Trump Thread

[Montmorency]

The sad fact is that while Trump is incredibly racist, this whole past week has been a diversion.

He's trying to lay some cover down for his Epstein escapades and that while we were debating whether or not "Go Back Where you Came From" to a native born African American or Latina is racist...the SDNY released evidence that Trump was intimiately involved in the actions to subvert election laws in Oct 2016.

It would be a great idea to systematically analyze Trump's tweets (or press secretary briefings) in connection with political and news events, but if he has a diversion strategy it doesn't look like it's very focused or has worked that well. My impression has long been that he is just prone to acting out on impulse without any deep consideration. For example, how easily influenced he is by Fox News commentary that a huge proportion of his tweets are immediate comments on or repetition of it.

It's also recursive with media coverage: he loves it, he acts to generate it, he absorbs on a physiological level the connection between his actions and media coverage of them - it's a reinforcement schedule.

And finally he knows which way the Wonderbread is buttered when it comes to his base, a group of people perhaps as collectively important to him psychically as his set of children. I don't know how to develop this as a metric, but his "go back" tweets are some of his most 'hearted' of all by users.




So chanting, calling for exile of democratically elected senators who are in the opposing party simply because they are critical of your policies and direction is not fascism?


As Montmorency said, in this circumstance, the criteria was met.

It's not fascism in itself to be racist or to want to eliminate/delegitimize your opposition, or both at once, but it should be placed in context with a preponderance of other features such as cultural reaction repudiating alleged cultural decadence and degeneration driven by vaguely-defined strong (or maybe weak) internal (or maybe external) elites - see: "cosmopolitan", implacable resistance to the existence of a political Left ("liberals"), ideological fixation on the (rhetorical) welfare of the insider class, definition of the insider class in purely national terms (further conceived racially), arrogation of authority to a messianic figure uniquely poised to channel the will of the people, the hollowing out of government institutions to be replaced by parallel structures of the party, the disposal of rule of law where it does not align with the leader's interests, the co-option of mainstream conservative and business elites, the encouragement of non-state or extra-legal violence to further political objectives, the general authoritarian practice of flooding incoherent bullshit (in the technical sense) as propaganda to overwhelm people's ability to discern truth (a more Orwellian term than our unlawful Migrant Protection Protocols is not easy to invent)...

And there's like, a lot more. It's hard to keep events lined up with such an unbelievable character. Truth is stranger than fiction. :shrug:

And while concentration camps are not a necessary or sufficient condition of fascism, it should further alarm us in this reinforcing web of features that the administration operates them with the explicit purpose of causing suffering (and even death) to a racially-framed class of marginalized outsiders the administration has fundamentally anathematized as an "invasion" and "infestation" fatal to the health and hygiene of the American nation, a class that he is going out of his way to intern by the tens of thousands, restrained only by a lack of facilities and the small size of Border Patrol and ICE relative to the population (these agencies have been notoriously difficult to recruit for, so they're not growing). And the facilities have gotten demonstrably worse in condition the longer the admin has operated them, outright meeting the level of crime against humanity. The natural progression of these things is clear... and let me also be clear, if it "only" gets as far as an attempt at an analog to a Japanese internment (note the amenities at Japanese relocation camps were superior to the ones made available in these "), it would still be a tragedy of historic proportions. There are enough corpse-fat stains on the American ledger; the index furnishes many examples, from Fort Cass to Andersonville, Batangas to Manzanar, Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay. :shame:

And with all due respect to the conservative patrons here, the following images represent the danger beyond Trump as an individual:

https://i.imgur.com/hMYHbDe.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/xE3jQ2z.jpg



Unrelated, but since I don't see an opening for it elsewhere, behold (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/29/gen-z-millennials-and-gen-x-outvoted-older-generations-in-2018-midterms/): The Passing of the Great Generation

https://i.imgur.com/YQVgOcB.png

[a completely inoffensive name]

Unrelated, but since I don't see an opening for it elsewhere, behold (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/29/gen-z-millennials-and-gen-x-outvoted-older-generations-in-2018-midterms/): The Passing of the Great Generation

https://i.imgur.com/YQVgOcB.png

Watch as Trump squeeks another victory while only winning 40% of the popular vote. I used to think Demographics was Destiny, but really it's the structure of institutions.

[Montmorency]

Watch as Trump squeeks another victory while only winning 40% of the popular vote. I used to think Demographics was Destiny, but really it's the structure of institutions.

Right, but we need the demographics to win at all.

And maybe less institutions than deep pilitical geography, which itself also plays a role in determining structure & function of institutions

[a completely inoffensive name]

Right, but we need the demographics to win at all.

And maybe less institutions than deep pilitical geography, which itself also plays a role in determining structure & function of institutions

demographics have been on the Dem's side since Gore won in 2000... past 19 years have only increased that 'lead' yet they still keep winning. Texas could probably add another million blue votes and still give their state to Trump. As far as geography, better hope we pick up more state chambers in 2020 to reverse the gerrymandering, otherwise you can count that path dead for another 10 years.

[Montmorency]

demographics have been on the Dem's side since Gore won in 2000... past 19 years have only increased that 'lead' yet they still keep winning. Texas could probably add another million blue votes and still give their state to Trump. As far as geography, better hope we pick up more state chambers in 2020 to reverse the gerrymandering, otherwise you can count that path dead for another 10 years.

There were a lot of narrow victories (<1%) in the midterms. Lot of similarly-narrow defeats too. Drop the turnout of the infra-Boomers just a little, and we may not retake the House. Don't take the votes for granted, we need every one. (Note: I'm being hyperbolic, just off the top of my head the 18-point Dem majority would not disappear completely if even all the wins with <2% were inverted. But you get the picture; a slim Dem majority would be doing literally nothing, rather than just grindingly)

[Vuk]

"Send her back" - Insight to 21st century Fascism.

You realize that 2 of the 4 members of the squad at least have told people to go back to their countries and even threatened to deport immigrants who disagreed with them, don't you?
I'm not supporting the chant, as I think it is stupid, but if it is fascism, then the squad brought us there first.

#justsayin

[a completely inoffensive name]

You realize that 2 of the 4 members of the squad at least have told people to go back to their countries and even threatened to deport immigrants who disagreed with them, don't you?
I'm not supporting the chant, as I think it is stupid, but if it is fascism, then the squad brought us there first.

#justsayin

Vuk! Glad to see you on here, even though I still probably absolutely hate your politics.

Can you provide the links to their twitter where they said such things?

[Vuk]

Vuk! Glad to see you on here, even though I still probably absolutely hate your politics.

Can you provide the links to their twitter where they said such things?

Good to be back! I miss this old place and all the regulars. I am very sad to see Frags left, because he and Frogbeastegg were my favorite Orgahs still around.
I've seen videos of Tlaib talking about how Trump should leave the country because he is unAmerican, as well as a video of Ilhan Omar saying that immigrants who don't support other immigrants should just go back (ie, immigrants who are conservative and support legal immigration). Google's slanted search algorithms being what they are, I was not able to find those with a Google search. I did, however, find this article to some Tweets they have made saying basically the same thing with links in the article to their Tweets. I was actually unaware that they had Tweeted these. (https://www.newsweek.com/ilhan-omar-rashida-tlaib-deport-tweets-1451022)

lol, as far as my politics, you probably will, as I am still very conservative. I have actually only gotten more conservative on every issue, but with a much stronger libertarian slant. For instance, I now believe in decriminalizing psychedelics, which I used to think the use or possession of should warrant the death penalty. I have evolved to love freedom even more. The one thing you may actually find refreshing though, is that I am not a fan of Trump. I find myself defending him a lot because so many of the accusations against him are false, but I did not vote for him in 2016 and will not vote for him in 2020. I think he is immoral, dishonest, and big government Democrat at heart who is only putting on the guise of a conservative because that is the direction the wind is blowing. I neither vote nor support people who I think are genuinely evil (not just wrong, but evil). Last election, I thought both Clinton and Trump were firmly in that category, and this election, I believe everyone running is repulsive, so I will vote 3rd Party again.

[Montmorency]

Indeed. (https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1155137821126090752)



I did, however, find this article to some Tweets they have made saying basically the same thing with links in the article to their Tweets. I was actually unaware that they had Tweeted these. (https://www.newsweek.com/ilhan-omar-rashida-tlaib-deport-tweets-1451022)

Without seeing the deleted tweets it's hard to tell, but Omar seems to have been indicating in her replies that white conservatives should be just as subject to arbitrary deportation for defying "our culture" as the ooga boogas. A perfectly cromulent point to make.


Tangential further thoughts on the subject of 'presidential distraction': Maybe it's a more reciprocal sense. As I mentioned in another thread recently, social grievance politics is wildly popular among the Republican base, but the party's economic platform (and Trump's execution of it) is resented, at least on paper. If the party's only value over replacement is its rejection of d/Democratic pluralism and cultural liberalism, the red meat of grievance is what masks the flavor of the bitter pill of austerity and deregulation. Or that's the old story. What if we look at the premise from another angle, that the two kinds of politics cannot be detached from one another? Note that this dynamic is also why we can expect corporate and "moderate" Republicans will inevitably and increasingly embrace outright ideological fascism in the coming years. (We can also expect it because we're observing it in real time, especially among state-level politicians but even at the level of ignobles like Lindsay Graham.)

Trump talks up the "economy" in a broad way at least as much as he spews racism, but to my knowledge he almost never mentions with any substance his executive branch agenda or proposed economic policies. This can't be mere established ignorance, as he would catch wind of some tidbit from his advisors and officials at some point. If he liked the sound of it - hearing and absorbing a snippet from an advisor or Fox News - he would at least reference something in a tweet, which is his habitual venue for talking points he likes the sound of:

"Great news for the working people of our great Country! I will direct my fine new Labor secretary Scalia (a Great judge) to demolish the wasteful and greedy Unions holding back our brave American workers! GET TO WORK!!"

"By removing bad Obama scheme to limit our vast Internet, companies can invest again. American people will benefit!"

"Food stamps are for losers. :daisy: all y'all."

To be clear, the above examples are fake tweets I made up to illustrate the kind of messaging Trump doesn't really do. Instead when he talks about the economy it's to my knowledge always in generic terms of jobs, "deals", and stock market records. IIRC he was fairly muted on the 2017 tax cut, even during the very session when it was advanced and passed in Congress... Upon searching his Twitter profile, I see not a single mention of "tax" or "taxes" until June 2018, when he begins to extol the economic effect of the "tax cuts." Of the tweets not mentioning taxes in the context of trade, taxes are mostly used in a list of examples of Republican success ("a winner for his State. Strong on Crime, the Border, Tax Cuts, Military, Vets and 2nd Amendment"), or to strike a contrast against Democratic politicians ("weak on Crime, the Border, Military, Vets, your 2nd Amendment - and will end your Tax Cuts."). In all of the thousands of Trump's 2018 tweets I could find only fewer than a dozen explicitly praising the 2017 tax law, and to reiterate he never mentioned it at all in 2017 or the first half of 2018 as far as I can tell.

The White Power stuff isn't a distraction from economic policy per se, it is deadly serious and an integral part of the platform. It's not that racism is cynically wielded to give cover to corruption, but that the two are syncretized into an informal hierarchy where class divisions are superseded by the cause of national (racial) unity, though not as of yet a putative common purpose. If all this sounds familiar, it should...

[Idaho]

Those nasty Danes! They won't discuss selling a chunk of their sovereign territory! I refuse to visit!

Bizarre, comic and alarming.

[Beskar]

Those nasty Danes! They won't discuss selling a chunk of their sovereign territory! I refuse to visit!

Bizarre, comic and alarming.

Beat me too it. Throwing a tantrum as Denmark won't let him buy Greenland.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-49416740

Living up to his name as a load of nasty hot air.

[Gilrandir]

Beat me too it. Throwing a tantrum as Denmark won't let him buy Greenland.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-49416740

Living up to his name as a load of nasty hot air.

Perhaps he thought since it is Greenland, it is full of long green which is anyone's for the finding.

Plus he suggested returning Russia to G7:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/us/politics/trump-russia-g7.html

[Montmorency]

Had a nice big post that I lost. :(


Anyway, some lowlights (https://www.vox.com/2019/8/22/20827949/trump-chosen-one-greenland-bizarreness-explained) of the week of Trump's intensifying lunacy:

1. Being overtly antisemitic in an overlearned way, again, as he has done many times.
2. Calling himself a "messiah" and "chosen one," echoing the comments many high-profile evangelical Christians (https://www.salon.com/2019/08/22/evangelicals-told-trump-he-was-chosen-by-god-now-he-says-it-himself/) have been making about him for years.
3. Declaring China the enemy after the latest round tariffs exchanges and (without executive basis*) "ordering (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1164914959131848705)" American companies to divest from China. (It's looking like he'll have the opportunity to acclaim the Dow breaking 25000 (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php/152445-Trump-Thread?p=2053794595&viewfull=1#post2053794595) again - ahead of schedule!)
4. Other despotic insinuations, which we really should not laugh off or get inured to.

*Actually not entirely without basis, he may order postal carriers to "SEARCH FOR & REFUSE,........all deliveries of Fentanyl from China (or anywhere else!)." I wonder what effect this directive might have on our hospitals if carried out.

Lots of Greenland stuff, but it was vaporized in the first iteration. In the rewriting I found this racist tidbit (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/trump-joked-about-trading-puerto-rico-greenland-puerto-ricans-are-n1045296) about Trump wanting to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland. Also, the Greenland thing and travel cancellation may be pretextual in light of Obama visiting Denmark next month to speechify. Even more frightening - yet utterly banal by now - is Republicans and movement conservatives reflexively (https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/458442-gop-group-selling-t-shirts-featuring-greenland-as-part-of) absorbing (https://thinkprogress.org/after-running-as-deficit-hawk-tom-cotton-admits-he-was-behind-the-push-to-buy-greenland-6ca5afa7d7c3/) the Dear Leader's pronunciations on Greenland into the agenda just as soon as he utters them.

Trumpism parody (http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/08/king-for-a-day-schmuck-for-a-lifetime):



WASHINGTON, DC - US President Donald Trump today announced United States currency, formerly referred to as "dollars," will now be known as "Trumps." The president made the announcement on his Twitter account at 3:03 am EST.

Secretary of the Treasury and Bond villain prototype Steve Mnuchin, when reached for comment, said, "Really? Really? Huh. Well, I think that's a terrific idea of course, and the sort of...bold thinking we all admire in our president."

President Trump's early morning Twitter reads in full:

As The Chosen One and King of Everyone, President and Master Negotiator Who Gets The Best Broads, I Hereby Announce I'm changing "US dollars" to "US Trumps" and the the word "cents" to "Donalds." So $20.19 will now be correctly called "twenty Trumps and nineteen Donalds." My Genius son Barren is designing the new Trump sign logo thingee, which I will announce soon. Your wekcome, America!
Director of the National Economic Council and day drinker Larry Kudlow said the announcement is great news for the US economy. "This will strengthen markets across the board, of course, and I'm certain we'll see 5-7% growth behind this new naming convention. A bold move by an economic mastermind."

"Another day, another Trump," chuckled Senior Succubus Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway. "You can bet your bottom Trump this will piss off the left something fierce! Trumps to doughnuts one of them strokes out!"

Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), acting White House Chief of Staff and Oval Office Carpet Jizz Hoover Muck Milvaney was characteristically upbeat about the announcement, and says "more Trumps and Donalds is what every American wants and deserves. And this administration is really going to give it to them, at every opportunity."

There is no word yet from Democratic party representatives in response to this latest move by the president.

Not tangentially, here are a couple (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/demoralizing-reality-of-life-under-trump.html?via=recirc_recent) articles (https://newrepublic.com/article/154818/trumps-tax-national-psyche) on the psychological burden of living under Trump. And we're just a bunch of insulated Internet dilettantes here!

22820
22822

[Tuuvi]

Lots of Greenland stuff, but it was vaporized in the first iteration. In the rewriting I found this racist tidbit (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/trump-joked-about-trading-puerto-rico-greenland-puerto-ricans-are-n1045296) about Trump wanting to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland.

Trump must not realize that Greenland is majority Inuit.

[rory_20_uk]

Trump must not realize that Greenland is majority Inuit.

The USA has a tried and tested approach with how to deal with indigenous populations. They'd be rounded up and decimated in short order. Perhaps Trump could get his face carved into their sacred mountain? He'd like that.

~:smoking:

[Seamus Fermanagh]

The USA has a tried and tested approach with how to deal with indigenous populations. They'd be rounded up and decimated in short order. Perhaps Trump could get his face carved into their sacred mountain? He'd like that.

~:smoking:

Short order? We were HORRIBLY inefficient about it. Never did properly conquer and assimilate them either.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Short order? We were HORRIBLY inefficient about it. Never did properly conquer and assimilate them either.

Oh don't sell yourself short, not even the Australians were as efficient at extermination as you.

[Beskar]

Oh don't sell yourself short, not even the Australians were as efficient at extermination as you.

Australians even lost the great Emu war. Machine gun versus flightless birds. Lost.

[Montmorency]

Random trivia (https://twitter.com/NewsHour/status/1166010564637843459)(?): Trump affirmed at G7 that Obama was "outsmarted" by Putin because Crimea was annexed during his term and, according to Trump:


That was not a good thing, it could have been stopped, could have been stopped, with the right - (literally waves hand) - whatever. It could have been stopped.

