Tag: Trump

  • I was feeling sick and going over my…

    I was feeling sick and going over my past reddit posts just to kill time until it’s time to sleep (to not mess up my sleep schedule), and found this post from a year ago that I think still makes sense.

    =============

    After 15 episodes in, Designated Survivor is feeling like a comical satire of the Trump administration. In some parts, there are parallel connections, and in some others, if we were to get inside Trump supporters’ minds, this is how they would imagine themselves – fighting the good fight to protect an embattled, post-apocalyptic America. In the 2000 movie The Cell, detectives enter a psychopath’s mind, materialized into a virtual-reality-of-sorts through a machine, where there are horrific depictions of their depraved thoughts, but in some scenes also some of them are represented beautifully because that’s how the psychopath feels about it internally. Now apply that mechanism to Trump and their supporters.

    For starters, he was never elected to public office prior to the presidency, and only became president due to a technicality. His swearing-in ceremony was the “largest in history”, and those present really believed in the legitimacy of his presidency.

    He has led a holy crusade against the ravaging mainstream media, who keeps running hit pieces on dear leader. The press secretary is misspeaking-machine-on-wheels (phase 1) and then improves and just outright lies to everyone on everything (phase 2) (Although for Trump it’s Phase 2 first)

    Let’s go on..

     

  • Online reception of the Trump’s latest citizenship comment…

    Online reception of the Trump’s latest citizenship comment is a bit mixed, because the Korean media (in this case, both peninsular and U.S. based) has long (20+ years?) established a standard buzzword to frame the issue: Expedition Birth (원정출산)

    The word Expedition has been combined with a few choice words to frame a couple topics that pertain to women and the Chinese people in the media. Expedition Shopping Trips, etc. There is a bit of a right-wing bias in the term, but it’s more strongly used as a click-baity keyword and I think even progressive media have sometimes used it as a way to summarize the whole topic.

    The expression produces a pretty vivid image in peoples minds and leads to a foregone conclusion: “Greedy, unpatriotic upper middle class women (as if devoid of their spouses) travel to the U.S. to get free citizenship, and avoid military service for their future son, and all kinds of “upper middle class benefits” to their child-to-be-born”.

    U.S. based Korean American media’s comment sections are abuzz with the keyword. I’m not sure if progressives have looked into, or developed counters to the frame.

  • It’s unfortunate that the real fake news and…

    It’s unfortunate that the real fake news (and no, I don’t mean Fox News.. i mean, the real, original fake news.. fake news *sites*) is not surfacing to the public attention anymore, because it’s been suspected to be one of the factors leading up to 45*’s election.

    It would be unfortunate that just because we have a biased right wing media, and Dems are picking up on the incorrect adoption of the term to attack Fox News, we give this issue a blind eye when fake news sites are alive and well:

    • Websites created with the sole purpose of generating clicks and ad revenue (a link farm on steroids, if you will)
    • Masquerading as news sites with some fancy name
    • Existing across the political spectrum, but with an overwhelming majority with headlines biased in favor of Trump, because let’s face it, everyone is dumb to an extent but Trump supporters are a special kind of stupid. The progressive base’s ROI with fake news sites can’t ever hope to compete with the i’m-swimming-in-cash level ROI with Trump.
    • Where the header is 90% of the content, with the remaining article body being either arbitrarily cut & pasted from other sources, or seemingly procedurally generated from click-baity content formats
    • Prospers from an internet culture where users don’t read the article they see from a friend, but simply re-share it in their timeline to make a political statement (usually in the form of “I hate Clinton”)
    • Is initially “seeded” by the site creators, but later acquires a life of its own after going viral
    • With 99% of traffic being generated from social media link shares, and having its biggest client in Facebook. And Facebook is suspected to have let it fester, because it still meant more business for Facebook in terms of user engagement

    Mid-term elections season is approaching – are we going to do anything about this?

  • facebook is running a survey that pops up…

    facebook is running a survey that pops up and takes over the entire screen (you can’t click on anything else until you respond or close it) where it literally asks “do you agree with the following statement: facebook is good for the world”

    fuck you facebook. manipulative piece of shit

  • 45* we’ll do it trade war in…

    45*: “we’ll do it (trade war) in a very loving way, loving loving way”

    all the immigrants who fell for trump saying he would “deal with immigration with heart” are now just learning that Mr. Embarrassment to the Human Race (TM)’s limited vocabulary defaults to “love” and “heart” to refer to things that are not directly related to profits.

    Trump thinks that the KKK is a group that “deals with immigration with heart” because, unlike Blackwater, they are not in this to make money. Puzzling, I know. So he decided to give it a label to make sense of these things- “heart”, “love”.

