Post: #1

How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind, or 6 reasons for Trump's rise that no one talks about.

By David Wong--"I am the Executive Editor of Cracked.com and NYT bestselling author David Wong, which is the pseudonym of a real person named Jason Pargin."



Read the whole thing. The article is actually well written, if profane, as is usual at Cracked. Overall vibe is somewhat angrier, less eloquent rehash of Nassim Taleb's Intellectual Yet Idiot. A Cracked cry for the common man, if you will.

What makes this notable, however, is that this is at Cracked, much shorter and easier to read, and will influence the election, while IYI was read only by very few.

Here are some quotes:

Quote:It's Not About Red And Blue States -- It's About The Country Vs. The City

If you want to understand the Trump phenomenon, dig up the much more detailed county map.



...
See, I'm from a "blue" state -- Illinois -- but the state isn't blue. Freaking Chicago is blue.
...
As a kid, visiting Chicago was like, well, Katniss [Everdeen] visiting the capital.

Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes -- either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.

"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.

But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.

To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. "Are you assholes listening now?"

Quote:Trends Always Start In The Cities -- And Not All Of Them Are Good

Church was where you made friends, met girls, networked for jobs, got social support. The poor could get food and clothes there, couples could get advice on their marriages, addicts could try to get clean. But now we're seeing a startling decline in Christianity among the general population, the godless disease having spread alongside Valley Girl talk. So according to Fox News, what's the result of those decadent, atheist, amoral snobs in the cities having turned their noses up at God?

Chaos.

The fabric has broken down, they say, just as predicted. And what rural Americans see on the news today is a sneak peek at their tomorrow.

The savages are coming.

Blacks riot, Muslims set bombs, gays spread AIDS, Mexican cartels behead children, atheists tear down Christmas trees. Meanwhile, those liberal Lena Dunhams in their $5,000-a-month apartments sip wine and say, "But those white Christians are the real problem!" Terror victims scream in the street next to their own severed limbs, and the response from the elites is to cry about how men should be allowed to use women's restrooms and how it's cruel to keep chickens in cages.

Madness. Their heads are so far up their asses that they can't tell up from down. Basic, obvious truths that have gone unquestioned for thousands of years now get laughed at and shouted down -- the fact that hard work is better than dependence on government, that children do better with both parents in the picture, that peace is better than rioting, that a strict moral code is better than blithe hedonism, that humans tend to value things they've earned more than what they get for free, that not getting exploded by a bomb is better than getting exploded by a bomb.

Or as they say out in the country, "Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."

Quote:The Rural Areas Have Been Beaten To Shit

They're getting the shit kicked out of them. I know, I was there. Step outside of the city, and the suicide rate among young people fucking doubles. The recession pounded rural communities, but all the recovery went to the cities. The rate of new businesses opening in rural areas has utterly collapsed.



If you don't live in one of these small towns, you can't understand the hopelessness. The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called "Cost of Living."

Quote:It feels good to dismiss people, to mock them, to write them off as deplorables. But you might as well take time to try to understand them, because I'm telling you, they'll still be around long after Trump is gone.

Post: #2

Two Wongs don't make a white.

Post: #3

(10-16-2016 09:16 PM)BortimusPrime Wrote:  Two Wongs don't make a white.

It's a nom de plume. Real name is Jason Pargin.

Post: #4

I decided to click. I liked it, especially this part:

Quote:"But Trump is objectively a piece of shit!" you say. "He insults people, he objectifies women, and cheats whenever possible! And he's not an everyman; he's a smarmy, arrogant billionaire!"

Wait, are you talking about Donald Trump, or this guy:

Post: #5

That's so true, the county map is what really illustrates what's happening.

There used to be (and probably still is) an outcry about the problem where black people look at a TV and don't see anybody like them on TV. That's a problem for all those red counties, too.

Quote:To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. "Are you assholes listening now?"

I think that the best way of summing up the election is this: a huge part of the electorate is thinking along these lines: "I don't care who wins, as long as the elites lose". I've said it before, and I'll repeat it: Trump and Sanders had basically the same appeal. It's just that Trump was running for a party that's completely lost its leadership, and Sanders couldn't co-opt the Democrats because all the elites and upper classes who are terrified of both Trump and Sanders fled to Clinton for protection.

