History has gone violently off the rails. A self-destructive urge has seized the nation. It's that bad and there's no mitigation for this horror of an election.

This is certainly a shocking turn of events.

Let's just hope that Trump cannot or at least does not set our nation back several decades with regards to all of the social issues like abortion, gay marriage, etc... I'm trying desperately to tune out the painful reality of a Trump presidency right now.

Sam Harris just tweeted something along the lines of "The irony: 81 percent of Evangelicals just elected our first atheist president."

I think Sam is probably correct. I seriously doubt Trump is a believer in any god other than himself.

DWill wrote:History has gone violently off the rails. A self-destructive urge has seized the nation. It's that bad and there's no mitigation for this horror of an election.

Hi Dwill. It's hard to be optimistic based on the rhetoric of the campaign. It may not be as bad as you suggest. Clearly there was a lot of anger and a sense of being disenfranchised by a significant number of U.S. citizens and the same phenomenon is evident in European elections and the Brexit referendum.

The mass media seem surprised all the time and have failed to take the pulse of much of society accurately.
Trump strikes me as a pragmatic businessman more than having any real solid principles. He's as likely to renege on his own constituency as anyone else based on pragmatic considerations.
I expect he will drastically reduce taxes on U.S. multinational corporations and businesses to encourage them to set up at home. Whether this will work remains to be seen.
Will he really build a wall between Mexico and the U.S.? Maybe.
As for foriegn policy I recall the guardian middle east correspondent Patrick Cockburn writing that Trump seemed to understand the problem of dealing with Isis better than the government representatives.
Maybe this is clutching at straws. Hopefully he does rein in on his rhetoric in practice. Time will tell.

Here's an interesting perspective from an unlikely source - perhaps a slightly calming influence?

While many people are stunned Donald Trump won, one person saw it coming, and embraced it wholeheartedly: Peter Thiel. ...In retrospect, Thiel nailed the Trump phenomenon:

"I think one thing that should be distinguished here is that the media is always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. ... I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally, so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment, their question is not, 'Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?' or, you know, 'How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?' What they hear is we're going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy."

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09/peter-th ... graph.html

Breaeaeathththe....

DWill wrote:History has gone violently off the rails. A self-destructive urge has seized the nation. It's that bad and there's no mitigation for this horror of an election.

Power to the people. Though I did not vote for Trump, he is the President-elect and deserves the respect of the office. And each every one of us has the right to criticize his actions and words (hopefully using rational arguments) every day he serves as President. This is a great country and the likes of Trump cannot taint it.

What happened? The dominant leftist culture bullied the traditional mainstream electorate into a sullen silence, or confined to right wing ghettoes, creating sanctimonious media and social and public policy environments where truth is intimidated out of the public square, and the only revenge is the privacy of the pencil writing on the ballot paper, or the electronic button these days.
The social justice warriors are now consigned to their deserved oblivion, where they can wail and gnash their teeth all they like.
Of course many strategic Trump voters would not tell pollsters how they will vote. Springing the surprise is a central part of the impact, increasing likelihood of conservative success. This is the art of war, avoiding succour to the enemy. As seen in Brexit, telling pollsters how you will vote can help energise your opponents, who deserve to be lulled into a false sense of complacency in order to be defeated.
Congratulations Mr Trump.

The DNC has no one to blame but themselves. They abandoned the working class eons ago and have been in bed with Wall Street for some time now. Give the people their toys and let them eat cake, while they grow fat on corporate sponsorship. Clinton was the epitome of it all and could not get enough votes from people who see through this cozy relationship - like african americans, who did not come out to vote in the same large numbers from the past 8 years; like Caucasian women, who didn't think voting for Clinton because she was a woman was a good enough reason; like the thousands and thousands of voters in traditional blue states that either held their Trump vote in total silence, or were simply turned off by Clinton's dishonest and downright criminal history.

The left was totally mislead by the media as well. They were so very wrong and dishonest about Trump's chances at the presidency. In the end, they bought into their own propaganda campaign.

And now the Party of Tolerance is chanting they won't tolerate the president elect when he hasn't even but his shoe on the White House lawn yet.


The left has gone way overboard in delusion, intolerance, and emotional immaturity. They played themselves in the end.

I've been laughing about it for the past 24 hours now.
You should too.

electoral college needs to be looked at.

Clinton wins popular vote, yet loses electoral college by 62 points?
Not 10 points. Or 5 points. 62.

This is a huge discrepancy. Is that power to the people?

And another thing:

I'm a minority. I got sick and tired of the left telling "us minorities" just how bad life would be under a Trump presidency.

Bullshit. I'll survive a Trump presidency because I don't get irrational when things don't go my way.