Lettuce was harshly treated and believe her claims of a "Deep State" conspiracy against her. There are also voters who seem to believe that Bozo was forced out by Party agitators and deserved better. Finally, we have people who believe that the two-Party system is a "stitch up" and we need Man Of The People, Farage, to come in and shake things up, despite the fact that he's barely made an appearance in his constituency nor represented them in Parliament.

Is this stupidity? Maybe. Is it a willingness to create and perpetuate an alternative narrative to explain and justify your thought process? Probably.

Nobody likes being told they're stupid, uninformed nor manipulated, even when there's evidence to support all three (Brexit springs to mind). But I'm not sure how believing the lies of someone, be they Trump, Bozo or Nige, denies the possibility of being gullible. It's easy to tell people what they want to hear, what's less explicable is people continuing to believe what they're told by that selfsame liar.

 

[klang]

Nobody likes being told they're stupid, uninformed nor manipulated, even when there's evidence to support all three (Brexit springs to mind).

What evidence is that?

 

[Derek S-H]

What evidence is that?

Dunno, just call it a feeling about the human ego.

 

[klang]

Dunno, just call it a feeling about the human ego.

So you have a feeling that Brexit voters are stupid, uninformed and manipulated, rather than evidence.

 

[Rompipalle]

If he was saying 'Big League' and not bigly he probably meant 'major league'. As in "this kid is major league" "We are playing with the majors now", a baseball term (major league baseball being the premier league) that is used as an idiom for being successful in a carrier or just something super big "These wild fires are major league" "these wild fires are creating some major league problems".

I 'think' I might have also heard this as "we're heading for the big leagues now guys" . . . but 'big league' is not normal or correct, so it doesn't sound right. This is probably why he is mocked on most late night US talk shows for 'bigly'. I don't think this is just something the British misheard because they have never heard of baseball.

According to this online dictionary site, when used as an adjective it apparently means either

1. Sports. of or belonging to a major league:
   a big-league pitcher.
2. Informal. among the largest, foremost, etc., of its kind:
   the big-league steel companies.

Dictionary.com | Meanings & Definitions of English Words

The world's leading online dictionary: English definitions, synonyms, word origins, example sentences, word games, and more. A trusted authority for 25+ years!

www.dictionary.com

I can't even remember now specifically what he was talking about when he said it.