:shrug:

[Gilrandir]

Random trivia (https://twitter.com/NewsHour/status/1166010564637843459)(?): Trump affirmed at G7 that Obama was "outsmarted" by Putin because Crimea was annexed during his term and, according to Trump:



:shrug:

I think the next president will say that Trump was outsmarted by the Danes and that Greenland could have been bought.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Oh don't sell yourself short, not even the Australians were as efficient at extermination as you.

The 'virgin field' epidemics done more or less accidentally probably did the most damage. The rest was follow through on a disparate group of micro-polities with no tech base to speak of. And we still took too long with it and didn't do it completely.

[Montmorency]

The 'virgin field' epidemics done more or less accidentally probably did the most damage. The rest was follow through on a disparate group of micro-polities with no tech base to speak of. And we still took too long with it and didn't do it completely.

It took too long because settlers didn't have sufficient manpower in all times and places, and at those times and places where we lacked sufficient manpower we liked to enjoy the fruits of their labor (i.e. trade or plunder). A hundred consistent genocides whenever we got the opportunity is a pretty strong pattern of behavior.

Heck, IIRC Andrew Jackson's illegal death march of the "Civilized Tribes" was denounced by some politicians as falling short of total annihilation. There's a reason this country is often said to be built on the bones of slaves and Indians.

The story of the Donner Party on the Oregon California Trail is an epitome of white colonialism. Set off to seize distant land without adequate planning or provisions, get disoriented and trapped amid harsh conditions, refuse to cooperate with aboriginals to extricate themselves, kill and eat their aboriginal guides, eat each other. What a Lovecraftian country this is.



Tangentially, a lot of stock has been placed in the expectation that even if the Office of the POTUS is shielded from criminal prosecution for the duration of the officeholder's term, such an individual can be prosecuted once they have departed the office. In theory this is true, but now I realize that it just cannot happen like that. In this country we have trial by jury, and the verdict must be delivered unanimously. You tell me - is there any hope of a randomly-selected jury pool that does not contain at least one diehard redcap, one who would refuse to convict no matter the evidence presented? We've already seen the like in the Manafort trial, in which IIRC a single hung (pro-Trump) juror refused to convict on around half the charges. It would be improper to winnow out and discard every potential juror who has ever voted for or supported Trump, so it's effectively guaranteed that at least one juror on any trial will be a partisan.

Trump could be tried for any number of crimes in 2021, but he would never be convicted. Trump could shoot Seamus in the face 10 years from now, and he would never be convicted. One of his sons could do the same, and would very likely enjoy a similar aegis effect. Any prosecution is an automatic fated mistrial. Therefore, even attempting to prosecute Trump would invariably strengthen his martyrhood in the eyes of millions, to no resolution. Can you imagine the cries of "witch hunt" renewed in that event? It would become a permanent cult of the GOP to venerate his name and his supposed innocence, even more so than in any other circumstances. Way more than Nixon ever got, and Nixon's resignation permanently hardened the hearts of movement conservatives.

NYT Front Page 2024: "Jury unable to find President Donald Trump guilty of conspiracy, money laundering, tax fraud, among other charges; Democrats in disarray"

So we can never even attempt to criminally prosecute Trump for anything he did before he took office, anything he has done in office, or anything he may do after he leaves office.

It's official and definitive: Trump is above the law, now and forever, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Or, we could make a habit out of sending our worst criminals to the ICC in the Hague. Outsource what we can't do ourselves - it's what international institutions are for, no? :shrug:


EDIT: Another suggestion, get a Democratic trifecta to pack the courts but offer a pseudo-olive branch by also confirming Donald Trump to the Supreme Court. It would help weaken the institution's dignity in the eyes of the public, and Trump probably can't do as much damage in that position anyway. (His clerks will write everything up.)
*Warning, this is not a serious suggestion*

[drone]

Tangentially, a lot of stock has been placed in the expectation that even if the Office of the POTUS is shielded from criminal prosecution for the duration of the officeholder's term, such an individual can be prosecuted once they have departed the office. In theory this is true, but now I realize that it just cannot happen like that. In this country we have trial by jury, and the verdict must be delivered unanimously. You tell me - is there any hope of a randomly-selected jury pool that does not contain at least one diehard redcap, one who would refuse to convict no matter the evidence presented? We've already seen the like in the Manafort trial, in which IIRC a single hung (pro-Trump) juror refused to convict on around half the charges. It would be improper to winnow out and discard every potential juror who has ever voted for or supported Trump, so it's effectively guaranteed that at least one juror on any trial will be a partisan.
If the case is brought by the SDNY it would be possible to convict. Everybody in NYC already knows he's a crook and conman...

[Montmorency]

If the case is brought by the SDNY it would be possible to convict. Everybody in NYC already knows he's a crook and conman...

1/5 of the city voted Trump. 1/3 at the state level. His support (https://morningconsult.com/tracking-trump-2/) here doesn't seem to have diminished over time, at least as compared to the battleground states. A jury of 12 is going to roll a Trump partisan. The prosecutor won't be able to strike every potential Trump partisan.

No dice.

EDIT: Remember that the problem is the level of risk. I don't remember how to do calculate combinations and I won't look it up. Basically, the probability of at least one juror being a 2016 (or even worse, 2020) Trump voter times the probability of at least one of these being a diehard partisan times the probability that the prosecutor can't identify and reject a Trump partisan.

The test already failed in at least one occasion (Manafort). Even a 10% risk of blowing the trial the way the feds blew the trials against the Bundys and their cohorts (remember that?) is simply way too high for this country's stability, and I believe the risk is much higher than 10%.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Monty: My comments about treatment of Native Americans did NOT claim that it wasn't genocidal in character -- just that it was haphazard. You could argue that haphazard is a fairly common characteristic defining the USA.

Drone: Monty is probably right as to the math of it. Trump's deplorables are not legion but egad are they loyal, reveling in his worst characteristics and loving him FOR those. Since he took office his support has NEVER dipped below 35% or so -- even though virtually all predecessors have dipped lower than that for one stretch of time or another. So while he has never enjoyed the huge and broad approval numbers that most of his predecessors have managed at one time or another, he has never gone really low either. Answer...his core group absolutely revels in his exercise of power. Since that is about a 1/4 of the voters overall, Monty's math as to the likelihood of getting a jury of 12 to vote guilty, as opposed to an 11-1 hung jury is probably pretty accurate.

Might get a guilty vote for shooting me in the face and killing me in broad daylight -- but only because it is a crime of personal violence. On issues of public (mis)behavior (and malfeasance?) I'd guess Monty is spot on.

[Montmorency]

Monty: My comments about treatment of Native Americans did NOT claim that it wasn't genocidal in character -- just that it was haphazard. You could argue that haphazard is a fairly common characteristic defining the USA.

Drone: Monty is probably right as to the math of it. Trump's deplorables are not legion but egad are they loyal, reveling in his worst characteristics and loving him FOR those. Since he took office his support has NEVER dipped below 35% or so -- even though virtually all predecessors have dipped lower than that for one stretch of time or another. So while he has never enjoyed the huge and broad approval numbers that most of his predecessors have managed at one time or another, he has never gone really low either. Answer...his core group absolutely revels in his exercise of power. Since that is about a 1/4 of the voters overall, Monty's math as to the likelihood of getting a jury of 12 to vote guilty, as opposed to an 11-1 hung jury is probably pretty accurate.

Might get a guilty vote for shooting me in the face and killing me in broad daylight -- but only because it is a crime of personal violence. On issues of public (mis)behavior (and malfeasance?) I'd guess Monty is spot on.

I just wanted to be clear that "haphazard" does not contradict malice aforethought. Let no one suppose that settlers bumbled their way into genocide. 'Aw shucks, did I (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya2xifdO_l0) kill all those Injuns? Was I not (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RvNS7JfcMM) supposed to do that?'

[drone]

Drone: Monty is probably right as to the math of it. Trump's deplorables are not legion but egad are they loyal, reveling in his worst characteristics and loving him FOR those. Since he took office his support has NEVER dipped below 35% or so -- even though virtually all predecessors have dipped lower than that for one stretch of time or another. So while he has never enjoyed the huge and broad approval numbers that most of his predecessors have managed at one time or another, he has never gone really low either. Answer...his core group absolutely revels in his exercise of power. Since that is about a 1/4 of the voters overall, Monty's math as to the likelihood of getting a jury of 12 to vote guilty, as opposed to an 11-1 hung jury is probably pretty accurate.
I think it depends a lot on the results of the 2020 election. If he tanks the economy, loses big, and takes the Senate majority down with him, every Republican politician will disavow they ever supported him. He will no longer get fellated every day by Fox News. He is being used, either for votes or ratings, and when he can no longer deliver he will be dumped, plain and simple. His supporters love him because he's a "winner", stick a big L on his forehead and most will abandon him.

If he wins, well, we are all screwed and it doesn't matter.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I just wanted to be clear that "haphazard" does not contradict malice aforethought. Let no one suppose that settlers bumbled their way into genocide. 'Aw shucks, did I (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya2xifdO_l0) kill all those Injuns? Was I not (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RvNS7JfcMM) supposed to do that?'

Oh no. Lots of folks pushing Westward had the 'they are lesser beings" thing in their heads. Exploitation up through out-and-out murder was tolerated by the vast majority of the newcomers and condoned and encouraged by a large plurality or better. The needs/rights/personhood of the Native Americans were seldom considered -- or even accepted as existing by many.

[Montmorency]

I think it depends a lot on the results of the 2020 election. If he tanks the economy, loses big, and takes the Senate majority down with him, every Republican politician will disavow they ever supported him. He will no longer get fellated every day by Fox News. He is being used, either for votes or ratings, and when he can no longer deliver he will be dumped, plain and simple. His supporters love him because he's a "winner", stick a big L on his forehead and most will abandon him.

If he wins, well, we are all screwed and it doesn't matter.

I appreciate your optimism. A solid 2020 loss and subsequent run for the boats by Right media and politicians could splinter all but the most hardcore from his brand. On the other hand, most contemporary Republicans still seem to be wondering whether Nixon (https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/hash0nbry8/econTabReport.pdf) did nothing wrong after all, and Nixon resignation hardened hearts etc. They have their avatar in Trump, and if Trump is a "winner" because Trumpism is a phenomenon beyond Trump then it stands to reason that it will continue to be a phenomenon with Trump (regardless of behavior or electoral performance).


Oh no. Lots of folks pushing Westward had the 'they are lesser beings" thing in their heads. Exploitation up through out-and-out murder was tolerated by the vast majority of the newcomers and condoned and encouraged by a large plurality or better. The needs/rights/personhood of the Native Americans were seldom considered -- or even accepted as existing by many.

Speaking of land seizure, reset the counter on days without Trump having a despotic moment (https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/take-the-land-president-trump-wants-a-border-wall-he-wants-it-black-and-he-wants-it-by-election-day/2019/08/27/37b80018-c821-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html):


President Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.

He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.

Trump has repeatedly promised to complete 500 miles of fencing by the time voters go to the polls in November 2020, stirring chants of “Finish the Wall!” at his political rallies as he pushes for tighter border controls. But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has completed just about 60 miles of “replacement” barrier during the first 2½ years of Trump’s presidency, all of it in areas that previously had border infrastructure.

The president has told senior aides that a failure to deliver on the signature promise of his 2016 campaign would be a letdown to his supporters and an embarrassing defeat. With the election 14 months away and hundreds of miles of fencing plans still in blueprint form, Trump has held regular White House meetings for progress updates and to hasten the pace, according to several people involved in the discussions.

When aides have suggested that some orders are illegal or unworkable, Trump has suggested he would pardon the officials if they would just go ahead, aides said. He has waved off worries about contracting procedures and the use of eminent domain, saying “take the land,” according to officials who attended the meetings.
[...]
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper is expected to approve a White House request to divert $3.6 billion in Pentagon funds to the barrier project in coming weeks, money that Trump sought after lawmakers refused to allocate $5 billion. [Ed. You will recall the legal challenge recently failed (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/26/supreme-court-lets-trump-use-disputed-military-funds-for-border-wall.html) in the Supreme Court per the lack of standing of the plaintiffs.] The funds will be pulled from Defense Department projects in 26 states, according to administration officials who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the matter.

Trump’s determination to build the barriers as quickly as possible has not diminished his interest in the aesthetic aspects of the project, particularly the requirement that the looming steel barriers be painted black and topped with sharpened tips.
[...]
Trump conceded last year in an immigration meeting with lawmakers that a wall or barrier is not the most effective mechanism to curb illegal immigration, recognizing it would accomplish less than a major expansion of U.S. enforcement powers and deportation authority. But he told lawmakers that his supporters want a wall and that he has to deliver it.
[...]
Former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly would often tell administration officials to disregard the president’s demands if Kelly did not think they were feasible or legally sound, according to current and former aides.
[...]
“They don’t care how much money is spent, whether landowners’ rights are violated, whether the environment is damaged, the law, the regs or even prudent business practices,” the senior official said.
[...]
At Trump’s behest, the Army Corps also is preparing to instruct contractors to remove from the upper part of the fence the smooth metal plates that are used to thwart climbers. The president considered that design feature unsightly, according to officials familiar with his directives.

Instead, contractors have been asked to cut the tips of the steel bollards to a sharpened point. Trump had told aides this spring he thought the barrier should be spiked to instill a fear of injury.

[Cherry]
Trump has recently urged the Army Corps to award a contract to a company he favors, North Dakota-based Fisher Industries, though the firm has not been selected. Fisher has been aggressively pushed by Trump ally Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who briefly held up the confirmation of a Trump budget office nominee last month in an attempt to put pressure on the Army Corps.

Cramer demanded to see the contracts awarded to Fisher’s competitors, lashing out at the “arrogance” of the Army Corps in emails to military officials after he was told the bidding process involved proprietary information that could not be shared. The CEO of Fisher Industries is a major backer of Cramer and has donated to his campaigns.

That is cool. This is not OK. Everyone please keep in mind how serious this kind of governing philosophy is, and how consistent Trump is in advancing it and pushing the bureaucratic and cultural boundaries. It's not a joke. It has literally been happening here for years as the very worst of the country gradually suborns government or neutralizes what they can't suborn, while boiling the public consciousness like the figurative frog; don't wait until we're already in the pit to be alarmed.

This and other instances would theoretically be a clarion call for the militia types, but of course they're the ones volunteering to patrol the border while gibbering about Jade Helm.

[Montmorency]

https://i.imgur.com/Q4gCpkk.png
https://i.imgur.com/S8x4tPE.jpg



I mean (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074ZLSDKQ), sure, but get a load of the spoiler.

https://i.imgur.com/44CEdYr.png
https://i.imgur.com/FYjpwqA.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/qj8PsHS.jpg


Technically, promulgating falsified weather forecasts is a crime. Add it to the list...

One way or another, this is pathological.

Now you might groan isn't the above, despite what it reaffirms about Trump's character and psychological health, far less egregious than the kinds of lies and destructive policies to which the media could be devoting the time and space it has accorded to this? You would be right, but I usually stay away from those stories in this thread because they're so numerous and profound. It's much less tedious to post about Trump's personal stupidity. For an example of what it would look like to discuss Trump's administration:

There have been a number of instances of corruption with respect to Trump properties and 'unseemly' government expenditures, and by "a number" I mean just the ones (multiple) in the British Isles, this month. Go check it out.

Worse than that, Trump has again demonstrated willingness and ability to direct the security apparatus of the United States against his political enemies, now in the form of apparently punitive antitrust investigations (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/opinion/trump-antitrust-auto-emissions.html) into automobile manufacturers (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/climate/automakers-california-emissions-antitrust.html). The news comes months after the White House announced deregulation of vehicle emissions standards and the companies affected above declined them because they considered the more stringent California regulations to be more suitable to their business model. Why assume Trump is behind the investigation? Besides all the other times he's reportedly or professedly tried (successfully or not) to direct improper or illegal actions against his enemies, including at the Department of Justice? Because he is also threatening (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/climate/trump-auto-pollution-california.html?module=inline) to challenge California's authority to set independent standards with executive power, and has lambasted the uncooperative manufacturers directly (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1164169890917433346).

This ought to be considered another impeachable offense all on its own, though for all that can be done about it Trump accumulates impeachable offenses like a drugged-up arraigned defendant cussing out the judge to provoke contempt charges.

As for the emissions deregulation itself, it is actually part of a pattern where Trump has insisted on environmentally-destructive deregulation (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/climate/epa-methane-greenhouse-gas.html) despite the companies themselves saying it goes too far for them and may even contradict their business interests. 'Hurt the businesses to destroy the environment more' sounds like a Simpsons joke.

Oh, and speaking of abuses of power, there's one present in the hurricane bullshit spoilered above: getting government offices (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/noaa-trump-hurricane-dorian-alabama/597628/) to release misleading official statements for the purpose of venerating the Dear Leader, who can never be wrong. (Thankfully the some (https://twitter.com/pres_nwseo/status/1170115531388719105) at the agency are publicly rejecting (https://www.thedailybeast.com/noaa-left-federal-weather-workers-shocked-and-irate-by-backing-trump-union-head-says) this subornment.) You see, all this stuff ties together, the evil and the venality and the stupidity. Don't for a second that the latter moderates the former, rather the opposite. Trump would be the next Mugabe if he could. Just a reminder that the election of one of the most remorselessly and prolifically criminal men in American history (as of before his election!) is a society-scale catastrophic failure.

