Remember when the days were long
And rolled beneath a deep blue sky
Didn't have a care in the world
With mommy and daddy standing by

When happily ever after fails
And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers dwell on small details
Since daddy had to fly

But I know a place where we can go
Still untouched by man
We'll sit and watch the clouds roll by
And the tall grass wave in the wind

You can lay your head back on the ground
And let your hair fall all around me
Offer up your best defense
But this is the end
This is the end of the innocence

O' beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening
They're beating plowshares into swords
For this tired rotten old man that we elected king

Armchair warriors often fail
And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie

But I know a place where we can go
And wash away this sin
We'll sit and watch the clouds roll by
And the tall grass wave in the wind

Just lay your head back on the ground
And let your hair spill all around me
Offer up your best defense
But this is the end
This is the end of the innocence

Who knows how long this will last
Now we've come so far, so fast
But, somewhere back there in the dust
That same small town in each of us

I need to remember this
So baby give me just one kiss
And let me take a long last look
Before we say good bye

Just lay your head back on the ground
And let your hair fall all around me
Offer up your best defense
But this is the end
This is the end of the innocence

I guess it's true about pictures being worth a thousand words.

Trump's voter base in a nutshell right there.

[b][size=150]An ice-cold handshake at last between President Trump and

What the FUCK are you talking about. Shit, I thought you were somewhat reliable for information before, but apparently the fuck not. Don't repeat that crap again, it's wrong. Anarcho-capitalists are not anarchists, their basically new age fuedalists, and they aren't "most". The proper anarchist ideology is radical leftist. The people pissed off and wearing black are leftists. They brunch with communists. Who are also radical leftists, which I worry I must clarify for you now.

You go talk to some anarchists throwing bricks in DC and tell them they're right-wing. Wow man.

Dangerously uninformed on this. You shouldn't be the one confronting BRAH on anarchists if you're going to spread convenient liberal disinformation like that. Like, why? So you can feel removed from them? Is it just an attempt at disassociation or are you legitimately clueless on anarchism?

"Right-wing anarchists" or "Anarcho-Capitalists" don't throw bricks. They don't protest. They don't wear black. They don't risk themselves to arrest and battery. They don't do shit other than lick bootheel, harass people who want a higher wage, and wonder if having a child slave is a violation of the "Non-Aggression Principle".

There are moments in our lives that make us think about the end. I have two on my mind. First, sometime in my pre-teens, while racing my bicycle down the block with friends, pedaling way too fast, I slammed the bike straight into a car at an intersection, fell off, and hit the ground hard. Not much was bruised aside from my ego, but in that instant an alternate reality flashed before me. Later on, in my early 20s, while walking home in the winter, I tried to maneuver around a mattress blocking my path and instead slid on some ice, tripped over the mattress and hit my head hard on the concrete stairs in front of me. I heard a loud thud through my headphones and panicked. After texting a friend, who told me not to fall asleep, I rushed to the hospital for an MRI. Both times I was perfectly fine.

The actuality of death is felt at specific points: being involved in an accident or averting one, seeing the dead body of someone familiar, experiencing celebrity death collectively. Someday we’re going to die. And we all wonder what it’s like, in continuum. Naturally, I’ve weighed various permutations of how it might happen, and how people around me might go, largely viewing death as the body easing into a state of failure. I’ve been under anesthesia twice and twice it felt like nothing. You’re conscious and then you’re not, and then you return. My anxiety about flying is directly related to an intense fear of crashing and dying, despite knowing the odds. Death thoughts defy probability and yet, consistently, it doesn’t matter.

I can pinpoint Trump’s election as an event that made these dark thoughts more visceral. The running joke is that a Trump presidency means certain death, which even shows up in the way he speaks, routinely and vaguely spooking the public about “terrible” “things.” The cause for concern was immediate the day after the election—the results of which many processed like a funeral—when faced with a president whose desire to posture, among other things, consistently overrides better judgment.

My fear of adverse effects of Trump’s presidency, compounded by the general threat of aging and the reality of losing people, has made me strangely conscious of mortality, an addendum to the sting of dread ever-present for black people in this country. A legitimate concern subconsciously replays in my mind, and maybe yours, is that the policies Trump’s administration enact will lead to more people dying, short-term and long-term and, metaphorically, as pieces of us wither as well. Melodramatic national conversations about the End Times only deepen the feeling of dread.

