Hilarious. They really are delusional. On one hand, I'd say they're headed for a 1964 level beating in 2016. On the other hand, in 2008 I thought conservatism was done as a political philosophy and it came roaring back in 2010. The American electorate is fickle, so who fucking knows.
There are extremists on both sides, though, who talk about fleeing the country whenever the other sides guy is in office. I know very liberal people who said they were seriously considering it during the Bush years, and I even saw an episode of one of those "House Hunter" type shows where a guy was actually selling his house so he could move to Mexico to get away from Bush. It doesn't matter who is president; some group is always convinced a dictatorship is about to happen.
To be fair, Sarkus is part of a different genre of political commentary. Complete sentences, punctuation, a blithe disregard for what is actually significant about something as opposed to misleading troll bait, and so on. The standard issue conservative troll is employing ideological firebombs beneath the half-assed mimicry of good faith debate. This is more along the lines of building a fortress around your bland ignorance with caveats. It's not really part of a broader strategy to advancing reprehensible ideas against an imaginary leftist cabal, which is an essential part of the conservative troll.
You can always find lunatic fringes. The problem people have been trying to point out is that the conservative groups in the US have been putting these lunatics in charge of shit. The thrust of the quote posted wasn't the random dude talking about leaving the country and scared of muslims. It's that shortly after the hosts of the event decided to start up the same paranoid delusions. Same thing with birthers. Nobody cares that random morons are birthers. They care when elected officials are questioning Full Faith and Credit, and proposing legislation to remove opposing political candidates from ballots over such conspiracy bullshit. The issue I have with the GOP isn't that it has some crazies that follow it. My issue is that it has some crazies that lead it.
Interesting take, because in my admittedly more limited experience here, brettmcd seemed to have the blithe disregard setting stuck at 11. Misleading troll bait suggests evidence of deliberate strategy and he seemed to hail more from the Pavlovian school of posting. To the topic at hand, the article is workmanlike enough, but I see nothing terribly insightful or revelatory. It reads sort of like a letter from camp. "Johnny said we lost the election because of messaging and Susie says she's going to leave the country."
This is an inexact science, because with Classic Internet Conservative Trolls you are building a composite profile by running counterbattery on someone who communicates exclusively by throwing shit. You can then cross-reference than with the behavior of people closer to normal human modes of conversation and see the similarities and differences in the approach to shit tossing. The patterns are pretty consistent, as much as we savor the subtle hints of corn in one or the grassy bouquet of another. The strategic components are harder to argue for definitively, but I think when you look at victory conditions, you begin to see a rhyme to the behavior. Vaguely (or strongly) liberal consensus encounters troll, at which point the thread often descends into personal attacks, where the "pile on" creates reflexive (and often stifled) sympathy for the minority perspective. But that's what you might call a tie. The real victory is when a distinction that relies on nuance and good faith analysis for its relevance can be leveraged into a full-scale argument between people who might otherwise agree on many fundamentals, and then it gets personalized and blown out of proportion by the injection of further troll-bait linked to that wedge issue. This gets especially slippery when the troll is able to establish non-trolling patterns in other subjects. This provides him with vital leverage with people closer to the low information end on the Dunning-Kruger spectrum for that particular subject (ie people working with strong emotions on dimly understood subjects). I believe anyone can fall for it, by the way, I don't describe it from the outside. But that's what I mean when there's a recurring strategy in play. You just have to see the more articulate ones do it in order to get what what the clumsier, more opaque, or idiot savant ones are doing. That's not the case with simple blandness drowned in sincerely-held but unimportant attention to detail.
I so wish he (and all of his nutjob bretheren) were serious about that. I would even support the use of federal money to buy these chuckleheads an island. With a big fence. That locks on the outside.
I'm curious what country these numbnuts plan to move to if the US is too liberal for them. Greece seems to be heading in the right direction.
Australia is, from a certain point of view, the US writ small, so I guess there's a certain amount of sense there. They're a product of the same colonialism, have a similar history of abusing their natives, hating immigrants who got there after the white people, an overblown sense of/reputation for Wild West rugged individiualism, etc. Plus you know, Rupert Murdoch is from there so obviously they're doing something right.
But Australia has been infected by the universal health care devil! Of, course, I'm looking for logic and consistency in a group that has been proven to have none.
Except that they have the dreaded poisonous møøse. I wouldn't want to let my sister near one, let me tell you.
Don't forget Sydney Mardi Gras as well! Also the current prime minister is an atheist female (pretty much no one gave a fig about the atheism during the last election). The Governor General is also female. So is the head of state - The Queen (as in Elizabeth). But yeah, Australia is probably closer to the US on the European Socialist layabout <----> US wingnuts political spectrum.
Australia is also on fire. http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/01/nasas-alarming-map-worst-australian-heat-wave-record This coupled with record brush fires...
I guess I should mention the amount of censorship and other limits of personal freedom (as some view it) that goes on in Australia in many aspects is far more pervasive than the States, and if you really think a female Atheist wouldn't be reviled as President of the US by righties to a degree that would dwarf the current level of hatred for Obama, then I dunno what to tell you.
She's a female atheist anti-patriarchy that is also against gay marriage though. I have a really hard time reconciling her worldviews.