[rory_20_uk]

Trump got rid of Bolton.

I loathe the man and almost everything he stands for but it is another illustration of just how much loyalty and sycophantic behaviour are the only skills required.

~:smoking:

[Montmorency]

Trump got rid of Bolton.

I loathe the man and almost everything he stands for but it is another illustration of just how much loyalty and sycophantic behaviour are the only skills required.

~:smoking:

This firing is actually a good thing in itself for a change, because Bolton's lifelong career has been one of incompetent and dangerous warmonger.

On the issue of loyalty and bureaucracy, I hope you will find the following update relevant:

In today's reminder that Trump's grip on the bureaucracy gets surer and more effective with each week, an Update (https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/460574-ross-threatened-to-fire-top-noaa-staff-after-office-contradicted) on why Trump's hurricane intransigence is a big deal: [Secretary] Ross threatened to fire top NOAA staff after office contradicted Trump on [Hurricane] Dorian.

From Wapo (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/noaa-staff-warned-in-sept-1-directive-against-contradicting-trump/2019/09/07/12a52d1a-d18f-11e9-87fa-8501a456c003_story.html):


“This is the first time I’ve felt pressure from above to not say what truly is the forecast,” the meteorologist said. “It’s hard for me to wrap my head around. One of the things we train on is to dispel inaccurate rumors and ultimately that is what was occurring — ultimately what the Alabama office did is provide a forecast with their tweet, that is what they get paid to do.”

I hope none of those employees is named Winston (https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/section9/). (Once again though, there is resistance (https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/politics/noaa-trump-alabama-dorian-political/index.html).)

Brazen political interference in state scientific and statistical agencies is only more dangerous when manipulation of fact is motivated by the pettiest personal fixations - it s9gjaps there is no bottom. It's the perfect juxtaposition to Ross's illegal lies to the courts about their regulatory agenda for the Census (which agenda was hopefully foreclosed on earlier in the summer). Even if we ultimately learn that this particular scandal in the administration was not explicitly ordered by Trump (as he avers), it nevertheless will have followed from the Henry II effect, symptomatic of deep institutional corrosion that can't be repaired in mere years.

[Beskar]

So Trump posted on twitter a couple of days ago that he invited the Taliban to a teaparty at Camp David around 11th September.

Certainly one of the most tone-deaf timing and location imaginable.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Wow...one of those times when Monty and I more or less agree (if, as usual, for somewhat different reasons). Bolton has been too much of a warmonger, and was very much one of the neocon voices in 2003 who somehow thought Sadam could be toppled and democracy would spontaneously erupt. I think Bolton WAS making good points vis-à-vis our stance towards Russia etc., but he has a track record of robust intervention without quite planning for the follow-through components.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

So Trump posted on twitter a couple of days ago that he invited the Taliban to a teaparty at Camp David around 11th September.

Certainly one of the most tone-deaf timing and location imaginable.

His 'base' love him for his tone-deaf, combative, 'I am the leader' attitude -- but even most of them would admit he isn't the most glib or sensitive of communicators.

[Beskar]

His 'base' love him for his tone-deaf, combative, 'I am the leader' attitude -- but even most of them would admit he isn't the most glib or sensitive of communicators.

But if it was Hilary or Obama, they would be rioting. They accused Obama of 'palling with terrorists' whilst he is the one who ordered the hit on Osama.

[Montmorency]

But if it was Hilary or Obama, they would be rioting. They accused Obama of 'palling with terrorists' whilst he is the one who ordered the hit on Osama.

IMHO the bigger problem with this incident was Trump cancelling peace negotiations (https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/talktojazeera/2019/09/taliban-respond-trump-peace-talks-withdrawal-190912103207588.html) that were nearing finalization, out of pique. Not the decision to hold them or continue them or the location or time of formalization. Of course, once again Trump's handling makes America look stupid and hostile while conferring legitimacy to our adversaries.

Hopefully it's like his usual pattern of blowing up talks then coming back weeks later with concessions. Get it done.

I'm not joking about the pattern. It's not just North Korea or NAFTA. Trump is now at the stage of trying to buy back (https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/09/12/trump-tries-to-extinguish-the-fire-he-started-with-iran/) Iran's compliance with a pact Trump himself caused the United States to violate.

Is he literally just doing this for all our foreign policy, instigating a crisis and then walking it back having permanently weakened our diplomatic and economic position? Are there any counterexamples?


His 'base' love him for his tone-deaf, combative, 'I am the leader' attitude -- but even most of them would admit he isn't the most glib or sensitive of communicators.

One article suggested that Trump reneged after becoming upset that he wouldn't be perceived as having 'sealed the deal' (professional diplomats worked it out over months and years behind the scenes). But I haven't found confirmation so don't hold me to that.


Well beyond the Iraq War Bolton had a reputation as a wrecker (https://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-john-bolton-architect-iraq-war-pushing-action-against-iran-2019-5). What are your reasons for disliking Bolton (https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/13/bolton-walks-away-from-the-national-security-councils-corpse-trump/), Seamus? I doubt ours don't overlap significantly.

Other than that, in case anyone wants to give credit to Trump for once again being the foreign policy version of the man who killed Hitler, here is Trump's own perspective (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1172198767627526151?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) on Bolton's role:


In fact, my views on Venezuela, and especially Cuba, were far stronger than those of John Bolton. He was holding me back!

kek

[Seamus Fermanagh]

…One article suggested that Trump reneged after becoming upset that he wouldn't be perceived as having 'sealed the deal' (professional diplomats worked it out over months and years behind the scenes). But I haven't found confirmation so don't hold me to that.
Well beyond the Iraq War Bolton had a reputation as a wrecker (https://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-john-bolton-architect-iraq-war-pushing-action-against-iran-2019-5). What are your reasons for disliking Bolton (https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/13/bolton-walks-away-from-the-national-security-councils-corpse-trump/), Seamus? I doubt ours don't overlap significantly.

Other than that, in case anyone wants to give credit to Trump for once again being the foreign policy version of the man who killed Hitler, here is Trump's own perspective (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1172198767627526151?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) on Bolton's role: …

I don't hate Bolton but mostly disagree with him. His skepticism as to the efficacy of the UN, the role of diplomacy, and the value of the EU are a bit more strident than my own, but I trend in that direction. On the other hand, however, he pretty much always views US military intervention as the correct answer and very much takes a "smash it flat then leave them in their squalor" attitude towards such interventions. Bolton is considered one of the 'architects' of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and he was quite possible criminal (and certainly a negligent analyst) in his cavalier support for the evidence proffered regarding Iraqi WMDs. His attitude also helped create the simply deplorable lack of security/suppression of insurrection that characterized our involvement in Iraq following the toppling of the Saddam regime. Apparently, following Saddam's capture, his attitude was that we should have pulled out and handed them a copy of the Federalist Papers with a cheery 'good luck.' I am not opposed to intervention using military force, but the cavalier attitude for the aftermath Bolton exhibit' is, at best, poor long-term thinking about problem resolution.

If you want a better read on me over the course of the last few years, take a read of Max Boot's Wiki.


n general, Boot considers himself to be a "natural contrarian".[33] He identifies as a conservative, once joking that "I grew up in the 1980s, when conservatism was cool".[34] He is in favor of limited government at home and American leadership abroad. He strongly opposed Trump's presidential candidacy in 2016[35] and has been highly critical of the Republican Party.[36] Boot endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 U.S. presidential election.[37] Boot was critical of the nomination of Rex Tillerson to the position of Secretary of State, believing him to be problematically pro-Russian, and subsequently called on Tillerson to resign.[38] Boot said he would "sooner vote for Josef Stalin than he would vote for Donald Trump."[39]
In an opinion piece for Foreign Policy in September 2017, Max Boot outlines his political views as follows: "I am socially liberal: I am pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-abortion rights, pro-immigration. I am fiscally conservative: I think we need to reduce the deficit and get entitlement spending under control. I am pro-environment: I think that climate change is a major threat that we need to address. I am pro-free trade: I think we should be concluding new trade treaties rather than pulling out of old ones. I am strong on defense: I think we need to beef up our military to cope with multiple enemies. And I am very much in favor of America acting as a world leader: I believe it is in our own self-interest to promote and defend freedom and free markets as we have been doing in one form or another since at least 1898."[40]
In December 2017, also in Foreign Policy, Boot wrote that recent events—particularly since the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president—had caused him to rethink some of his previous views concerning the existence of white privilege and male privilege. "In the last few years, in particular, it has become impossible for me to deny the reality of discrimination, harassment, even violence that people of color and women continue to experience in modern-day America from a power structure that remains for the most part in the hands of straight, white males. People like me, in other words. Whether I realize it or not, I have benefited from my skin color and my gender—and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it."[41]
Damon Linker of the New York Times argued in a 2018 review of Boot's The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right that Boot never espoused pronounced conservative ideas, but rather followed "the expression of a particularly bellicose strand of Cold War liberalism that migrated from the center-left to the center-right in the aftermath of the Vietnam War... By the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, this brand of muscular, centrist liberalism was back."

Other than his endorsement of Hillary Clinton [I voted for my wife rather than supporting her or Trump], abortion [I view the unborn as living with the rights attached thereto, though the whole situation makes me sad], and trade treaties [one of my few areas of partial agreement with Trump. I DO believe that too many extant treaties are too lopsided against the USA and do not consider it our duty to subsidize Chinese development etc. when they don't respect intellectual property].

With those caveats, Boot's on shift in political thinking is very much in line with my own. Like Reagan once said about his break with the Democrats, "they left me."

[Montmorency]

I DO believe that too many extant treaties are too lopsided against the USA and do not consider it our duty to subsidize Chinese development etc. when they don't respect intellectual property].

More precisely, lopsided in favor of US corporations and against labor (everywhere). But if you used those terms with Sanders or Warren they would vehemently agree. Would you be able to vote for one of them next year?


With those caveats, Boot's on shift in political thinking is very much in line with my own. Like Reagan once said about his break with the Democrats, "they left me."

sigh

When the liberals were telling you what the Republican Party was, y'all should have listened.

https://i.imgur.com/QDrmjf4.jpg

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Even into the summer of 2016, I was convinced that Trump was an aberration of the moment. Not so, his Trumpeteers had taken over the party from the inside using the TEA party as a framework. It is now Trump's creature.

[Montmorency]

Even into the summer of 2016, I was convinced that Trump was an aberration of the moment. Not so, his Trumpeteers had taken over the party from the inside using the TEA party as a framework. It is now Trump's creature.

I know this will feel like I'm picking on you, but from the world-historical perspective it is necessary to understand that Trump was the party's creature, not the other way around. The party made its bed with Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society and Jerry Falwell and the Southern Strategy. Degeneracy was overdetermined without even taking into account the party's already-hideous hundred-year history as the "Free labor" aristocracy (transitionally transmuted through Milton Friedman).

Here's a clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJDhS4oUm0M) of Ronald Reagan campaigning for Truman in 1948. "In other words, higher prices have not been caused by higher wages, but by bigger and bigger profits." Sounds like Sanders. 'My party left me' because it became more conservative economically (than the historically unique New Deal heyday) and more socially liberal so there was no choice but to join the Republicans - is... a very telling (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/reagan-nixon-trump-white-nationalism/595465/) transformation.

A Lovecraftian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lurking_Fear) tale of dreadful genealogy.

[Montmorency]

Hilarious that the inciting event has been reported since ~April, but perhaps, it is finally beginning (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/us/politics/democrats-impeachment-trump.html) to begin in earnest.

Even Prof. Bowman (https://impeachableoffenses.net/2019/09/24/impeach-donald-trump/) comes out.

22885

[InsaneApache]

My first post in this thread, so forgive me I havn't read it all (TLDR)

I like Trump. He's upsetting all the right people.

Oh and as a businessman he know how it goes. It shows in the economy.

Another thing he's stitched on for a 2020 win.

That is all.

[CrossLOPER]

My first post in this thread, so forgive me I havn't read it all (TLDR)
Perhaps you would have something useful to add to the discussion if you took the time to do so.

[InsaneApache]

Perhaps you would have something useful to add to the discussion if you took the time to do so.

:sweatdrop: :whip:

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

My first post in this thread, so forgive me I havn't read it all (TLDR)

I like Trump. He's upsetting all the right people.

Oh and as a businessman he know how it goes. It shows in the economy.

Another thing he's stitched on for a 2020 win.

That is all.

Bravvah, marvellous trolling.

[CrossLOPER]

Brazzah, marvellous trolling.

LOOK, MAH, I POSTED!

[Greyblades]

Top kek.

[edyzmedieval]

For the record, Giuliani tried to do the same shazam in Romania as he did in Ukraine, trying to prop up the corrupt president of the ruling party with a letter sent to the government. That blew in his face and they quickly dropped the issue, causing even more problems to the ruling party.

He tried to attack the chief prosecutor - Laura Codruta Kovesi - who will now be the European Prosecutor. -> https://www.euractiv.com/section/justice-home-affairs/news/parliament-wins-its-battle-kovesi-to-be-the-first-eu-public-prosecutor/

https://www.salon.com/2019/09/25/rudys-got-a-scandal-of-his-own-giuliani-meddled-in-romania-while-on-trumps-payroll/

[CrossLOPER]

For the record, Giuliani tried to do the same shazam in Romania as he did in Ukraine, trying to prop up the corrupt president of the ruling party with a letter sent to the government. That blew in his face and they quickly dropped the issue, causing even more problems to the ruling party.

He tried to attack the chief prosecutor - Laura Codruta Kovesi - who will now be the European Prosecutor. -> https://www.euractiv.com/section/justice-home-affairs/news/parliament-wins-its-battle-kovesi-to-be-the-first-eu-public-prosecutor/

https://www.salon.com/2019/09/25/rudys-got-a-scandal-of-his-own-giuliani-meddled-in-romania-while-on-trumps-payroll/

I like the meltdown he had.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiIERTHvzfw

[Montmorency]

Privately (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-border-wars.html#click=https://t.co/kUJYqhKdax), the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.

What a fucking degenerate.

Phil for one should appreciate it when I say the epithet most fitting for Trump in all the ancestral language is nithing.


I like the meltdown he had.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiIERTHvzfw

Yeah. Funny.

22912

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

LOOK, MAH, I POSTED!

You're all allowed to laugh at our political meltdown and we don't complain - the least you can do is reciprocate the indulgence.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

My first post in this thread, so forgive me I havn't read it all (TLDR)

I like Trump. He's upsetting all the right people.

Oh and as a businessman he know how it goes. It shows in the economy.

Another thing he's stitched on for a 2020 win.

That is all.

He is upsetting many of the right people, as well as a lot of the wrong people, as well as a lot of people who used to be staunch GOP.

He has had some positive influence on the economy (though some would assert this is short term economic gain at the expense of safety and global climate), though it is also true that the first half of a first term President's economy is at least half the product of the predecessor. Improved, yes. All Trump's doing....not so much.

He and McConnell are ratcheting the percentage of originalist judges way up in the federal judiciary. The traditional values crowd loves this a lot -- it is probably the number one reason so many evangelicals stick with him.

The Dems are pushing, so far, staunchly left of center where the hearts of their younger and most active and their ardent leftist core groups are happiest. But they will need to take back the white working class voter or Trump may well repeat his minority vote win in 2020.

[Greyblades]

The four front runners are either senile, infirm, corrupt bordering on supervillian or, well, Warren. The only two candidates who have a chance of matching trump are relegated to the single digits or actively shunned by the DNC.

You might as well call it here; The dems are destined for the grave they dug themselves.

[a completely inoffensive name]

The only two candidates who have a chance of matching trump are relegated to the single digits or actively shunned by the DNC.

Nah, but if you keep the Big Lie going maybe others will believe you.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/general_election/

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Nah, but if you keep the Big Lie going maybe others will believe you.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/general_election/

The outliers seems to have a better chance of beating him and trump is narrowing the lead of the "big three."

We should not forget that last time Trump faced Clinton, but we also should not forget the American habit of just electing the same guy twice.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

... but we also should not forget the American habit of just electing the same guy twice.

13 of the 44 who have served as POTUS won two terms consecutively. 1 won two separate terms (and two pres #s) but lost the intervening election. 4 more have acceded to the office to finish a term following a death and subsequently won a second on their own pins. FDR, or course, won 4 consecutive elections.

Historically, we have less than half who have won a second term in office. However, 4 of the last 5 have served two consecutive terms making it seem the 'norm.'

[Pannonian]

13 of the 44 who have served as POTUS won two terms consecutively. 1 won two separate terms (and two pres #s) but lost the intervening election. 4 more have acceded to the office to finish a term following a death and subsequently won a second on their own pins. FDR, or course, won 4 consecutive elections.

Historically, we have less than half who have won a second term in office. However, 4 of the last 5 have served two consecutive terms making it seem the 'norm.'

Historical norms aren't really norms if they're outside our lifetime. Democracy in its basic form only takes place in our lifetime. Before that, it's history. Dead people don't (officially) vote.

[Greyblades]

Nah, but if you keep the Big Lie going maybe others will believe you.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/general_election/

I'd be concerned if I believed they could keep that up over a year of campaigning, as it is the Big Lie is insisting the democrats havent backed the wrong horses but I'd believe that most of them dont see it yet.