As humans, we’re constantly at odds with the prospect of no future. That background noise in our brain has no doubt become louder, though not necessarily deafening. When I brought up the idea of Trump and death thoughts, my co-workers expressed similar anxiety. “I was trying to flirt with someone recently and I ended up talking about how we’re gonna get nuked,” one staffer recalled. Another suggested, “Trump feels more like we are all going to die imminently.” Stories about death and revolution feel strange, too. Embarrassingly, the end of Star Wars: Rogue One made me cry, as did the finale of Westworld, because it’s weird to see revolution play out like a dream.

After the election, various outlets wrote about pervasive “post-election stress” or “post-election blues,” which might as well now be a long-term ailment. There’s a reason Ava DuVernay says she’s “dreading” the moment Trump is sworn in, or that intelligence officials admitted to “dread” over Trump’s presidency. In a December 2016 article about national “unprecedented dread,” published in The Los Angeles Times, David Horsey writes:



The idea that Trump—a physical manifestation of fear in many ways, a symbol of destruction in others—is linked with thoughts of death makes absolute sense. Both he and death breed feelings of uncertainty and thoughts of the unexpected. Depending on your degree of belief in religion and the afterlife, and how comfortable you are with the unknown, your view of death will change. In a May 2016 Psychology Today article about death anxiety, clinical psychologist Stephen A. Diamond wrote:



Diamond (who also wrote “Should Psychology Play Some Part in Presidential Politics?”) describes the fear of the unknown:



An anonymous senior national security official echoed these sentiments but about Trump, in a November 2016 Washington Post piece. “We don’t know what he’s really like under all the talk,” said the official. “How will that play out over the next four years or even the next few months?...I’m half dreading, half holding my breath going to work today.”

Speaking to me by phone, Dr. Diamond brings up the work of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, as he did in the death anxiety article. “Fundamentally, the unknown is certainly a factor that provokes some anxiety and even dread. Kierkegaard, when he wrote about anxiety, he actually used the term ‘dread,’” says Diamond. “When you have someone in power who could potentially abuse their power, could potentially get angry and retaliate against somebody, another foreign entity, that brings the reality of the possibility of death to the surface. It tweaks it and makes it more real, more conscious in a way. Certainly, that may be part of what’s going on for some people in terms of the fear of war, getting into some kind of situation that could be catastrophic.”

The anxiety felt on Election Day has steadily evolved, as the theoretical fallout of Trump’s rhetoric spreads—and as he continues to send ill-advised tweets. On January 2, he tweeted: “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won’t happen!” Never has a president had and used such a weapon as social media in this way, yet another uncertainty. (It doesn’t help that Trump has yet to confirm officials for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which handles the country’s nuclear arsenal and thus manages safety.)

Trump’s unpredictable nature is innately troubling, as psychologist Dan P. McAdams concluded in a June 2016 article for The Atlantic:



There are many ways we could meet our demise, but the threat of nuclear warfare has crossed my mind many times, a set of doomsday thoughts that really isn’t anything new. Similar to today’s articles citing “dread,” the lede for a January 1946 article about atomic bombs in The New York Times did the same: “That black cloud on the horizon so much bigger than a man’s hand is called the atom bomb. The destructive powers of the storm it can loose upon us are so great that civilization, already racked by so many torments, trembles in apprehension. The world now knows a fretful and uneasy peace, but men still live in the shadow of fear and their sleep is haunted by dreadful dreams.” Just as fear of Zika or Ebola existed, so did fear of yellow fever, and just as fear of warfare looms, so did Cold War anxiety, the knowledge of which doesn’t provide much comfort.

