It’s wrong to compare a United States President to Hitler. Not because it’s an exaggeration but because it’s backwards. American policy inspired Hitler, not the other way around. Adolf Hitler was a student of US History, developing his concept of concentration camps and genocide from the American policy of reservation creation and the near extermination of our Native population. The concept of a master Aryan race didn’t come from Hitler but from American scientists whose work in eugenics shaped national policies of forced sterilization, segregation, and marriage restrictions. Hitler merely brought to Europe what America had been doing for centuries. Donald Trump is the rightful successor of that centuries long legacy, not a new danger.
so i wanted to share this little tidbit from my m&g with jared and it’s specifically show related/about sam so i think it’s okay. and i wanted sam fans to hear this bc i know it’s something discussed a lot (this is all paraphrased and stuff btw, but i tried to accurately capture jared’s answer).
at njcon, i essentially asked jared this: “the show has had this trope of having sam constantly have to work with his abusers but never addresses the after effects. last season he had to work with lucifer, and lucifer was even in his room, and cole the season before that, and gadreel before that. and most recently there was his torture and sexual assault from toni, who i have a feeling he’ll now have to work with. so do you think sam has any trauma and ptsd and struggles working with them?”
jared said that he thought that of course sam had trauma, a lot of trauma, from all these events and these people. but he went on to say that he thinks sam is a character who constantly feels like he needs forgiveness – that he needs to be forgiven for the things he’s done wrong in his life. and because sam always feels like he needs to be forgiven, that makes him feel like he needs to forgive others in return for the wrongs they’ve done. he said that sam doesn’t want to work with them, nor forgive them, and it’s hard for him in these situations and of course the trauma is real and present for sam, but sam also knows that when he is working with them it’s typically born from necessity, so he has to kind of shoulder his own demons and work with these people despite what they’ve done. so it boiled down to jared saying that yes, sam has a great deal amount of trauma, but he will stomach that/ignore that because sam is a character that feels like he needs to be forgiven and therefore has to give forgiveness back and also because of the situations of the boys’ life
also jared seemed a little shocked/interested by the question, said it was one he didn’t think anyone had really asked or put together, but he appreciated the weight of it and definitely took his time to answer seriously and think about sam and sam’s headspace, which i truly appreciated.
“Coastal elites” are in a bubble. So are white working-class Americans. See the full story (and the rest of Patrick’s tweets) here.
Actually, I would like to say – since I am also in the rural Red Zone – that while he’s right about this part of the country being like 99 percent white with a power structure heavily slanted toward ‘dude’, the answer isn’t going to be “they need to get out more” because, frankly, they can’t.
Lemme put it to you like this: I’m in a Town. If you’re on the coast, you’d consider my Town to be a badly dislocated suburb. One. Suburb. It has one starbucks. One mcdonalds. One (small) strip mall. I’d have to travel 30 miles to get a full service FedEx place or bookstore. I’d have to drive a hundred miles to get to a City, and quite a bit more than that to reach a Major City. “get out more”, for what you want, would involve basically taking a vacation because it’d be at least 12 hours of driving. And on minimum wage (which is nearly all the jobs out here) vacations are few and far between.
And therefore my response to you is this: REPRESENTATION MATTERS. You know what people around here use to see the rest of the world? TV. That’s what. And if all your villains are foreigners, or non white, and all your good guys are straight white dudes, there is nothing in the world hereabouts to contradict that. That’s what we see because there sure aren’t a lot of non-white, non-straight, non-christian types here. What people here know of all that diversity they get from hollywood.
You want to teach the locals that black people aren’t all thugs? Cast more black heros and romantic leads. You want to teach them that muslims aren’t all terrorists? Start making a point of representing them more positively in oh, I don’t know, everything?
I’d also like to add that we’re going to have to do something about the algorithms that rule Facebook, Google, and other social media. Our searches and news feeds are determined by algorithms based on our history. Whatever we pay attention to? We see more of it. Even though the internet has the potential to be a great tool of diversity, we can very easily end up in our own echo chamber. Eli Pariser warned about its effects on democracy as early as 2011.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the meeting between Trump and Obama at the White House, and here’s the thing.
Obama used to be a law professor. This is key.
Law school is so, so different from college.
In college, everyone expects there to be a “syllabus day,” kind of a grace period where they can show up and get the lay of the land, figure out the bare minimum that they can get away with, the TA gives everyone their office hours, there’s an introductory lecture, and everybody leaves a few minutes early to go take a nap or something. You do the bullshit assignments, you say something in class now and then to get your participation check mark, and figure out how badly you can do on the final and still pass.
But see, in law school, all the methodologies you’ve spent the last 17 years operating under go out the window. Day one of law school is you being thrown into the deep end of the pool—you’ve had a homework assignment for two weeks now, and it’s to read the first 200 pages of your casebook. And now it’s you and the teacher (who is usually as smug as Alex Trebek) gauging and assessing what you managed to absorb while you skimmed through all those pages of reading so you could hurry up and get to the other 150 pages of reading for your next period class, in front of 50 people who are all smarter than you. And if you fuck up, or you didn’t do the reading, you are at the mercies of not just the professor, but the silent satisfied judgment of your peers.
Law school is hard, and it will make you feel stupid and tongue-tied and like you don’t know anything and can’t form an argument—because you don’t, and you can’t. Everybody there has had a 4.0 since birth. Everybody there was the smartest kid in their class, and you’re all rabidly competing for a sliver of a chance at something down the road. It’s petty, and savage, fiercely entrenched in a culture of formalities and ceremony, and exactly like Washington DC.