After the eviceration Gabbard gave Harris the DNC have made every effort to avoid putting Biden and Warren on the same stage as her. They're scared shitless and it tells everything I need to know to how they'll fare with trump. Bernie is the exception, making the likelyhood he's blown before he could even begin downright tragic.

[Montmorency]

He is upsetting many of the right people, as well as a lot of the wrong people, as well as a lot of people who used to be staunch GOP.

He has had some positive influence on the economy (though some would assert this is short term economic gain at the expense of safety and global climate), though it is also true that the first half of a first term President's economy is at least half the product of the predecessor. Improved, yes. All Trump's doing....not so much.

In spite of the typically limited and diffuse impact of policy on the economy in the short-term, Trump has done more than almost any President since the antebellum era to singlehandedly and directly damage the economy, which is hard to do when administrations like Jefferson's, Jackson's, Polk's, etc. (hmmm, I'm beginning to detect a pattern) adopted basically suicidal economics. There's even an argument that, to the extent that this president's economic actions are largely executive as opposed to worked out with Congress (other than the 2017 tax law), he bears the responsibility and thereby becomes the very worst President on the economy. Though it does him no favors that the legislative action, the 2017 law, was so marginal a stimulus in its upward wealth transfer. Republican depredations are well-enough known to be an archetype, but the jokes about Trump running the country like a business by driving it into bankruptcy while enriching himself through embezzlement and fraud were obviously especially prescient.


The Dems are pushing, so far, staunchly left of center where the hearts of their younger and most active and their ardent leftist core groups are happiest. But they will need to take back the white working class voter or Trump may well repeat his minority vote win in 2020.

Without having to challenge your premises, it should cheer you that Trump is indeed bleeding among the white working class, especially white women, whose votes he cannot afford to lose.

Remember that (you can check this against the certified results) the Trump 2016 electorate was something like 45% white men and 40% white women, compared to <50% whites among the Clinton electorate. He can neither lose any of that nor afford any increase in turnout among the opposition, and he's consistently down on both counts so far. Meanwhile, seemingly the only demographic among whom he has enlarged his vote share are Never-Trump Republicans (lol). More pertinent is to relate this to the Electoral College, where I reiterate he must win all the states he won in 2016 and has no prospect of capturing any new ones. But his clinches in the decisive states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are in danger of evaporation if they haven't already, Florida remains in play with a heavy blue shift among the electorate (perhaps too heavy to disenfranchise), and now even Texas is becoming a battleground state.

On the other side, Warren (https://www.thecut.com/2019/08/elizabeth-warren-teacher-presidential-candidate.html) is a fairly skilled and persuasive politician.


Warren has won multiple teaching awards, and when I first profiled her in 2011, early in her Senate run and during what would be her last semester of teaching at Harvard, I spoke to students who were so over the moon about her that my editors decided I could not use many of their quotes because they were simply too laudatory. Many former students I interviewed for this story spoke in similarly soaring terms. One, Jonas Blank, described her as “patient and plainspoken, like an elementary-school teacher is expected to be, but also intense and sharp the way a law professor is supposed to be.” Several former students who are now (and were then) Republicans declined to talk to me on the record precisely because they liked her so much and did not want to contribute to furthering her political prospects by speaking warmly of her.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I don't like her policy set, as you might well imagine Monty. On the other hand, she is intelligent, openly promoting relatively detailed policy initiatives (I don't have to agree with them to respect the policy goals intended or the fact that she has the ovaries to get this detailed this early in what is often only a beauty pageant at this stage), a solid public speaker, and seems likable personally. She would not, unlike the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania, constitute a stain on the executive.

I know that Trump's support has eroded in the working class in some of those swing states he must carry again to return to office. And I think he has slipped a bit in Florida too. However, running against socialism/communism is a doable "sale" to our working class (Reagan did it twice, as did Dubya and even term one Clinton with his Centrist stances on economics etc.). I am concerned that too ardent a progressive will backfire and yield a second term.

[Beskar]

1 won two separate terms (and two pres #s) but lost the intervening election.

Misread that as "I won...", was thinking President Seamus wouldn't have been too bad.

[Montmorency]

I don't like her policy set, as you might well imagine Monty. On the other hand, she is intelligent, openly promoting relatively detailed policy initiatives (I don't have to agree with them to respect the policy goals intended or the fact that she has the ovaries to get this detailed this early in what is often only a beauty pageant at this stage), a solid public speaker, and seems likable personally. She would not, unlike the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania, constitute a stain on the executive.

I know that Trump's support has eroded in the working class in some of those swing states he must carry again to return to office. And I think he has slipped a bit in Florida too. However, running against socialism/communism is a doable "sale" to our working class (Reagan did it twice, as did Dubya and even term one Clinton with his Centrist stances on economics etc.). I am concerned that too ardent a progressive will backfire and yield a second term.

Cheers, but as often as conservatives recommend that Democrats can become more appealing by adopting conservative positions, it shouldn't be controversial to acknowledge a certain bias in the estimation.

"Hey bud, can you go get us two large pizza pies." "Regular?" "Some of that, but also some individual slices of pepperoni - and oregano and basil - and some mushrooms with chicken - and barbecue sauce - and buffalo - and Capricciosa if they have it." "Doesn't sound like that will leave much room for regular cheese." "Trust me, they're gonna love it."

For my part I'm not sure we could clearly establish as of now that any Top 5 candidate would lose to Trump, or more likely lose than another, though suspect with Biden the margins would be uncomfortably close. Trump loves nothing in his job more than campaigning, and by all I've seen he's a more energetic and confident campaigner than Biden could hope to be. We need that "crawl over broken glass" fervor, and yet Biden has been caught totally flatfooted (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/05/us/politics/biden-trump-ukraine.html) by his role in the Ukraine controversy despite it being out there for months? This is the guy, who goes so far as to micromanage his campaign team, he is the electable one who is uniquely poised to defeat Trump?

[InsaneApache]

Is Warren the one who pretended to be a red indian to get into college?

Why would you vote for a cheat like that?

[CrossLOPER]

Is Warren the one who pretended to be a red indian to get into college?

Why would you vote for a cheat like that?

I dunno.

Why would anyone vote for a dude who claimed to be a "successful businessman" and "a very stable genius", but can't provide the tax forms to back that up, even when he promised to do so? Why would someone believe that a guy who would promise to build a giant wall on the southern border and make the other government pay for it even though they clearly would not? Why would someone vote for a guy who screwed the farmers with a trade war, and then put a guy in charge of agriculture who told them "In America, the big get bigger and the small go out" (kinda tone deaf seeing as that there are a lot of people with money issues right now). Why would people vote for a guy who promised to revitalize coal, when it was in no way economically or environmentally feasible to do so?

Anything can happen.

Also, Trump kind of screwed over the Kurds really badly. It's going to bite really hard somewhere down the line. The worst part is that, although the US has done this type of thing before, this time the president abandoned allies because of his personal financial ties to another country's leader. The US got nothing out of this one, except a possible Islamic State resurgence and antagonizing another group of Muslims.

[Idaho]

Is Warren the one who pretended to be a red indian to get into college?

Why would you vote for a cheat like that?

If you want to cast it as a battle of morals and that's as bad as it gets from Warren, well then she wins hands down against trump. The man is an odius imbecile.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Misread that as "I won...", was thinking President Seamus wouldn't have been too bad.

I think the Presidency would be better served if we did not elect them to that office....but sentenced them to it against their will.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

If you want to cast it as a battle of morals and that's as bad as it gets from Warren, well then she wins hands down against trump. The man is an odius imbecile.

I am not sure that I agree with the imbecile label. I concur with odious, and I would probably add bombastic, crapulous, obstreperous, narcissistic, demagogic, and quasi-sociopathic, but he is not as stupid as he is ignorant and unethical.

[Greyblades]

Its funny, the more he is denigrated by the left the more humiliating it is that such a man has beaten the democrats and the more damning it becomes when the democrat who would replace him are shown to be or have done much the same and worse.

[CrossLOPER]

Its funny, the more he is denigrated by the left the more humiliating it is that such a man has beaten the democrats and the more damning it becomes when the democrat who would replace him are shown to be or have done much the same and worse.
I think you should be more concerned that there are dumbasses who would still vote for him. They voted for a vague idea of perusing some abstract sense of nationalism that involved supremacy, but the policies are doing everything that is undoing that supremacy. If the ideals of Trump's America First policy were followed to the letter, the US would quickly become a hermit state like North Korea. It's infuriating that the braying jackasses who scream the loudest about their supposed patriotism are the ones totally incapable of appreciating what is it about their country that is actually great.

But, hey, he's showing it to the libtards, so he is winning. Because you voted for him, you're winning. That means you're not a loser anymore, even though everyone is worse off, including yourself. That's the winning strategy. Make people who, under more sane circumstances, be ridiculed and shunned, feel like winners.

There's also the typical strain of tribalism in R vs D, religion and single issue voters that ultimately play the system. It's a trainwreck sustained by whataboutism, cynicism, and a general disconnect with the world.

It's frantic psychosis.

[Shaka_Khan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjwaVcDpAEU


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC2FaAQntzo

[Montmorency]

Is Warren the one who pretended to be a red indian to get into college?

Why would you vote for a cheat like that?

The salient quality of this post is not its mere wrongness, but its premise that cheats are not worthy of votes - yet the poster would characterize Donald Trump, one of the most voracious fraudsters in American history (to say nothing of all the other violations), as a god-emperor. Hypocrisy in its original sense was understood to arise in professing a belief or persona that one did not hold: a kind of play-acting, really a subset of the lie. But the poster probably can't even be said to be deceiving us about a belief in the wrongness of cheating. It's worse than that.

The poster appears to engage in a sort of doublethink where their enemies are naturally cheaters and therefore cheating is bad, while at the same should their friends cheat it is a show of strength and prowess and therefore cheating is good. There could well genuinely be no psychological contradiction between these beliefs, because they are deployed serially in a goal-oriented fashion; they will not conflict except when the object is an ambivalent one in categorization. In other words, this type of person operates according to a principle of tribal aggression, which precludes normal human communication. When the aggression principle is active typical limits on the incoherence of a belief set may be exceeded. So what should we do with them, eh? Shave them with a rusty razor?

CrossLOPER Innuendo Studies has a video series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xGawJIseNY) about the alt-right playbook.


I am not sure that I agree with the imbecile label. I concur with odious, and I would probably add bombastic, crapulous, obstreperous, narcissistic, demagogic, and quasi-sociopathic, but he is not as stupid as he is ignorant and unethical.

However one defines stupidity, Trump evinces it. At the very minimum a politician should be concerned for their political survival, yet Trump frequently acts against even his own (electoral) interests. A smarter politician would be shoring up his support while committing his crimes quietly, not the other way around - for three years straight.

No, the shoe fits. Moreover, I hope you don't defend Trump from charges of stupidity on the basis of his high status. A lot of powerful men throughout history have been plain fools. I know there's a kind of instinctive tendency to impute cleverness and ability to high-status men, but it's unwarranted deferential bias. Wishful thinking about the distribution of merit. The one exacerbating element would be that having power and wealth tends to damage good judgement all on its own because of insulation from criticism and consequences, but I would call that another component of stupidity all the same.


Unrelatedly, a review (https://twitter.com/attackerman/status/1183039022257582087) of James Comey's new memoir.


If you read Comey’s memoir, the story that he doesn’t realize he’s telling you is a story about a man so convinced of his own heroism that he constantly searches for opportunities to intervene and ends up making things worse. An extremely American story.

[Idaho]

The poster appears to engage in a sort of doublethink where their enemies are naturally cheaters and therefore cheating is bad, while at the same should their friends cheat it is a show of strength and prowess and therefore cheating is good. ...
I present the greater spotted old English brexiteer.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

The salient quality of this post is not its mere wrongness, but its premise that cheats are not worthy of votes - yet the poster would characterize Donald Trump, one of the most voracious fraudsters in American history (to say nothing of all the other violations), as a god-emperor. Hypocrisy in its original sense was understood to arise in professing a belief or persona that one did not hold: a kind of play-acting, really a subset of the lie. But the poster probably can't even be said to be deceiving us about a belief in the wrongness of cheating. It's worse than that.

The poster appears to engage in a sort of doublethink where their enemies are naturally cheaters and therefore cheating is bad, while at the same should their friends cheat it is a show of strength and prowess and therefore cheating is good. There could well genuinely be no psychological contradiction between these beliefs, because they are deployed serially in a goal-oriented fashion; they will not conflict except when the object is an ambivalent one in categorization. In other words, this type of person operates according to a principle of tribal aggression, which precludes normal human communication. When the aggression principle is active typical limits on the incoherence of a belief set may be exceeded. So what should we do with them, eh? Shave them with a rusty razor?

The reverse is also true - that which disqualifies Trump in your eyes, racism, self-delusition, falsehood, incompetence, etc.... should also disqualify Warren.

Like IA you simply ignore the parts of your candidate you don't like.

[Montmorency]

The reverse is also true - that which disqualifies Trump in your eyes, racism, self-delusition, falsehood, incompetence, etc.... should also disqualify Warren.

Like IA you simply ignore the parts of your candidate you don't like.

Do you believe every person is identical to all other persons? That is e absurdity of both-sidesism. With such categorical reasoning we could find every human to be equally as bad or good as Hitler or Jesus.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Do you believe every person is identical to all other persons? That is e absurdity of both-sidesism. With such categorical reasoning we could find every human to be equally as bad or good as Hitler or Jesus.

No, of course not, don't be silly. Warren isn't as bad as Trump.

Despite which, you've expended an awful lot of effort trying to convince me that although she's racist it's OK because (unlike Trump) it's just the normal American racism against Native Americans, instead of Trump's nasty racism.

[Montmorency]

No, of course not, don't be silly. Warren isn't as bad as Trump.

Despite which, you've expended an awful lot of effort trying to convince me that although she's racist it's OK because (unlike Trump) it's just the normal American racism against Native Americans, instead of Trump's nasty racism.

So what's the basis for your complaint? I'm not so radical as to presumptively hold that white people should not be represented in government (which at some point would mean the racial power structures inverting anyway).

[Pannonian]

The reverse is also true - that which disqualifies Trump in your eyes, racism, self-delusition, falsehood, incompetence, etc.... should also disqualify Warren.

Like IA you simply ignore the parts of your candidate you don't like.

It depends on how prevalent these characteristics are. All humans lie to a greater and lesser extent. Politicians by the nature of their position lie more than most. But, at least until the advent of the alt-right, few lie as a matter of course, and those that do gained certain reputations. Does Warren lie occasionally? We know that Trump lies practically all the time. Does the telling of one, or even a few, lies, equate one with someone who lies all the time?

[CrossLOPER]

Does the telling of one, or even a few, lies, equate one with someone who lies all the time?
Yes, if you are a religious fanatic who believes in predestination.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

It depends on how prevalent these characteristics are. All humans lie to a greater and lesser extent. Politicians by the nature of their position lie more than most. But, at least until the advent of the alt-right, few lie as a matter of course, and those that do gained certain reputations. Does Warren lie occasionally? We know that Trump lies practically all the time. Does the telling of one, or even a few, lies, equate one with someone who lies all the time?

I take your point, but my point is that the nature of the lies she has told to/about herself show she's not fit to be president.

Monty's argument is what you might call "The Prince Philip Defence" that all she's guilty of is the sort of "benign" racism common to her class.

[Pannonian]

I take your point, but my point is that the nature of the lies she has told to/about herself show she's not fit to be president.

Monty's argument is what you might call "The Prince Philip Defence" that all she's guilty of is the sort of "benign" racism common to her class.

If it doesn't directly pertain to the job, I wouldn't say that any kind of deception about oneself affects one's fitness for it. If she's buffing her CV, who cares. The current posterboys for the alt-right are far, far worse at it, both in frequency (it's the defining aspect of Trump, Johnson, and all the rest of that tribe) and in degree. What the chief executive should be judged on is whether they're good at identifying talents to help them, and whether they're good at picking what advice to follow. The alt-right make it their point to screw the world on that front.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I take your point, but my point is that the nature of the lies she has told to/about herself show she's not fit to be president.

Monty's argument is what you might call "The Prince Philip Defence" that all she's guilty of is the sort of "benign" racism common to her class.

Class does not mean quite the same thing on this side of the pond as it does on yours. Which is not to say that we don't have them, just that things on this side are somewhat more mutable.

[Montmorency]

I take your point, but my point is that the nature of the lies she has told to/about herself show she's not fit to be president.

Monty's argument is what you might call "The Prince Philip Defence" that all she's guilty of is the sort of "benign" racism common to her class.

My argument? I'm not even sure what your point is. If you think "the nature of the lies" shows her unfitness, then surely you would be prepared to personally apologize for every white politician whom you've ever supported - no? Yet again here you made an ostentatiously spurious declaration with the unconcealed design of erasing contrasts between political causes and persons. I find it perverse that a relatively decent and upright person should have to be justified specially against the morally squalid, as though a clear solvent ought to be precisely titrated in the hunt for sins yet the effluence of biohazard can be dismissed as constitutionally odious and therefore uninteresting for scrutiny.

PVC, do you - do you think of yourself as less racist than Warren? Or, oh my god, do you think only leftists have agency?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

My argument? I'm not even sure what your point is. If you think "the nature of the lies" shows her unfitness, then surely you would be prepared to personally apologize for every white politician whom you've ever supported - no? Yet again here you made an ostentatiously spurious declaration with the unconcealed design of erasing contrasts between political causes and persons. I find it perverse that a relatively decent and upright person should have to be justified specially against the morally squalid, as though a clear solvent ought to be precisely titrated in the hunt for sins yet the effluence of biohazard can be dismissed as constitutionally odious and therefore uninteresting for scrutiny.