  • Seeing Nunberg in the news keep reading as…

    Seeing Nunberg in the news, keep reading as Nuremberg. Nuremberg.. Nuremberg trials, ooh yeah..

  • I think I’ll get a U S flag…

    I think I’ll get a U.S. flag to go out to the streets and waving the flag the day 45* is sent to jail. Should I get a regular sized one or mini handheld ones?

  • You know maybe from all the meaningless shit…

    You know, maybe from all the meaningless shit 45* spewed to date, maybe the “I’ll take all the heat from this” line is an indication that impeachment is finally imminent. As in, “I’m going down anyways, who cares”

  • Trump cancelled DACA to shock congress and…

    “Trump cancelled DACA to shock congress and help undocumented young people”

    Yeah right, says who? People who were lucky enough to have their DACA work authorizations expire *after* March 2018 and haven’t lost their jobs. You think you can just show up in the same workplace in 6 months and expect to be automatically re-hired? Really taking care of other people in the line of thought right there.

  • Selective Impression

    It’s unusually interesting that in the case of this DACA phased repeal, people remember the piece of information “6 months” over everything else. Everyone I talked to (even some DACA dreamers who seem relatively well informed) since I returned to LA recall the DACA announcement as “DACA will be cancelled in 6 months” – which is a few shades harsher than what it really is. While it’s simpler than most policy, the DACA phased repeal has a few components, and it’s not possible to convey them all in a mouthful. 1) no new applications, 2) one more renewal allowed if your expiration is between now and March 2018 (6 months) – but it needs to be filed within one month. What you are seeing, given this, is a phased 2-year repeal period where the earliest EAD expirations come in in April 2018 and the latest ones happen in March 2020.*

    • This assumes that people will get 2 years added to their original EAD expiration date. Some seem to have received 2 years added to their date of application and not expiration – we will need further confirmation to consider this official practice. Also, I am not going into the specifics of which day in March is the last date and which date in October is the last renewal application date, which are important details for those involved, but not relevant to the point I’m trying to make.

    Of all these pieces of information, an overwhelming number of people are remembering this as “full repeal with 6 month buffer” or “all canceled in 6 months”.

    If it had to be a time-related number that would have been easier to remember, there’s a couple other numbers competing for the spot as well. There’s the “one month” piece – and you could argue that there’s the implicit “two years” which is the repeals period. Why did these two not make it to the public memory?

    First, there’s the first impression factor. After a full week of click-baity media articles citing anonymous White House sources on the DACA decision, Politico broke ground in its September 2nd (I think?) article by putting one specific piece of information out: there would be a 6-month buffer of some sort in the DACA repeal. To me this indicated a first signal indicating that the impending DACA decision would be one of cancellation, because we finally had a piece of detail. It is possible that for the media and the public, seeing this piece of detail later confirmed in the official announcement solidified its position in the public memory.

    The DACA phased repeal should really be simplified as a “2.5-year phased repeal”, and not a “repeal after 6 months”. But that would not look good to the administration. 2.5 years – that means that between the Iowa caucuses and Super Tuesday there would be a significant portion of dreamers still holding valid EADs, and another potion who very recently would have expired their EADs. The 2016 presidential elections took place just a few months ago. Other than pundits, who is looking at the 2020 presidential race as an imminent event? To most it will feel like a long, long time ahead. That’s when the last batch of dreamers lose their EADs. This is a very long phaseout. It’s akin to the Obama administration saying “well folks we will start discussing health care soon, but we don’t expect the final vote to take place until the 2012 Primaries season”.

    Given how useless Session’s announcement speech in terms of information density, I wonder if a possibly deliberate surfacing the factoid “6 months” most prominently in the public space follows a pattern. A pattern of being (relatively) soft in action and harsh in words. Session spent 20 seconds conveying information in the decision per se (“rescinded” and “phased out”), and the remaining 10 minutes catering to the anti-immigrant far right. It created a spectacle conveying the idea that Trump was on board with the anti-immigrant agenda.

    Something similar could be said of emphasizing the 6 months aspect of the announcement over others. The 6 months detail is actually a second level of detail, it’s not even a piece of information that matters to the general public – it’s used to determine whether a person can renew their DACA for the last time. Here, the first level of detail is that only one last round of renewals will be allowed in DACA, not 6 months. But the administration decided to pick it, possibly because it sounds much better than 2.5 years.

    Why does the administration care how harsh or soft they are on immigration? Do they display this behavior in any other topic – global warming, taxes, financial regulations, LGBT? It’s a bit of a mystery.

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