Fuck, this sucks.
We went from the best president in my lifetime to someone who will almost certainly be the worst president in American history.
Okay, pretty much everyone. I was still, in my naivety, shocked at the extent of it. The KKK literally did a victory march and celebration of the election results, and Trump's support didn't flag. They're already talking about rounding up and imprisoning Americans based on their race and religion, while the media talks about how we "need to give Trump a chance."
One of the more amusing things that's been happening since the election is racists on social media complaining about people calling them racist. In a way it's hopeful, they know they're bad people. They could choose to change if they wanted to, but they mostly seem to want people to stop pointing out how awful they are.
There's even been pushback against people saying that Nazis were bad people. Seriously, if this was just a novel (and not the most powerful nation on earth, with a huge nuclear arsenal) I'd snort at how ridiculous and unrealistic it was.
The hatred of (so many) Americans for women is astounding. It's so endemic in this country that many American women decry feminism, as if sexual equality as a concept is a combination of laughable, horrifying, and perverse.
Unlike racism, most people don't even bother denying being misogynists. They're proud of it.
A competent, experienced woman ran against an incompetent, inexperienced man. And the man won. (Though, to be fair, she did win the popular vote. By a lot, over 2 million at the time of this writing.) No one can look at the election and conclude that there is no systemic bias against women in America.
Yet I see people claiming that all the time.
As an example, IT people will go on and on about how worthless IT job interviews are. (And they are.) IT interviews don't do a good job of measuring candidates' abilities to do the job. People are weeded out for arbitrary reasons. Bias is rampant, and the term "culture fit" is openly used to discriminate against people. Yet the same people who complain about the ineffectiveness of job interviews, claim that there's no bias at all against women, and the reason there are so few women in tech is that they're just not qualified.
Here are the two candidates we had in the election:
Clinton has decades of experience, and no honest person would deny that she's extremely qualified to be president.
Trump is a blustering, insecure, irrational twit with no experience, and no honest person would say that he's qualified to be president.
He ran an extremely racist and misogynistic campaign. How racist? So racist the KKK had a celebration rally when he was elected. So racist that a week after his election (more than two months before his inaugeration) people started talking about rounding up US citizens based on race, national origin, and religion and putting them into camps.
How misogynist? He dismissed video of himself openly bragging about sexually assauting women and getting away with it as "locker room talk". (No locker room I've ever been in, but I suppose YMMV.) He appears to have only two settings for women, "She's young, pretty, and thin, so I want to fuck her" and "She's a disgusting, horrible person." And it's undeniable that a significant fraction of his voters voted for him solely because he was running against a woman.
His qualifications over Clinton? He's a rich, white male.