It's not about the depth of her sin, it's about the lack of awareness she demonstrates, and frankly basic competency. this is a Harvard academic who looks in the mirror and then write "Native American" on a form where it says "ethnicity". Oh, and I do mean "writes" because apparently there wasn't a tick-box for that.

It's not like her platform is that coherent anyway - she abandoned the republicans because they don't believe in "markets" any more, but she's stoled most of Bernie's policies. As Bernie said, he doesn't necessarily believe in markets - warren is committed to them.


PVC, do you - do you think of yourself as less racist than Warren? Or, oh my god, do you think only leftists have agency?

Yes, excellent, mockery, well done.

[Montmorency]

It's not about the depth of her sin, it's about the lack of awareness she demonstrates, and frankly basic competency.

It's a fatal lack of awareness and competence to conceive of Indian-ness in a way that the large majority of Americans have? Even if one could take you seriously on you believing that, it would behoove you to move from the abstract realm and evaluate her competence against her performance and conduct. If you refuse to do that much, then there's nothing to work with here.


this is a Harvard academic who looks in the mirror and then write "Native American" on a form where it says "ethnicity". Oh, and I do mean "writes" because apparently there wasn't a tick-box for that.

We already discussed this. On official employment documents she recorded her race as simply "white." She identified herself as Native American with a state bar and a professional (legal) association.


It's not like her platform is that coherent anyway - she abandoned the republicans because they don't believe in "markets" any more, but she's stoled most of Bernie's policies. As Bernie said, he doesn't necessarily believe in markets - warren is committed to them.

Have you read anything of her platform? She did not "steal" Sanders' policies; the only thing within a mile's radius is that she signs on to his basic vision for Medicare for All because she doesn't have a better idea yet. Sanders, it should go without saying, did not invent the concepts of taxation or populism or left politics.

She's been active in politics (before becoming a Senator) for 15 or 20 years. Her beliefs and proposals are public record. You really should familiarize yourself with these things before you pratfall.


Yes, excellent, mockery, well done.

It's not mockery, it's a deadly serious question because I think I see where this is coming from...

[Pannonian]

It's not mockery, it's a deadly serious question because I think I see where this is coming from...

Namely, because PFH doesn't apply his standards across the board. In the UK, he backs a cause that has lies as its fundamental basis, with lies being the most effective factor that got it electoral credibility, yet excuses himself from these lies whilst backing the cause that uses them. One would say that these lies are rather more relevant than merely buffing up one's CV via identity.

Here's a funny looking Zulu.

http://p.imgci.com/db/PICTURES/DB/112004/055621.player.jpg

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Namely, because PFH doesn't apply his standards across the board. In the UK, he backs a cause that has lies as its fundamental basis, with lies being the most effective factor that got it electoral credibility, yet excuses himself from these lies whilst backing the cause that uses them. One would say that these lies are rather more relevant than merely buffing up one's CV via identity.

Here's a funny looking Zulu.

https://p.imgci.com/db/PICTURES/DB/112004/055621.player.jpg

Except the last prime minister who had my personal support was David Cameron, and the last politician I voted for was Lib-Dem.

Elizabeth Warren is not a cause, she's a presidential candidate.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

It's not mockery, it's a deadly serious question because I think I see where this is coming from...

Where this is coming from is I see her actions as either deeply cynical or extremely weird - and frankly I don't think you'd give anyone further to the Right this much benefit of the doubt.

Now, please initiate you personal attack, I'm suitably braced.

[Idaho]

Class does not mean quite the same thing on this side of the pond as it does on yours. Which is not to say that we don't have them, just that things on this side are somewhat more mutable.
Unless you have brown skin.

[Pannonian]

Except the last prime minister who had my personal support was David Cameron, and the last politician I voted for was Lib-Dem.

Elizabeth Warren is not a cause, she's a presidential candidate.

If there is a referendum on Johnson's deal, would you vote for it? NB. Johnson is as much of a liar as Trump is, and he's made promises that he never intended to keep, which his chief of staff said were instrumental in winning the 2016 vote. So these are far more relevant lies than ones about one's identity.

What do you think of the Zulu whose picture I posted? Is he a Zulu? Or is he not a Zulu? Looks a bit pale to be a Zulu, doesn't he?

[rory_20_uk]

Unless you have brown skin.

Apart from the Landed Aristocracy, it's pretty mutable over here and is mainly based on money and accent. And if you've got the former you can make the jump in about 1 generation since you send your children to a good school and job done.

Race is much less important than the school tie.

~:smoking:

[Seamus Fermanagh]

...Elizabeth Warren is not a cause, she's a presidential candidate.

For the ardent activist Dems (who represent most of the folks paying attention at this point in our process) there is a bit of a conflation between cause/candidate in outlook. Some are voting for her for the "cause" of advancing Social Democracy.

To be fair, Trump's yahoos are -- in their minds -- crusading against the evils of left wing liberalism (along with a sub-group whose cause is white supremacy).

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Unless you have brown skin.

Even those with different melanin, despite our historical problems with 'race.'

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

If there is a referendum on Johnson's deal, would you vote for it? NB. Johnson is as much of a liar as Trump is, and he's made promises that he never intended to keep, which his chief of staff said were instrumental in winning the 2016 vote. So these are far more relevant lies than ones about one's identity.

What do you think of the Zulu whose picture I posted? Is he a Zulu? Or is he not a Zulu? Looks a bit pale to be a Zulu, doesn't he?

Friend of mine is married to a Native American who looks white. I find it a bit odd that she barely identifies with her Polish heritage but she grew up on a Reservation and her grandparents are full-blooded Native-American.

This is not about skin colour, really, and Elizabeth Warren doesn't just "look white" because of her skin colour.

[Pannonian]

Friend of mine is married to a Native American who looks white. I find it a bit odd that she barely identifies with her Polish heritage but she grew up on a Reservation and her grandparents are full-blooded Native-American.

This is not about skin colour, really, and Elizabeth Warren doesn't just "look white" because of her skin colour.

The Zulu I posted doesn't just look white. He has 0% Zulu ancestry, and as is 100% European as can be practically discerned. He doesn't call himself Zulu. But he grew up alongside Zulus, speaks the Zulu language, is owned by Zulus as one of them, is at least partly culturally and socially Zulu, and is known by the nickname "Zulu". What is he? Or does it matter?

There are lies that matter, and lies that don't matter. Who cares about identity? But then you have the likes of Johnson and the other Leave leaders who deliberately and consistently lie about their work, yet the advantage this gives them is condoned by their supporters. Even Trump isn't as bad as the Brexiteers, given that he lies as a lifestyle, compared with the focused lies of his more politically capable but no less mendacious UK counterparts. These lies, that are actually relevant to the political sphere, should be ones that matter and to be addressed. But they're not. While you complain about Elizabeth Warren claiming an identity she may not warrant. Who cares what she calls herself.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

The Zulu I posted doesn't just look white. He has 0% Zulu ancestry, and as is 100% European as can be practically discerned. He doesn't call himself Zulu. But he grew up alongside Zulus, speaks the Zulu language, is owned by Zulus as one of them, is at least partly culturally and socially Zulu, and is known by the nickname "Zulu". What is he? Or does it matter?

So the polar opposite of Elizabeth Warren, then?

Actually has some Zulu culture, none of the Zulu blood.

[Pannonian]

So the polar opposite of Elizabeth Warren, then?

Actually has some Zulu culture, none of the Zulu blood.

Completely missing the point. Who cares what people identify as. Why is it important? If telling the truth is important to you, do you apply these standards across the board?

[Greyblades]

Who cares what people identify as.

*laughs in attack helicopter*

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Completely missing the point. Who cares what people identify as. Why is it important? If telling the truth is important to you, do you apply these standards across the board?

Telling the truth is important to me - and I'm not a supporter of Farage or Johnson before you say it. In the Etremis of "ARRRG! The House is on fire!" I'd rather have Boris Johnson than Jeremy Corbyn. That's pragmatism.

The question over picking the Democratic nominee is, at this stage especially, rather different. Elizabeth Warren is, in my view, hardly fit to face trump and, frankly, unlikely to beat him.

[Montmorency]

Where this is coming from is I see her actions as either deeply cynical or extremely weird - and frankly I don't think you'd give anyone further to the Right this much benefit of the doubt.

Now, please initiate you personal attack, I'm suitably braced.

As we have seen, it is neither of those things in American cultural and Warren's personal context.

You're only reinforcing my impression that you believe only leftists have agency. If my reaction to the BS is strong it is because it cuts much more broadly than just across Warren as a candidate; the whole political philosophical spectrum is implicated. Warren, who told no lies, made the common error of exoticism and insufficient contemplation of the experience of contemporary Natives and of her own social privileges. In other words, for failing to privately check her privilege as a younger woman she is disqualified in your eyes as a candidate. The fact that she rectified her error and moreover promises policies that would greatly improve the lives of the relevant demographic is something you refuse to engage with despite being repeatedly addressed. Meanwhile, in your estimation white men who dislike the thought of their daughters being in proximity to blacks or Muslims, well that threat sensitivity is just normal psychology and not something we can fairly hold against them.

Like, you literally said you would support Johnson over Corbyn in your last post. Gives the game away completely. Corbyn at least is not entirely implausibly a sclerotic racist, but it's revealing when you wail about him writing an introduction to a hundred-year-old monograph while going out of your way to excuse Boris Johnson's concrete and explicit racist sentiments. Any gap in racism between the platforms and governance of the Labour and Conservative parties and the individual records of Corbyn and Johnson within them, then, is not even a consideration.

It's not even necessary to speculate about you as a person. I simply fear that you afford those on the right all the benefit of the doubt for egregious offenses, and reflexively condemn those on the left for peccadilloes, all while declining to consider the respective politics beyond the internal individual. It's a flawed mindset to say the least, inasmuch as it assumes that conservatives are fixed and cannot be expected to grow into good behavior, whereas a leftist should be expected to perform as a paragon from their genesis because they alone have an affirmative moral responsibility to be upright.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

As we have seen, it is neither of those things in American cultural and Warren's personal context.

You're only reinforcing my impression that you believe only leftists have agency. If my reaction to the BS is strong it is because it cuts much more broadly than just across Warren as a candidate; the whole political philosophical spectrum is implicated. Warren, who told no lies, made the common error of exoticism and insufficient contemplation of the experience of contemporary Natives and of her own social privileges. In other words, for failing to privately check her privilege as a younger woman she is disqualified in your eyes as a candidate. The fact that she rectified her error and moreover promises policies that would greatly improve the lives of the relevant demographic is something you refuse to engage with despite being repeatedly addressed. Meanwhile, in your estimation white men who dislike the thought of their daughters being in proximity to blacks or Muslims, well that threat sensitivity is just normal psychology and not something we can fairly hold against them.

Like, you literally said you would support Johnson over Corbyn in your last post. Gives the game away completely. Corbyn at least is not entirely implausibly a sclerotic racist, but it's revealing when you wail about him writing an introduction to a hundred-year-old monograph while going out of your way to excuse Boris Johnson's concrete and explicit racist sentiments. Any gap in racism between the platforms and governance of the Labour and Conservative parties and the individual records of Corbyn and Johnson within them, then, is not even a consideration.

It's not even necessary to speculate about you as a person. I simply fear that you afford those on the right all the benefit of the doubt for egregious offenses, and reflexively condemn those on the left for peccadilloes, all while declining to consider the respective politics beyond the internal individual. It's a flawed mindset to say the least, inasmuch as it assumes that conservatives are fixed and cannot be expected to grow into good behavior, whereas a leftist should be expected to perform as a paragon from their genesis because they alone have an affirmative moral responsibility to be upright.

So you think I'm a hypocrite but you're not?

I could, if I so wished, marshal Muslim women writers in support of Johnson's statements on the Burkha, I could martial statistics showing that inter-class and inter-race conflict is a real thing. I could point out that many black parents justifiably worry about their sons, and moreso their daughters, being the victims of just the exoticism you seek to excuse.

We could talk about the stereotypical virile black man and why white women don't seem to be able to identify their black attackers in a line-up.

I believe Jeremy Corbyn is an "intellectual racist" of the same bent as the men who sought to justify the Holocaust, I think Boris Johnson is probably what we might acidly call "a bit racist" in that he lives in a white Middle Class bubble, despite having a multi-racial background.

Your problem is that you over-empathise with the Left and under-empathise with the Right - your project that failing back on me (reversed) because you over-emphasise the times I disagree with you.

I'm not claiming Elizabeth Warren is some filthy racist scumbag who wants to wipe out the remaining Native Americans - I'm claiming she has a history of being self-deluding if not cynical about her background. The idea that she's "racist" comes from you, not me.

[Pannonian]

Telling the truth is important to me - and I'm not a supporter of Farage or Johnson before you say it. In the Etremis of "ARRRG! The House is on fire!" I'd rather have Boris Johnson than Jeremy Corbyn. That's pragmatism.

The question over picking the Democratic nominee is, at this stage especially, rather different. Elizabeth Warren is, in my view, hardly fit to face trump and, frankly, unlikely to beat him.

You're not a fan of Farage or Johnson, but you're happy to ride in their slipstream. Thus you get what you want via their lies, but you can disassociate yourself from the liars.

[CrossLOPER]

*laughs in attack helicopter*

Way too many memes fused into one, man.

[Idaho]

Even those with different melanin, despite our historical problems with 'race.'

Yeah race is just a historical issue. Nothing to see now.

Jesus. You (white) Americans really have no idea how segregated and screwed up your nation is in this regard. It's always been this bad, but for a brief period racists kept their mouth shut. Now trump has ripped off the band aid and those people feel at liberty to "say it as they see it".

[Greyblades]

Way too many memes fused into one, man.

No such thing as too many memes!

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Yeah race is just a historical issue. Nothing to see now.

Jesus. You (white) Americans really have no idea how segregated and screwed up your nation is in this regard. It's always been this bad, but for a brief period racists kept their mouth shut. Now trump has ripped off the band aid and those people feel at liberty to "say it as they see it".

I had meant to note that it was a theme that has continued throughout our entire history as a nation. I was not using it in as a synonym for past or in the past. I can see where the word choice was off, as it can and often does imply that connotation.

[Montmorency]

I could, if I so wished, marshal Muslim women writers in support of Johnson's statements on the Burkha, I could martial statistics showing that inter-class and inter-race conflict is a real thing. I could point out that many black parents justifiably worry about their sons, and moreso their daughters, being the victims of just the exoticism you seek to excuse.

We could talk about the stereotypical virile black man and why white women don't seem to be able to identify their black attackers in a line-up.

I am unable to divine what you're talking about or its relevance.


I believe Jeremy Corbyn is an "intellectual racist" of the same bent as the men who sought to justify the Holocaust, I think Boris Johnson is probably what we might acidly call "a bit racist" in that he lives in a white Middle Class bubble, despite having a multi-racial background.

It would seem more the other way around, all the more salient in the context of which of their politics is the more anti-racist.


Your problem is that you over-empathise with the Left and under-empathise with the Right - your project that failing back on me (reversed) because you over-emphasise the times I disagree with you.

It's really about the facts and substance of any given case.


I'm not claiming Elizabeth Warren is some filthy racist scumbag who wants to wipe out the remaining Native Americans - I'm claiming she has a history of being self-deluding if not cynical about her background. The idea that she's "racist" comes from you, not me.

You're the one who said she's not fit to be President on this basis, and it's not because you have preternatural standards for chief executives in general or the American chief executive in particular. Not merely that the affair damaged your confidence in her ability to gain the office, but that it shows her unfit to hold it. It's arbitrary, like a bill of attainder.

My phrase "failed to check her privilege" is the most apt here. Everyone will stumble, so the recovery relative to the error is the crux. I doubt the valid criticisms of Warren on policy or politics are exhausted to my awareness, so when you fixate on this one (flanked by other facile talking points from her enemies about her once being a Republican or a capitalist) when routinely excusing much worse from others - excusing in the sense of not calling for the culpable to be stripped of public trust forthwith - it appears to me one of the systematic ideological pitfalls I routinely encounter in the discourse and find quite frustrating. Trump tried just now, for example, to openly embezzle government money and solicit foreign contributions/bribes by designating one of his hotels as the upcoming G7 venue, before being convinced somehow to walk it back. Would it be wrong to say that you take this as merely typical from Trump and so unworthy of reproach, whereas if Warren were to bring home a stapler from her Senate office this would strike you as a grave scandal and mark against her integrity? I've read plenty who do have such discernment and you're falling into the same pattern.


Apropos of nothing, I've figured out why your aphorism that "Rome is always falling" is such a quintessentially conservative sentiment to have. Conservatives of all stripes and eras prominently proclaim the decline of their society and the contribution to decline of all the things they don't like, no?


I think you will find this very long video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jD-PbF3ywGo) exploring issues of American class and race and transgenderism and their, uh, confluence, worth viewing. This format and voice handles some of the questions that interest you better than we ever could here. I watched the whole thing so I am in a position to recommend it.

[Pannonian]

I am unable to divine what you're talking about or its relevance.



It would seem more the other way around, all the more salient in the context of which of their politics is the more anti-racist.



