Trumpocalypse Now

So here we are: President Trump. He's not in office yet, but barring the USA being struck by a giant meteor (at which the rest of the world will shrug and say "good riddance", while desperately trying not to starve to death due to impact winter), he will be come January 20. An actual fascist in the White House.

I use that word deliberately. What else do you call someone who repeatedly calls for people to be deported on the basis of their religion, for the military to use torture, for the arrest and imprisonment of his political opponents? He's exactly the sort of tyrant the US's system of "checks and balances" is supposed to protect against. I guess we'll get to see if that actually works. And if not, well, Americans will get to experience their government how the rest of the world experiences it: as a force of terror and destruction, which murders people at random or drags them away to be tortured in the middle of the night. All of those Americans who were stupid enough to think that it was fine to let the NSA construct a mass-surveillance state because it was only used against "bad people" - good luck with that.

What's the quote? "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard". America is going to get exactly what they voted for. Hopefully they'll learn something from it. And hopefully it won't fuck up our lives too much.

As for NZ, the silver lining is that the TPPA is dead, hooray! But the bigger looming cloud is that Trump won't just continue the US's warmongering ways, but probably get them involved in even bigger and more pointless clusterfucks - which our spineless government will feel obliged to get us involved in in the name of the free trade treaty he's going to tear up. Which is why we simply shouldn't talk to the US, ever: no good can ever come of it.