On a related note, I ran across this from The Guardian today: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/o...-americans

The author makes no bones that she can't stand Trump, but she's making basically the same point: the elites & upper urban classes don't get it. It's been going on for a while. Remember Obama's "clinging to guns & religion" quote?

Quote:I’m hard-pressed to think of a worse slight than the media figures who have disregarded the embattled white working class for decades now beseeching the country to have sympathy for them. We don’t need their analysis, and we sure don’t need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told, preferably by someone who can walk into a factory without his own guilt fogging his glasses.

Quote:When Hillary Clinton recently declared half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables”, Zaitchik told another reporter, the language “could be read as another way of saying ‘white-trash bin’.”

Post: #6

Never thought I would ever enjoy a Cracked article again but I totally agree with all points mentioned here though I could have done without the Millennial snark and "wit". I've always found it strange how Ivory Tower leftists despite rural white for their values such as "misogyny" and being more religiously inclined but will defend groups such as Muslims and urban blacks despite these groups having the same values.

Post: #7

I read this a few days ago. He links to another article he wrote to illustrate that while he understands why the rural folk support Trump, he knows they're completely wrong

He's 100% SJW. He thinks that we have to bend over backwards to get all the women and Syrian refugees into the workforce, or else we're,missing out on the next Einstein. I first became aware of this from a Facebook link by an SJW friend from high school. She grew up on a farm, and I grew up in the small farm town. She was posting it to help her SJW circle understand how Trump supporters could be soooo wrong, and that's what the author was trying to achieve.

Post: #8

A Cracked article that was actual readable, I wasn't expecting that to happen in this decade. The author of the article had something that majority of the MSM does not know how to use: empathy. This element of empathy is shown when the author explain the situation in the rural areas and reminder this viewers your all are assholes.

Post: #9

I will have to believe you guys that this is a good article but I won't read anything from Cracked since they went full SJW retarded cesspool a few years ago, and that white guy is the mangina fag in chief of the place.

Post: #10

Exactly the same reason why Brexit was successful. A lot of sneering, turned-up nose arrogance from those in London that pisses off the rest of the country. A lot of people are simply not intelligent enough (even guys with degrees/PHDs) to understand why someone would vote for Brexit/Trump/Farage/the perennial bogeyman of the left.

There is a major road that encircles outer London called the M25. You can go clockwise or anti-clockwise round it, and come off at the point where you wish to drive further in to the city. It's become more than just a road- it is now often used in politics to describe those who genuinely can't empathise with why someone might support Brexit or any other view that is against the status quo. Often used in the sense of 'their view of the world doesn't extend outside of the M25'.

Post: #11

Is that seriously written by David Wong or it's just an elaborate hoax? From what I know of the man and Cracked.com in general, none of their staff are capable of writing an article that doesn't have at least 100 instances of the following words: "misogyny", "racism", "colonialism", "oppression" and "bigotry".

Post: #12

^^Hence the surprise of the article.

Post: #13

(10-16-2016 11:10 PM)RoastBeefCurtains4Me Wrote:  I read this a few days ago. He links to another article he wrote to illustrate that while he understands why the rural folk support Trump, he knows they're completely wrong

He's 100% SJW. He thinks that we have to bend over backwards to get all the women and Syrian refugees into the workforce, or else we're,missing out on the next Einstein. I first became aware of this from a Facebook link by an SJW friend from high school. She grew up on a farm, and I grew up in the small farm town. She was posting it to help her SJW circle understand how Trump supporters could be soooo wrong, and that's what the author was trying to achieve.

I have no doubt he intended to achieve that, but instead managed to make them look human with genuine grievances.

It's kinda like the guy on Hillary's twitter--he posts what he thinks will make Hillary look good, but instead unknowingly makes a case for Trump.

Post: #14

David Wong is a f-ing ass hole SJW. Maybe it takes one to get a moment of clarity like this.

Post: #15

^
Broken clock is right twice a day.