It's really about the facts and substance of any given case.



You're the one who said she's not fit to be President on this basis, and it's not because you have preternatural standards for chief executives in general or the American chief executive in particular. Not merely that the affair damaged your confidence in her ability to gain the office, but that it shows her unfit to hold it. It's arbitrary, like a bill of attainder.

My phrase "failed to check her privilege" is the most apt here. Everyone will stumble, so the recovery relative to the error is the crux. I doubt the valid criticisms of Warren on policy or politics are exhausted to my awareness, so when you fixate on this one (flanked by other facile talking points from her enemies about her once being a Republican or a capitalist) when routinely excusing much worse from others - excusing in the sense of not calling for the culpable to be stripped of public trust forthwith - it appears to me one of the systematic ideological pitfalls I routinely encounter in the discourse and find quite frustrating. Trump tried just now, for example, to openly embezzle government money and solicit foreign contributions/bribes by designating one of his hotels as the upcoming G7 venue, before being convinced somehow to walk it back. Would it be wrong to say that you take this as merely typical from Trump and so unworthy of reproach, whereas if Warren were to bring home a stapler from her Senate office this would strike you as a grave scandal and mark against her integrity? I've read plenty who do have such discernment and you're falling into the same pattern.


Apropos of nothing, I've figured out why your aphorism that "Rome is always falling" is such a quintessentially conservative sentiment to have. Conservatives of all stripes and eras prominently proclaim the decline of their society and the contribution to decline of all the things they don't like, no?


I think you will find this very long video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jD-PbF3ywGo) exploring issues of American class and race and transgenderism and their, uh, confluence, worth viewing. This format and voice handles some of the questions that interest you better than we ever could here. I watched the whole thing so I am in a position to recommend it.

You'll find that PFH professes to despise the liars on the right such as Trump and Johnson, and thus excuses himself from their personae, whilst repeating the arguments based on falsehoods that these liars pump out. You see it earlier on the page where he says that he doesn't support Johnson the liar, but he'll still back the signature cause of this serial liar. You see it in self-professed centrists who tack to the (alt)right. In earlier times I believe they were called fellow travellers (a label also used, correctly I think, to describe Jeremy Corbyn and his association with anti-semites).

Centre-leftists tend to be a bit more self-aware and apply their standards more evenly. I'd say that proper centre-rightists would be the same, as long as they don't get caught up believing in one of the alt-right causes. It's the tragedy of our times that the far left and far right have each colonised the political scene when there are far more important issues to be addressed by a central consensus.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

I am unable to divine what you're talking about or its relevance.

Message: You don't pay attention to what I say.


It would seem more the other way around, all the more salient in the context of which of their politics is the more anti-racist.

Johnson is a Liberal - his politics are theoretically at least as Anti-racist as Corbyn's far-Leftism some would argue has antisemitism baked in.


It's really about the facts and substance of any given case.

If I said something like that you'd accuse me of a lack of self-awareness.


You're the one who said she's not fit to be President on this basis, and it's not because you have preternatural standards for chief executives in general or the American chief executive in particular. Not merely that the affair damaged your confidence in her ability to gain the office, but that it shows her unfit to hold it. It's arbitrary, like a bill of attainder.

OK - let's ditch "chief executive". Now, how do you know what standards I have for politicians? At this point the Democrats are supposed to be choosing their best person, not only to face Trump but to govern America. Mrs Warren is neither of those things.

When faced with a binary choice between slightly-racist Johnson and obviously-crypto-racist Corbyn that's a different question.


Apropos of nothing, I've figured out why your aphorism that "Rome is always falling" is such a quintessentially conservative sentiment to have. Conservatives of all stripes and eras prominently proclaim the decline of their society and the contribution to decline of all the things they don't like, no?

Not even close - the full quote is: "Rome is falling, but then Rome is always falling". It doesn't mean anything like what you think it does.

[Montmorency]

You'll find that PFH professes to despise the liars on the right such as Trump and Johnson, and thus excuses himself from their personae, whilst repeating the arguments based on falsehoods that these liars pump out. You see it earlier on the page where he says that he doesn't support Johnson the liar, but he'll still back the signature cause of this serial liar. You see it in self-professed centrists who tack to the (alt)right. In earlier times I believe they were called fellow travellers (a label also used, correctly I think, to describe Jeremy Corbyn and his association with anti-semites).

Centre-leftists tend to be a bit more self-aware and apply their standards more evenly. I'd say that proper centre-rightists would be the same, as long as they don't get caught up believing in one of the alt-right causes. It's the tragedy of our times that the far left and far right have each colonised the political scene when there are far more important issues to be addressed by a central consensus.

Well, I've been open in my belief that the central consensus has failed us. The proof is in the blood pudding*.

*This is a double meaning and mixed metaphor.


Message: You don't pay attention to what I say.

If you want to talk about your understanding of racial issues, feel free to do so, but I haven't been impressed before. But come on, you must be reading me carelessly if you imagine I need convincing that inter-class and inter-racial conflict are real things. rofl


Johnson is a Liberal - his politics are theoretically at least as Anti-racist as Corbyn's far-Leftism some would argue has antisemitism baked in.

A liberal? "Theoretically"? European liberalism? I won't take up your time calling in your references for those and just ask what you see in a comparison of their concrete policy platforms and actions.


If I said something like that you'd accuse me of a lack of self-awareness.

Why do you say that? That's what I've consistently asked from you, isn't it? See above where I raise an eyebrow at your argument from theoretical theory.


OK - let's ditch "chief executive". Now, how do you know what standards I have for politicians? At this point the Democrats are supposed to be choosing their best person, not only to face Trump but to govern America. Mrs Warren is neither of those things.

You don't have good or even generalizable reasoning. Like, even in the most limited scope of argumentation if one assigned Warren's behavior an extremely negative valence it still wouldn't speak to those two criteria in itself.

As distinct from our conversation you're welcome to increase engagement in the relevant thread with your own narrative for who the best person to face Trump or to govern America is (and, if you must, what overlap if any there is between the two). It's not my fiefdom after all. :creep:


Not even close - the full quote is: "Rome is falling, but then Rome is always falling". It doesn't mean anything like what you think it does.

It definitely sounds like it does. What metatextual meaning would you render as more consonant with the phrase? Alternatively, whatever your own interpretation may be why isn't mine available?


If you'll ever countenance a recommendation from me, I do recommend the video.

[Pannonian]

Well, I've been open in my belief that the central consensus has failed us. The proof is in the blood pudding*.

*This is a double meaning and mixed metaphor.

What you mean by centre is probably different from what I mean by centre. For me, centre isn't so much a position on social politics, as it is how these politics are pursued. Evidence-based arguments, listening to qualified experts, respect for custom and agreements, desire for truth, fairness in applying standards, and a revulsion against those who are against the above. You see the alt-right offending against the above, and they certainly do, but the left here are aware that the far left also offend in the same manner.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

What you mean by centre is probably different from what I mean by centre. For me, centre isn't so much a position on social politics, as it is how these politics are pursued. Evidence-based arguments, listening to qualified experts, respect for custom and agreements, desire for truth, fairness in applying standards, and a revulsion against those who are against the above. You see the alt-right offending against the above, and they certainly do, but the left here are aware that the far left also offend in the same manner.

Pretty much all of what you define as "centre" is absent from American politics and large swaths of both major parties are at fault.

What you define as centre is what I call "thoughtful consideration and decision making" but it seems to involve too much effort for most of my fellow Americans to bother.

[Pannonian]

Pretty much all of what you define as "centre" is absent from American politics and large swaths of both major parties are at fault.

What you define as centre is what I call "thoughtful consideration and decision making" but it seems to involve too much effort for most of my fellow Americans to bother.

Over here, the first significant departure from the above was when the left plumped for Corbyn as Labour leader, not so much because of arguments made in the above manner, but because they held the Blairite consensus to be just another shade of Tory, and wanted "a genuine alternative". The decisive departure was Brexit, made especially effective because Corbyn was the leader of the other party, with virtually any outrage made possible because of the argument "Do you really want Corbyn in charge?". The manner of the arguments made by the left for Corbyn are practically identical in methodology to the ones made by Brexiteers.

There's a thread on here where I argue with the lefties on here about Corbyn, and there is the same disregard for evidence-based arguments as I pile evidence upon expert-provided evidence, only to be countered by meme-based arguments and keywords that apparently refute all arguments simply by being brought into play.

[CrossLOPER]

CrossLOPER Innuendo Studies has a video series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xGawJIseNY) about the alt-right playbook.
So as I said, a bunch of lost losers who can't accomplish anything without pushing down anyone else. Miraculous only in their numbers. I will say this, I live in a liberal city surrounded by Red, and liberals are just as insufferable, though occasionally actually campaign for the rights of everyone pinned as a target by the alt-right. This happens to include everyone who isn't them.

It's a complete mess.

[Montmorency]

What you mean by centre is probably different from what I mean by centre. For me, centre isn't so much a position on social politics, as it is how these politics are pursued. Evidence-based arguments, listening to qualified experts, respect for custom and agreements, desire for truth, fairness in applying standards, and a revulsion against those who are against the above. You see the alt-right offending against the above, and they certainly do, but the left here are aware that the far left also offend in the same manner.

I haven't heard anyone refer to a package of generic idealized political virtues as a consensus, let alone a central one. What your term would typically be evocative of is the postwar liberal consensus of international social democracy, followed by the post-Thatcher/Reagan neoliberal consensus of free trade, marketization, financialization, and reduced social welfare intervention by the state.

So it is a little worrisome that below you seem to identify this central consensus of virtuous conventions with the Blairite consensus, which was itself one branch of the Western neoliberal consensus. Don't you think that consensus could be reasonably criticized, even against the virtues you list?

To be frank I can't help but approve of the way the hard left has taken over the Labour Party. This is exactly what the Blairites were telling the left to do, isn't it? When the Left agitates for policy influence, the centrists always retort 'then win some votes.' Well that's just what Corbyn went and did. The main problem is that Corbyn seems to be building power in the party not for the sake of gaining the government and implementing his (very good) manifesto, but for the sake of self-aggrandizement and the settling of archaic personal vendettas. If I have the right of it Momentum has been attempting to purge disloyal elements from the Parliamentary Labour Party this year simply according to the calculation of who is likeliest to vote against Corbyn's leadership if he fails in the next general election (which is now apparently taken for granted). Ousting officials who don't support your agenda is all well and good in politics, but not when the man is the agenda.

I would have no complaints about the direction of the Labour Party if Corbyn were not the sort of person to center himself at the expense of the cause.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

I haven't heard anyone refer to a package of generic idealized political virtues as a consensus, let alone a central one. What your term would typically be evocative of is the postwar liberal consensus of international social democracy, followed by the post-Thatcher/Reagan neoliberal consensus of free trade, marketization, financialization, and reduced social welfare intervention by the state.

So it is a little worrisome that below you seem to identify this central consensus of virtuous conventions with the Blairite consensus, which was itself one branch of the Western neoliberal consensus. Don't you think that consensus could be reasonably criticized, even against the virtues you list?

To be frank I can't help but approve of the way the hard left has taken over the Labour Party. This is exactly what the Blairites were telling the left to do, isn't it? When the Left agitates for policy influence, the centrists always retort 'then win some votes.' Well that's just what Corbyn went and did. The main problem is that Corbyn seems to be building power in the party not for the sake of gaining the government and implementing his (very good) manifesto, but for the sake of self-aggrandizement and the settling of archaic personal vendettas. If I have the right of it Momentum has been attempting to purge disloyal elements from the Parliamentary Labour Party this year simply according to the calculation of who is likeliest to vote against Corbyn's leadership if he fails in the next general election (which is now apparently taken for granted). Ousting officials who don't support your agenda is all well and good in politics, but not when the man is the agenda.

I would have no complaints about the direction of the Labour Party if Corbyn were not the sort of person to center himself at the expense of the cause.

I think you're confusing the general consensus with a political ideology. The centre also isn't where you think it is, it's further to the right.

Most people don't think political in the way you do - most people just live "in the middle".

You've also bought into the rhetoric of "New Labour" when in reality Blair was just the latest incarnation of the Labour Right, like every Labour Prime Minister before him. Corbyn, on the other hand, comes from the Hard Left of the Party - the side that seen Northern Ireland as an occupied colony - Corbyn famously (not famously enough) voted against the Anglo-Irish Agreement which became the foundation of the Good Friday Agreement.

[Montmorency]

I think you're confusing the general consensus with a political ideology. The centre also isn't where you think it is, it's further to the right.

Most people don't think political in the way you do - most people just live "in the middle".

You've also bought into the rhetoric of "New Labour" when in reality Blair was just the latest incarnation of the Labour Right, like every Labour Prime Minister before him. Corbyn, on the other hand, comes from the Hard Left of the Party - the side that seen Northern Ireland as an occupied colony - Corbyn famously (not famously enough) voted against the Anglo-Irish Agreement which became the foundation of the Good Friday Agreement.

Your construction of a "general consensus" IS the ideology, a very specific one.

As for ordinary people, most of them are clearly either conservative or liberal, just passive in their engagement. The people whose voting behavior can be said to be "in the middle" are very few in the United States, and this behavior is typically the refuge of the "innocent and confused."

[Pannonian]

Your construction of a "general consensus" IS the ideology, a very specific one.

As for ordinary people, most of them are clearly either conservative or liberal, just passive in their engagement. The people whose voting behavior can be said to be "in the middle" are very few in the United States, and this behavior is typically the refuge of the "innocent and confused."

In the UK, before Brexit, they really were not. There is a fair bit of overlap between conservative and liberal, with the same social views driven by different reasonings. It's identity politics that is either/or. I suspect Blair, if he were eligible to and if he cared to, could probably find a consensus even in the US, with centre-left politics framed in a centre-right language. You've swallowed the radical left's portrayal of Blair as another Tory. Even where instinctual lefties had uneasy feelings about the language Blair was using, when they actually dug into what he was doing, it was astonishing just how leftist his government's achievements were. For example: given the chronic current problems with lack of housing and soaring homeless numbers, Blair practically eliminated homelessness. Look it up.

[Montmorency]

In the UK, before Brexit, they really were not. There is a fair bit of overlap between conservative and liberal, with the same social views driven by different reasonings. It's identity politics that is either/or. I suspect Blair, if he were eligible to and if he cared to, could probably find a consensus even in the US, with centre-left politics framed in a centre-right language. You've swallowed the radical left's portrayal of Blair as another Tory. Even where instinctual lefties had uneasy feelings about the language Blair was using, when they actually dug into what he was doing, it was astonishing just how leftist his government's achievements were. For example: given the chronic current problems with lack of housing and soaring homeless numbers, Blair practically eliminated homelessness. Look it up.

This (https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/political-divisions-in-2016-and-beyond) is what the American electorate looks like. Most left policies are popular across the board, but there is no consensus to be found among the electorate.

With Blair it's not that simple. He was not a good friend to unions (https://www.psa.ac.uk/insight-plus/blog/labour-and-trade-unions-lessons-new-labour), for example.

[Pannonian]

This (https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/political-divisions-in-2016-and-beyond) is what the American electorate looks like. Most left policies are popular across the board, but there is no consensus to be found among the electorate.

With Blair it's not that simple. He was not a good friend to unions (https://www.psa.ac.uk/insight-plus/blog/labour-and-trade-unions-lessons-new-labour), for example.

On the first point, have you heard of the slogan, "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime"? Like everything else under Blair, it's catchy, but it also conceals great depth in policy that's decidedly left wing in nature. And like everything else under Blair, it's detested by identity-driven lefties who ignore the substance.

On the second, what does being a good friend to unions mean? Presumably you'd contrast union-unfriendly Blair with union-friendly Corbyn. But Len McCluskey, leader of the biggest union and one of the most influential figures in the Labour party, is detested by the smaller unions and many of the non-union-affiliated Labour people, for driving policies that benefit the leadership rather than the rank and file. Eg. Brexit, which he and the rest of the Labour leadership clique are in favour of, but which is opposed by the overwhelming majority of Labour members and voters. Are unions blocs to be directed by their leaders, or are they collections of individuals to be led by their leaders?

For instance, teachers, who form one of the biggest unionised groups of workers, are pretty unanimous on how Blair kept his promises and more in government (which isn't something to be sniffed at, given the prominence he gave the subject in campaign). Which is more important, the perceived leftwardness of the leader, or the effectiveness of the leader in enacting left wing policies?

[Seamus Fermanagh]

...Most left policies are popular across the board, but there is no consensus to be found among the electorate....

The GOALS of those policies are quite popular. As are some of the programs. Do remember that our electorate is famously happy to support the goal behind a program without wanting to fund it. Who the heck would oppose the idea that everyone should have access to quality medical care? Of course that concept is popular.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Your construction of a "general consensus" IS the ideology, a very specific one.

As for ordinary people, most of them are clearly either conservative or liberal, just passive in their engagement. The people whose voting behavior can be said to be "in the middle" are very few in the United States, and this behavior is typically the refuge of the "innocent and confused."

I'm sorry but I completely disagree.

Talk to most people, especially outside the US, and they have a very hazy notion of any political ideology. Having an ideology is something of a privilege, it requires having the leisure time and/or the education to develop one.

In general, most people want a few things, like enough money to support themselves and their families, to feel safe in their own homes and on their own streets, for their children to have more opportunities than their parents and - most of all - to be left alone to live their own lives.