To a large group of Americans, those who chose to elect Trump, he’s the antithesis of dread. It’s possible that their anxiety was cured by this changing of the guards. But to those who strongly oppose his views Trump is visibly deficient and uncertain even of himself and perhaps that is, at the core, what scares us in the way that bad parenting feels like a constant threat to our security. (The uncertainty of walking down the street with Trump holding my hand feels considerably less safe than walking with Barack Obama.) “It’s easy to feel totally disempowered in the same way that a child feels dealing with a parent like that,” says Diamond, when I ask about the idea of Trump as a bad parent. “Part of it is a kind of victimhood, feeling like a victim of all this. To some extent, one is a victim, let’s say, as a child when you’re born into a family with dysfunctional parents. Those people who didn’t vote for Donald Trump feel victimized because this is not their choice and now there’s nothing that they can do about it. That feeling of powerlessness, I think that’s a lot of the doom and gloom part of it. Just feeling like there’s no hope, feeling despair about the future.”

There are white people who have melodramatically worn their victimization, forgetting that in the midst of their despair, it’s the minorities who are most at risk under Trump’s presidency, and that many have worn such dread for some time. Diamond adds, “As a collective, the American people are responsible for putting him in office and we have to take some responsibility for that.”

What is the healthy line between dread and optimism? What good does being anxious do? Obsessing seems prudent, but also masochistic. I’ve scrutinized each of Trump’s appointments since he was elected, with each conservative figure he nominated possessing deeply destructive philosophies that appear to edge us closer to finality, be it through some effect of climate change, from antagonizing a world leader, having no access to abortion or just our leaders’ plain inefficacy. As Masha Gessen suggests, it’s our duty to reject the normalization of Trump and hold onto these feelings of dread. “The thing to do—and this is my recipe—is to continue panicking,” she told Samantha Bee. “To continue being the hysteric in the room, to say ‘this is not normal.’” Because that is the nature of pain and change.

Frequently considering death at large could feel better than obsessing about it in our personal lives, if equally irrational. There’s nothing to do either way but remain stubbornly optimistic, aware that life and death exist in tandem, and so it goes.

“The existential fact of life is that the possibility and inevitability of death is always present. We try not think about it, but it’s always rumbling underneath,” says Diamond. “I don’t know if it’s a matter of trying to go back into a state of denial about it. We need to really confront the facts of life and to learn how to live with them. To acknowledge the reality of death, to confront our own mortality in particular, can actually help you to appreciate being alive more. We don’t have time to waste in a sense. Life is something that can be taken from us anytime in a thousand different ways.”

http://jezebel.com/do

Jezebel.

Really ?

Jesus Christ, get a grip.

Grab your ankles, snowflakes! Trump isn't even President for six hours and he's already getting shit done!

https://www.whitehouse.gov/

But I ask back to you anyway, what of those that don't wish to be capitalist (or to support capitalism)? Starvation is their only alternative in a world completely dominated by capitalism.

Obviously from a while ago but still relevant:

Funny thing here is I do recall you were one of the people who used to complain because the US didn't trade with Cuba. I recall you did acknowledge me (that's a compliment btw) when I asked why does a communist country have to trade with a capitalist country? Especially one they say they hate?

Cuba remains a communist country. And even though they don't trade with the US we've never stood in their way trading with the rest of the world. Yet they live in poverty, they occasionally starve, their health care is for shit (but at least everyone has universal access to shitty healthcare), and the only people they can really blame are themselves.

Venezuela (which isn't communist but they're in that spectrum) is awash in oil, they enjoy a year-round growing season, the country is fucking polluted with lumber, yet they make Honduras look wealthy, they're starving, and they have a housing crisis even though they sit on a treasure house of building materials.

But, yes, it's America's fault.

See, you're free to be communist if you want but when other people are free not to be communist it's hard to sell it to everyone.

No one has to be forced to be a capitalist. It's actually a lot of work.

But communism always requires force at the national level. In groups of up to 300 to 500 it can work. For a while.

The Irish clans, for instance, are natural communists. It's in their culture. But they're no longer agrarian and 800 years of British occupation left the Irish culture torn between their cultural roots and the global reality. They'll never go back to being village-level communists again.

But if you want to go form your own commune where you and your friends can be self-reliant and apart from the rest of the world you're free to do so. Have at it!

Just don't try to say the rest of us have to do anything for you or provide anything to you.

No one is standing in your way.

Go on. Stop complaining and be a communist somewhere. The rest of us don't care.

Teddy would have liked Trump. Their policies are very, very similar.