Yesterday when I was driving home, the NPR reporter talking about the Oval Office meeting mentioned that Trump had thought it was going to be a “getting to know you” type meeting, but that he was surprised when Obama stretched their talk out to 90 minutes before sending him along to the Capitol building where he met with congressional leaders for more lengthy meetings and stuff he didn’t want to do.
And he hasn’t even gotten to the actual job yet.
So think about that as we go into this.
Trump walked into the Oval Office like a two-pump-chump freshman thinking it was syllabus day, and what he got was the first day of law school, and he hadn’t done the reading like everyone else had, and Professor Obama decided to put him in the hot seat.
This was Obama’s chance for the most perfect revenge that would never be picked up on as revenge at all. He was gracious, polite—everything he needed to be for a peaceful transition and a good review from the press. And that would continue when the doors were closed, because that’s the key. Not a Come to Jesus meeting, oh no. If Obama were smart—and he is very smart—he would have treated Trump like an equal, and brought the discussion to a level that assumes far more of Trump than anyone has so far. Assumes that he’s an adult who’s been paying attention. Statistics, esoteric minutiae about the executive branch procedure, economic growth numbers, labor figures, domestic policies, countries Trump has never even heard of, shit that would never in a million years have been in Trump’s campaign soundbites or digestible summaries.
No way to escape. No aides to remember any of it for him. Just the two of them.
Because that’s what would strike a precise chill into Trump. The thundering realization that he’s woefully unprepared for the hard, boring, thankless reality of this, and Obama’s version of a smooth transition won’t and shouldn’t include remedial civics.
That’s what I saw when they shook hands and Trump stared at the floor instead of looking back into Obama’s face. He’s just figured out how little he knows about any of this.
And that should give you a small glow of satisfaction, because after those meetings, Trump definitely has the 1L Terror Shits. In January, the night sweats and insomnia will show up, but for these first few weeks—nothing but diarrhea and self-doubt.
My fucking god you guys, seriously nothing makes me happier than this. I think about this and it makes a warmth in my bitter little heart.
Because it is 1000% true.
I looked at those photos of Trump and Obama shaking hands and that’s exactly what I see there in his face, a kind of sinking realization of what exactly he’s gotten himself into.
Why did such a stupid chump ever think this was a job he even wanted? This is an asshole who’s had everything in his life handed to him. This is hard fucking work, did he think it was going to be golf and blowjobs 24/7 while he gives vague instructions to a secretary who runs off and does all the real work for him?
I can’t fucking wait to see more photos of his stupid chump face with that solemn expression of “wtf have i done” on it. I can’t wait to see him at the end of his four year term.
he will be entirely hairless and grey all over
I’m not so sure Trump has the self-awareness to make that kind of experience stick in a lasting way. I’m pretty sure his defenses will snap back into place soon enough and he’ll be blaming everybody else for his own shortcomings. Still, I definitely like that they are separating him from Pence and making it very clear that the buck stops with him.
Remember this story from when Trump was looking for a running mate? (New York Times)
One day this past May, Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., reached out to a senior adviser to Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who left the presidential race just a few weeks before. … But according to the Kasich adviser (who spoke only under the condition that he not be named), Donald Jr. wanted to make him an offer nonetheless: Did he have any interest in being the most powerful vice president in history?
When Kasich’s adviser asked how this would be the case, Donald Jr. explained that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.
Then what, the adviser asked, would Trump be in charge of?
“Making America great again” was the casual reply.
I keep thinking about all of the journey imagery that was used in the last few seasons and the “River shall end at its source.”
We’ve arrived at the source. Mary’s alive and Sam and Dean are struggling with what that means for them. So here we have Dean fumbling over road blocks and dropping and breaking ships. They’re played lightheartedly, but it seems like it’s a way of reinforcing how much he is struggling along this journey.
In late October, Donald Trump released an action plan for what he hopes to accomplish in his first 100 days in office. Below, NPR reporters and editors from the politics team and other coverage areas have annotated Trump’s plan. We’ve added context on several of his proposals, including whether he can really repeal Obamacare and what a hiring freeze on the federal workforce would actually look like. You can see a nonannotated version of “Donald Trump’s Contract With The American Voter” here.
This was not a normal election. And there can be no normalizing of what happened here, no pretense that ordinary explanations suffice.
The creeping horror for many as they watched the electoral results come in was not the typical disappointment people feel during a political defeat; it was a realization that there is no overlap any longer in our scoresheets for what constitutes a leader — or even a decent person. Half the country either had no knowledge of the monstrous things the president-elect has said and done or else they simply didn’t care. The former is hard to believe, given the coverage Donald Trump received. The latter is heartbreaking, if true.
There is a third possibility: that half the country saw these things and simply refused to believe what they saw. Facebook and social media has flattened the distinction between information and disinformation. Even though his image was on video, even though his voice was on tape, many of Trump’s supporters attributed the facts to the “liberal media,” the outrageousness of Trump’s actions as “spin.”
Journalism cannot reach this world view. As responsible media outlets try to account for how every prediction went wrong, there will be waves of hand-wringing; there will be fatuous pronouncements on how “the elite” in the media failed to reckon with some deep unavailable truth about Trump’s supporters.
This is wrong. Worse, it perpetuates the error it seeks to correct by making the conversation all about the media instead of this transformation of the American electorate.
Hearseeno 