Ideologues exploit these basic wants and needs to push a systematised agenda. For example, opponents to universal healthcare in the US exploit the fear that rising taxes will prevent people from bettering their own lives and the lives of their children. The fact that such tactics are utterly transparent to you or I is a reflection of our privileged intellectual status.

One of the reasons everybody in the UK is obsessed with Brexit is that it cuts completely across political lines and classes. You might say that it represents a general ideological struggle within the consensus about how we want to be governed. This is, however, an utter aberration in UK politics and should not be taken as in any way indicative of how things are generally.

[Montmorency]

On the first point, have you heard of the slogan, "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime"? Like everything else under Blair, it's catchy, but it also conceals great depth in policy that's decidedly left wing in nature. And like everything else under Blair, it's detested by identity-driven lefties who ignore the substance.

On the second, what does being a good friend to unions mean? Presumably you'd contrast union-unfriendly Blair with union-friendly Corbyn. But Len McCluskey, leader of the biggest union and one of the most influential figures in the Labour party, is detested by the smaller unions and many of the non-union-affiliated Labour people, for driving policies that benefit the leadership rather than the rank and file. Eg. Brexit, which he and the rest of the Labour leadership clique are in favour of, but which is opposed by the overwhelming majority of Labour members and voters. Are unions blocs to be directed by their leaders, or are they collections of individuals to be led by their leaders?

For instance, teachers, who form one of the biggest unionised groups of workers, are pretty unanimous on how Blair kept his promises and more in government (which isn't something to be sniffed at, given the prominence he gave the subject in campaign). Which is more important, the perceived leftwardness of the leader, http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/10/respect-their-authoritay

The bolded - the substance - is actually the key issue, but I'll admit to needing to read more about the issues before I can make an absolute judgement. Blair was indeed to the left of any American president since LBJ, so all relative factors need to be normalized. So I'll pose a couple of questions:

1. Would it be reasonable to say that, for example, Blair's administration did a lot to reduce visible homelessness (rough sleeping), but its simultaneous underinvestment in social housing limited the long-term effectiveness of its policies? If not, why?

2. Do you believe a Blairite platform would be adequate to the needs of the present moment? If so, why? Are there any elements of the Corbyn platform you would prefer to the enactments of the Blair administration?



The GOALS of those policies are quite popular. As are some of the programs. Do remember that our electorate is famously happy to support the goal behind a program without wanting to fund it. Who the heck would oppose the idea that everyone should have access to quality medical care? Of course that concept is popular.

I think the fact is the American people generally want greatly expanded government services and interventions on their behalf, but without any detectable disruptions to government, the economy, or to their own lives. These desires are obviously irreconcilable. At the same time Americans are prone to be accommodating of new spending/programs once they are initiated. It seems like even if an 'idea' has 75% approval, this can never mean 75% active support of any proposal (as opposed to passive assent). Furthermore, the electorate experiences an intrinsic thermostatic reaction to whichever political group is contemporarily perceived to be in power. Strategically then what is the implication? Ram through new programs whenever you have the chance.
:shrug:



Talk to most people, especially outside the US, and they have a very hazy notion of any political ideology. Having an ideology is something of a privilege, it requires having the leisure time and/or the education to develop one.

In general, most people want a few things, like enough money to support themselves and their families, to feel safe in their own homes and on their own streets, for their children to have more opportunities than their parents and - most of all - to be left alone to live their own lives.

I agree. Why do you think I was saying otherwise? I even affirmed that most people are politically "passive."


Ideologues exploit these basic wants and needs to push a systematised agenda.

Yes, and centrism is one such in its prescriptions of what "the people" want, what acceptable goals and constraints there are, what is and is not legitimate... Centrism, like glib revolutionary aesthetic, is routinely a position of privileged intellectual (moreover economic) status.

As I said, most people are consistently either conservative or liberal. That doesn't mean they are sitting around in salons and debate clubs, or all running for city council and school board positions, it means if you ask them some questions about their ethical, political, and economic beliefs and desires and behaviors they will largely trend to one side of a spectrum. This doesn't even have to be especially self-examined, it can arise completely intuitively from personality or ingrained practices. Most political actors are, after all, "low-information."

Of course there will be variations in the details between countries, especially as unique populations and electoral/political systems assimilate themselves to one another in various ways, but this is something that can and needs to be studied in the context of the general fact.


One of the reasons everybody in the UK is obsessed with Brexit is that it cuts completely across political lines and classes. You might say that it represents a general ideological struggle within the consensus about how we want to be governed. This is, however, an utter aberration in UK politics and should not be taken as in any way indicative of how things are generally.


It's a little early to say that. Check to see if Brexit positions are systematically correlated with other variables. Don't be surprised if Britain is in the midst of a political realignment. (I hope you don't react to this by averring that there is no such thing as political realignment.)

[Pannonian]

The bolded - the substance - is actually the key issue, but I'll admit to needing to read more about the issues before I can make an absolute judgement. Blair was indeed to the left of any American president since LBJ, so all relative factors need to be normalized. So I'll pose a couple of questions:

1. Would it be reasonable to say that, for example, Blair's administration did a lot to reduce visible homelessness (rough sleeping), but its simultaneous underinvestment in social housing limited the long-term effectiveness of its policies? If not, why?

2. Do you believe a Blairite platform would be adequate to the needs of the present moment? If so, why? Are there any elements of the Corbyn platform you would prefer to the enactments of the Blair administration?

1. Here's (https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/where-did-all-the-homeless-people-go-557240.html) a read for you. Early on, Blair took personal charge of the issue of homeless. To reduce the visible homeless, he moved them off the streets and into rented accommodation, but he also addressed the causes of homelessness, namely the social issues that led to this state. I can't remember if social housing increased under Blair.

2. None realistic. Times a big number once you factor in Brexit, which Corbyn is in favour of but which Blair opposes. Under Blair, a lot of left wing causes had increased funding in real terms to an extent that I've never seen in any other government (I can remember back to Thatcher). If you were young or old, poor, or serving the human infrastructure (eg. teachers, health service, police), you had it good under Blair. If you were in the middle, you also had it good, in terms of the stability that you got in return for the slight tax increases. None of Corbyn's platform that may be attractive to me is realistic, and I care about realism. Blair's achievements were, of course, realistic, as he's actually done them and they're on historical record.

To translate it to US terms, would you support someone who was nominally speaking in a centre right language, but who could offer the same combination of competence and a willingness to think in centre left terms? Someone whom the centre right can take to in identity, but who will and can enact centre left policies. Sometimes it's not just a matter of how far to the left someone is on the spectrum.

[Montmorency]

1. Here's (https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/where-did-all-the-homeless-people-go-557240.html) a read for you. Early on, Blair took personal charge of the issue of homeless. To reduce the visible homeless, he moved them off the streets and into rented accommodation, but he also addressed the causes of homelessness, namely the social issues that led to this state. I can't remember if social housing increased under Blair.

Is there an analysis that showed it worked beyond the short-term? As I read there has been a major resurgence in homelessness over the past decade. Blair can't be blamed for any Conservative policies but he can be criticized for any inadequacies of his own administration.

Unfortunately Google fails to bring up much granular information on the subject, but I see here (https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/insight/have-the-conservatives-really-built-twice-as-much-council-housing-as-labour-50497) that


The Conservative dominance in the council housebuilding stakes is in fact a quirk of housing policy history. Council housebuilding dropped away as a significant part of country’s output under Margaret Thatcher’s government – falling from 55,200 in her first year in power to just 400 in John Major’s last. This was due to the introduction of the Right to Buy and spending restrictions which prevented councils from building at scale.

The incoming Labour government under Tony Blair did nothing to reverse this position initially. In fact, it took until 2009, under Gordon Brown’s government and then housing minister John Healey, to start any changes. They set in motion plans to give councils control of their own rental income rather than passing it to the Treasury under a model known as self-financing.


Under Blair, a lot of left wing causes had increased funding in real terms to an extent that I've never seen in any other government (I can remember back to Thatcher).

Setting Blair's priorities against Thatcher's of all people can't be informative either historically or in abstract.


If you were young or old, poor, or serving the human infrastructure (eg. teachers, health service, police), you had it good under Blair. If you were in the middle, you also had it good, in terms of the stability that you got in return for the slight tax increases.

What about the people who didn't have it good? How is the legacy to be assessed in the ongoing historical record?


Blair's achievements were, of course, realistic, as he's actually done them and they're on historical record.

Whether he did the best with what was available is controversial.


None of Corbyn's platform that may be attractive to me is realistic, and I care about realism.

What makes something realistic or unrealistic in your opinion, do you think it is possible to change that, and how? Why haven't Margaret Thatcher's policies been the most realistic ones in British history?

From my vantage all proposals of impact are unrealistic until Brexit is resolved - but what then?

Tony Blair, for his part, supports parts of Labour's manifesto (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/03/tony-blair-backs-labour-land-tax-solve-uk-housing-crisis).


To translate it to US terms, would you support someone who was nominally speaking in a centre right language, but who could offer the same combination of competence and a willingness to think in centre left terms? Someone whom the centre right can take to in identity, but who will and can enact centre left policies. Sometimes it's not just a matter of how far to the left someone is on the spectrum.

I care about realism too, and to my knowledge such a fantastical unicorn has never manifested in American history. On rare occasion Left politicians have governed according to left rhetoric, and much more frequently Right politicians have governed according to right rhetoric. In 50 years the best we've had is someone like Obama who pairs center-left rhetoric with center-right governance, which is suboptimal to say the least.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

I agree. Why do you think I was saying otherwise? I even affirmed that most people are politically "passive."

Passivity implies inclination without action - rather I would say the inclination is weak, very, eak, and this is the cause of the perceived passivity.

Here in the UK it's often the case that two parties are generally palatable in a given region or constituency and you can see wide swings election to election.


Yes, and centrism is one such in its prescriptions of what "the people" want, what acceptable goals and constraints there are, what is and is not legitimate... Centrism, like glib revolutionary aesthetic, is routinely a position of privileged intellectual (moreover economic) status.

Centrism is a political ideology in the way that agnosticism is a religion. It has no real central tenets, no systematised program for implementation and no great thinkers.


As I said, most people are consistently either conservative or liberal. That doesn't mean they are sitting around in salons and debate clubs, or all running for city council and school board positions, it means if you ask them some questions about their ethical, political, and economic beliefs and desires and behaviors they will largely trend to one side of a spectrum. This doesn't even have to be especially self-examined, it can arise completely intuitively from personality or ingrained practices. Most political actors are, after all, "low-information."

Of course there will be variations in the details between countries, especially as unique populations and electoral/political systems assimilate themselves to one another in various ways, but this is something that can and needs to be studied in the context of the general fact.

Very few people are going to be in the dead-centre, it is true, but life-long political ideology is not a trend in Europe the way it is the in US. In fact, it seems doubtful it is even an historical trend in the US.

"If You Are Not a Liberal at 25, You Have No Heart. If You Are Not a Conservative at 35 You Have No Brain."

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/

Seems that quote may have originated with an Anglo-Irish statesman.


It's a little early to say that. Check to see if Brexit positions are systematically correlated with other variables. Don't be surprised if Britain is in the midst of a political realignment. (I hope you don't react to this by averring that there is no such thing as political realignment.)

Every party in the UK Parliament has a majority of MP's who are in favour of the EU - the two major parties are currently being led by their respective Eurosceptic wings at the behest of the historically Eurosceptic sections of their respective electorates.

Corbyn and Johnson probably hate each other, and their supporters almost certainly do - a realignment under such circumstances seems unlikely. Rather, it seems we are seeing a paradigm shift within British politics similar to the one which led to the creation of the Welfare State - another momentous event which did not lead to a political realignment.

[Montmorency]

Passivity implies inclination without action - rather I would say the inclination is weak, very, eak, and this is the cause of the perceived passivity.

This is elitism. You assume the natural state of the ordinary citizen is to not have strong political commitments, rather than that most people are confused, bored, enervated, or alienated by the political circus and lack the time or education to engage with it.


Here in the UK it's often the case that two parties are generally palatable in a given region or constituency and you can see wide swings election to election.

Again, this is something you would have to develop empirically. To say that people trend one way or another is not to say that it has always been so, or that it must always remain so. It wasn't like that in the US until our lifetimes, and not all at once. It depends on characteristics of the electorate, the parties, and the issues of the day. In the United States today, it is so. I can't claim to know what's going on in Chile or Lebanon - i haven't checked.


Centrism is a political ideology in the way that agnosticism is a religion. It has

Lol no. It's more like Scientology.


no real central tenets

Hatred of "populism," which entails minimizing democratic input in governance and institutions while maximizing the stability of established actors, especially business. Deregulation, privatization, tax cuts, reliance on conservative economic and sociological expertise. Hostility to criticism of elite persons from below. There's a reason why in the present day it is so frequently identified with intellectual libertarianism and small-c conservatism.


no systematised program for implementation

The general theory of centrist governance is to advance minimally-disruptive (to stakeholders) policy and build out a bespoke coalition "from the center." I know it's what Bill Clinton and Obama explicitly maintained going into their administrations. It was a resounding failure. Practically what centrist intellectuals and policy makers are more concerned with than any policy agenda is neutralizing the influence of the "extremes." Look at Larry Summers telling us that high tax rates on the wealthy are bad because instead of donating to charity the wealthy will support fascism (more).


no great thinkers.

:clown: :smash:


Very few people are going to be in the dead-centre, it is true, but life-long political ideology is not a trend in Europe the way it is the in US. In fact, it seems doubtful it is even an historical trend in the US.

Life-long ideology? As in, you think people outside the US don't tend to form and maintain political orientations durably? What is your evidence for this? I'd be surprised if the matter has even been studied in the English language.


Every party in the UK Parliament has a majority of MP's who are in favour of the EU - the two major parties are currently being led by their respective Eurosceptic wings at the behest of the historically Eurosceptic sections of their respective electorates.

Corbyn and Johnson probably hate each other, and their supporters almost certainly do - a realignment under such circumstances seems unlikely. Rather, it seems we are seeing a paradigm shift within British politics similar to the one which led to the creation of the Welfare State - another momentous event which did not lead to a political realignment.

The realignment in the American party system (well, the 20th century realignment) took place over two generations, though of course it was immediately obvious to any observer by the end of the 1960s. I'm not prepared or equipped to assess early raw evidence in the UK. I'm sure the presence of national parties and the Liberal Democrats (whom I assume British voters interpret as "between" Labour and the Conservatives) complicates the picture. But don't be shocked if it turns out permanent shifts in voting behavior emerge in the medium-term.

There has been something like it happening across the Western world (at least UK, US, France) however, as explored by Thomas Piketty in his latest work. I don't care to look it up for you, but basically the mainstream soc-dem/center-left parties have gradually absorbed the educated and professional classes from the conservative/center-right parties while losing some of their original "working class" base over that time period.

OK fine, here (https://delong.typepad.com/piketty2018.pdf) it is. I've barely looked at it to be honest, who has the patience. You may want to skip to the graphs near the end. The ones simultaneously mapping 20 elections are visually hideous.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

This is elitism. You assume the natural state of the ordinary citizen is to not have strong political commitments, rather than that most people are confused, bored, enervated, or alienated by the political circus and lack the time or education to engage with it.

I'm part of the intellectual elite, so are you, to pretend otherwise is just vanity. It would be like pretending I was working class just because I'm poor. In any case, this is my observation of actually going out and talking to people - most people don't care overmuch about politics, especially when there's no election going on.


Again, this is something you would have to develop empirically. To say that people trend one way or another is not to say that it has always been so, or that it must always remain so. It wasn't like that in the US until our lifetimes, and not all at once. It depends on characteristics of the electorate, the parties, and the issues of the day. In the United States today, it is so. I can't claim to know what's going on in Chile or Lebanon - i haven't checked.

One should always worry about Lebanon - it's one of the most important political loci in the world. Currently they're having a !quiet revolution" that cuts across sectarian boundaries.

Meanwhile, in the UK it's generally accepted that after about 10-15 years you need to "get the other lot in" and only the most staunch supporters of a given party will argue otherwise. This is because people are less strognly wedded to any ideology than the parties are themselves.

British Stoicism - it's even a national trait in Hearts of Iron IV.


Lol no. It's more like Scientology.

Scientology is actually a religion, sorry to tell you.


Hatred of "populism," which entails minimizing democratic input in governance and institutions while maximizing the stability of established actors, especially business. Deregulation, privatization, tax cuts, reliance on conservative economic and sociological expertise. Hostility to criticism of elite persons from below. There's a reason why in the present day it is so frequently identified with intellectual libertarianism and small-c conservatism.

You're just described a mish-mash of Right-Wing policies. Where's the social welfare? The neccesity for charity, both private and public? The provision of necessary regulation on (say) food standards and provision of basic infrastructure (which usually includes healthcare)?

You're just demonstrated you don't know where the centre is outside the US, and that the centre in the US is quite a ways over to the right - not even the Centre-Right in the UK.


The general theory of centrist governance is to advance minimally-disruptive (to stakeholders) policy and build out a bespoke coalition "from the center." I know it's what Bill Clinton and Obama explicitly maintained going into their administrations. It was a resounding failure. Practically what centrist intellectuals and policy makers are more concerned with than any policy agenda is neutralizing the influence of the "extremes." Look at Larry Summers telling us that high tax rates on the wealthy are bad because instead of donating to charity the wealthy will support fascism (more).

Outside the US Obama and Clinton are Right-Wing politicians, Clinton less-so than Obama over all.



:clown: :smash:

:inquisitive:


Life-long ideology? As in, you think people outside the US don't tend to form and maintain political orientations durably? What is your evidence for this? I'd be surprised if the matter has even been studied in the English language.

It's a lot less common.


The realignment in the American party system (well, the 20th century realignment) took place over two generations, though of course it was immediately obvious to any observer by the end of the 1960s. I'm not prepared or equipped to assess early raw evidence in the UK. I'm sure the presence of national parties and the Liberal Democrats (whom I assume British voters interpret as "between" Labour and the Conservatives) complicates the picture. But don't be shocked if it turns out permanent shifts in voting behavior emerge in the medium-term.

There has been something like it happening across the Western world (at least UK, US, France) however, as explored by Thomas Piketty in his latest work. I don't care to look it up for you, but basically the mainstream soc-dem/center-left parties have gradually absorbed the educated and professional classes from the conservative/center-right parties while losing some of their original "working class" base over that time period.

OK fine, here (https://delong.typepad.com/piketty2018.pdf) it is. I've barely looked at it to be honest, who has the patience. You may want to skip to the graphs near the end. The ones simultaneously mapping 20 elections are visually hideous.[/QUOTE]

You've just described New Labour - 24 years ago.

[Montmorency]

I'm part of the intellectual elite, so are you, to pretend otherwise is just vanity. It would be like pretending I was working class just because I'm poor. In any case, this is my observation of actually going out and talking to people - most people don't care overmuch about politics, especially when there's no election going on.

Academics are workers too though (n.b. in the US (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/09/23/trump-labor-board-proposes-new-rule-against-grad-unions) the Trump admin wants to reclassify graduate students so they won't be considered primarily employees and therefore won't have enjoyment of collective bargaining protections). I'm not an academic btw, you are; you should have a keener awareness of these things than I.

I agree that most people "don't care overmuch about politics" - didn't I say as much already? There's a difference between being a junkie or activist and having strong opinions, or durable ones. A component of Trump's base, for example, is uneducated white people who were disconnected from politics but nevertheless maintained strong opinions about what the problems with the United States were (immigrants) and what should be done about them ('remove taco') - all before Trump declared and captured their attention. On the other hand there are Sanders supporters who have long believed things like: politics is rigged; corporations have too much power; the government should do something. Just because many of them were not involved in politics or following politics for a long time (if ever) does not mean they didn't care about anything or that they were purely ambivalent.

Even more broadly are millions of people who habitually vote for either major party but really don't think or talk much about politics besides voting at least half the time and arguing with family or coworkers. That's tens of millions of people for whom it would be wrong to translate a lack of engagement with process into an absence of reformist commitment (in any direction).


One should always worry about Lebanon - it's one of the most important political loci in the world. Currently they're having a !quiet revolution" that cuts across sectarian boundaries.

There have been quite a lot of large protest movements flaring up around the world this year. To the point where I searched, "why so many protests 2019" and it looks like other people (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-50123743) have noticed (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/why-are-there-so-many-protests-across-the-globe-right-now/2019/10/24/5ced176c-f69b-11e9-ad8b-85e2aa00b5ce_story.html) the trend.

I'm pretty sure some aren't mentioned in the linked articles that I've also heard of recently. Indonesia (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/world/asia/indonesia-protests-joko-widodo.html) for example. It makes me think of this song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV4oYkIeGJc) as aspirational, juvenile as it sounds.


Scientology is actually a religion, sorry to tell you.

Yes. You said centrism is to ideology what agnosticism is to religion. I replaced agnosticism with Scientology. Think about the features of Scientology.


You're just described a mish-mash of Right-Wing policies. Where's the social welfare? The neccesity for charity, both private and public? The provision of necessary regulation on (say) food standards and provision of basic infrastructure (which usually includes healthcare)?

You're just demonstrated you don't know where the centre is outside the US, and that the centre in the US is quite a ways over to the right - not even the Centre-Right in the UK.

Outside the US Obama and Clinton are Right-Wing politicians, Clinton less-so than Obama over all.

We all know that US centrist and neoliberal political patterns have been exported around the world, as seen in the reprioritization of many center-left European parties away from major new programs and regulations and taxation in the past couple generations. You couldn't have your Mitterrands and Meidner Plans in 2000. (To paraphrase certain aggrieved comedians, "you can't do that anymore.") As also seen in the Latin American Pink Wave reacting against American-based ideologies in the first fifteen-ish years of the millennium. The center of received economic wisdom shifted decisively to the right after the 1980s, you know that. It's currently experiencing a reversion, possibly.

Obama wasn't to the right of Clinton though, it's the other way around. I'm not closely familiar with all the tax changes under the two administrations (they're mostly pretty minor and technical), but AFAIK Obama injected more new taxation than Clinton, added more regulation to finance and business, did not cut welfare... and of course for all its limitations the Affordable Care Act was the largest downward transfer of wealth in America since Medicare (because ACA expanded* Medicaid and subsidized health insurance). It says a lot that about the baseline of our politics that this could be the case, but thereby alone Obama has to be ranked to the left of Mr. "Third Way" Clinton.


:inquisitive:

What I quoted could be interpreted as unknowingly taking the piss out of centrism.


It's a lot less common.

Let's get our variables straight. There's political behavior, most easily but not solely measured in terms of votes cast. There's the characteristics of the parties themselves in a given system, which may or may not be divergent from one another in various ways or at various times (for example. the assimilation of mainstream parties in many countries to the postwar Keynesian consensus for a few cycles). Then there's people's political beliefs, which are about values and priorities and aren't simply subsumed by electoral politics as a practice. A political issue may be "should we refurbish this bridge or tear it down and build a new one?" A political belief might be that the government should do more to maintain infrastructure. A more detailed political belief might be that the central government should provide grants to local governments to help finance local infrastructure projects. When you talk about people's political beliefs I feel like you're trying to simplify by boiling it all down to one point, which you can't really do.


You've just described New Labour - 24 years ago.

The trend continues, it's worth talking about. One factor may be within the correlation between contemporary "young" people (under 40) and the left, where these age cohorts are also the most educated and professionalized. But it's been intensifying for decades in multiple countries, hence: realignment.

[Shaka_Khan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROQp3pT3BLo

https://www.newsweek.com/china-xi-jinping-donald-trump-trade-war-1470138

TRUMP'S TRADE WAR WITH CHINA HAS 'DAMAGED BOTH ECONOMIES AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC SYSTEM' SAYS EXPERT

[a completely inoffensive name]

Yo, I'm all in on Mayor Pete. Not sure if Warren can win with her optics, but 2020 would be absolutely nuts with a Pete/Sanders ticket.
Show me a more meme inducing ticket.

[Montmorency]

Yo, I'm all in on Mayor Pete. Not sure if Warren can win with her optics, but 2020 would be absolutely nuts with a Pete/Sanders ticket.
Show me a more meme inducing ticket.

I would have a lot of things to say about this development, but it's going to be obsolete within a few months so we might as well keep our powder dry.

I'll drop this (https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/education/profile-in-courage-essay-contest/past-winning-essays/2000-winning-essay-by-peter-buttigieg) though, Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg's high school JFK Library contest-winning essay from 2000:


In this new century, there are a daunting number of important issues which are to be confronted if we are to progress as a nation. Each must be addressed thoroughly and energetically. But in order to accomplish the collective goals of our society, we must first address how we deal with issues. We must re-examine the psychological and political climate of American politics. As it stands, our future is at risk due to a troubling tendency towards cynicism among voters and elected officials. The successful resolution of every issue before us depends on the fundamental question of public integrity.

A new attitude has swept American politics. Candidates have discovered that is easier to be elected by not offending anyone rather than by impressing the voters. Politicians are rushing for the center, careful not to stick their necks out on issues. Most Democrats shy away from the word “liberal” like a horrid accusation. Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush uses the centrist rhetoric of “compassionate conservatism” while Pat Buchanan, once considered a mainstream Republican, has been driven off the ideological edge of the G.O.P. Just as film producers shoot different endings and let test audiences select the most pleasing, some candidates run “test platforms” through sample groups to see which is most likely to win before they speak out on major issue. This disturbing trend reveals cynicism, a double-sided problem, which is perhaps, the greatest threat to the continued success of the American political system.

Cynical candidates have developed an ability to outgrow their convictions in order to win power. Cynical citizens have given up on the election process, going to the polls at one of the lowest rates in the democratic world. Such an atmosphere inevitably distances our society from its leadership and is thus a fundamental threat to the principles of democracy. It also calls into question what motivates a run for office – in many cases, apparently, only the desire to occupy it. Fortunately for the political process, there remain a number of committed individuals who are steadfast enough in their beliefs to run for office to benefit their fellow Americans. Such people are willing to eschew political and personal comfort and convenience because they believe they can make a difference. One outstanding and inspiring example of such integrity is the country’s only Independent Congressman, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders.

Sanders’ courage is evident in the first word he uses to describe himself: “Socialist”. In a country where Communism is still the dirtiest of ideological dirty words, in a climate where even liberalism is considered radical, and Socialism is immediately and perhaps willfully confused with Communism, a politician dares to call himself a socialist? He does indeed. Here is someone who has “looked into his own soul” and expressed an ideology, the endorsement of which, in today’s political atmosphere, is analogous to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Even though he has lived through a time in which an admitted socialist could not act in a film, let alone hold a Congressional seat, Sanders is not afraid to be candid about his political persuasion.

After numerous political defeats in his traditionally Republican state, Sanders won the office of mayor of Burlington by ten votes. A successful and popular mayor, he went on to win Vermont’s one Congressional seat in 1990. Since then, he has taken many courageous and politically risky stands on issues facing the nation. He has come under fire from various conservative religious groups because of his support for same-sex marriages. His stance on gun control led to NRA-organized media campaigns against him. Sanders has also shown creativity in organizing drug-shopping trips to Canada for senior citizens to call attention to inflated drug prices in the United States.

While impressive, Sanders’ candor does not itself represent political courage. The nation is teeming with outspoken radicals in one form or another. Most are sooner called crazy than courageous. It is the second half of Sanders’ political role that puts the first half into perspective: he is a powerful force for conciliation and bi-partisanship on Capitol Hill. In Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy wrote that “we should not be too hasty in condemning all compromise as bad morals. For politics and legislation are not matters for inflexible principles or unattainable ideals.” It may seem strange that someone so steadfast in his principles has a reputation as a peacemaker between divided forces in Washington, but this is what makes Sanders truly remarkable. He represents President Kennedy’s ideal of “compromises of issues, not of principles.”

Sanders has used his unique position as the lone Independent Congressman to help Democrats and Republicans force hearings on the internal structure of the International Monetary Fund, which he sees as excessively powerful and unaccountable. He also succeeded in quietly persuading reluctant Republicans and President Clinton to ban the import of products made by under-age workers. Sanders drew some criticism from the far left when he chose to grudgingly endorse President Clinton’s bids for election and re-election as President. Sanders explained that while he disagreed with many of Clinton’s centrist policies, he felt that he was the best option for America’s working class.

Sanders’ positions on many difficult issues are commendable, but his real impact has been as a reaction to the cynical climate which threatens the effectiveness of the democratic system. His energy, candor, conviction, and ability to bring people together stand against the current of opportunism, moral compromise, and partisanship which runs rampant on the American political scene. He and few others like him have the power to restore principle and leadership in Congress and to win back the faith of a voting public weary and wary of political opportunism. Above all, I commend Bernie Sanders for giving me an answer to those who say American young people see politics as a cesspool of corruption, beyond redemption. I have heard that no sensible young person today would want to give his or her life to public service. I can personally assure you this is untrue.

memes

[Montmorency]

The Attorney General, the Senate Majority leader, and the entire Federalist Society (including its co-founder Steve Calabresi) just reaffirmed that the purpose of the judiciary in their minds is to destroy the Democratic Party and enforce one-party rule. So far so normal - that's not the prompt. I have to write because of two reports this week. First that Trump finally did what he told us he would do since 2015 and retaliated against Jeff Bezos and the fake news Amazon Washington Post through improper interference in billion-dollar federal contracting. Second, those who have been wondering at the mainstream media's objectively pro-Trump slant all these years have yet more confirmation in the disgrace of The Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein that the personal relationships and ideological affinity of the ownership class with Trump will invariably tell in coverage and commentary. State persecution of and editorial bias in the press is a one-two punch, see?

Also, this is Trump, and should be a meme [EDIT: Oh my god, the corresponding video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnBKZRtmu6A) is a vital complement):

https://i.imgur.com/mgR8dHs.jpg

[Shaka_Khan]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/celadon-bankrutpcy-biggest-of-nearly-800-trucking-companies-failures-in-first-three-quarters-of-2019/

In the first three quarters of 2019, nearly 800 carriers went out of business, more than double the count of trucking failures in 2018, according to transportation industry data firm Broughton Capital.

A number of factors are behind the pileup, including escalating insurance costs, tariffs impacting the ability to get cheaper products from China, and a decline in the spot market where shippers book last-minute transportation.

[a completely inoffensive name]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/celadon-bankrutpcy-biggest-of-nearly-800-trucking-companies-failures-in-first-three-quarters-of-2019/

It's fine, those truckers will still vote for him because he is hurting the right people.

[Montmorency]

Trump is well on his way to losing the military (https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2019/12/17/half-of-active-duty-service-members-are-unhappy-with-trump-new-military-times-poll-shows/).

https://i.imgur.com/Q7gm1VH.jpg

Hit me ^ if u want civil-military rltns insite.

[Beskar]

America -
Trump gets impeached
Nothing happens
Trump causes World War 3

[edyzmedieval]

I am absolutely aghast at the fact that this has been done without consulting anyone, so haphazard and with incredibly dangerous consequences.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Someone asked me today - "Why would Trump do this? What was he trying to achieve?"

I opined that he was probably trying to remove this particular Iranian general who has been a thorn in the side of the West for decades and in this he had been successful, and to look for any deeper thinking on Trump's part was probably a mistake.

This is one of those circumstances where we tend to see things a certain way but which history may view differently. The general was, we must remember, in Iraq meeting with dissident militia commanders and Iraq is a US ally - or puppet.

On balance, I would say his assassination will be a net positive for America, but it must be acknowledged that Trump in engaging in a "race to the bottom" where America is starting to use the tactics previous employed by Russia albeit openly and with an air of impunity.

[Beskar]

Someone asked me today - "Why would Trump do this? What was he trying to achieve?"
Horses mouth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QdBPP7nMfI

[Montmorency]

Someone asked me today - "Why would Trump do this? What was he trying to achieve?"

I opined that he was probably trying to remove this particular Iranian general who has been a thorn in the side of the West for decades and in this he had been successful, and to look for any deeper thinking on Trump's part was probably a mistake.

This is one of those circumstances where we tend to see things a certain way but which history may view differently. The general was, we must remember, in Iraq meeting with dissident militia commanders and Iraq is a US ally - or puppet.

On balance, I would say his assassination will be a net positive for America, but it must be acknowledged that Trump in engaging in a "race to the bottom" where America is starting to use the tactics previous employed by Russia albeit openly and with an air of impunity.

There may be good reasons prior administrations declined to kill this man. The capacity to do so was never in question.

As for Iraq being our ally, I doubt our having blown up Suleimani at Baghdad airport is looked upon favorably by anyone (except maybe Saudi Arabia). There's probably a reason Iraqi security forces allowed protesters to breach the US embassy perimeter. Maybe we're just adding reasons.

American foreign policy under Trump in a nutshell (https://www.rt.com/news/471411-us-base-books-bible-flag-syria/):

https://i.imgur.com/RSzFX0O.png

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Horses mouth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QdBPP7nMfI

So Trump, all options exhausted, is going to go to war with Iran to stop them getting Nuclear weapons and taking over the second largest oil reserves in the world?

Or am I just supposed to pay attention to the part where he talks about Obama needing to get reelected and ignore the rest?

See - this is why links require commentary - you can't just fling them out and expect other people to understand your position. Looked at objectively those clips seem to suggest Trump's ultimate, final, plan for Iran was always war - making thisn his opening gambit designed to provoke Iran into attacking the US directly and hence triggering a shooting war with NATO.

Makes Trump look like a genius.

[Montmorency]

So Trump, all options exhausted, is going to go to war with Iran to stop them getting Nuclear weapons and taking over the second largest oil reserves in the world?

Or am I just supposed to pay attention to the part where he talks about Obama needing to get reelected and ignore the rest?

See - this is why links require commentary - you can't just fling them out and expect other people to understand your position. Looked at objectively those clips seem to suggest Trump's ultimate, final, plan for Iran was always war - making thisn his opening gambit designed to provoke Iran into attacking the US directly and hence triggering a shooting war with NATO.

Makes Trump look like a genius.

Huh?

It doesn't take a genius to go to war as an American president - you just do it. Bush wasn't a genius. :creep:

Our ostensible allies (outside Saudi Arabia and Israel) already agree that we're the aggressors, so it's unclear how much pretext they would have to support us militarily even if they wanted to (which they don't).

[edyzmedieval]

European Union members / NATO members that overlap will not support a war, that's very clear.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

European Union members / NATO members that overlap will not support a war, that's very clear.

They may not have a choice.

[edyzmedieval]

They will, no one wants to go in a war with Iran. Nobody.

On top of that, Iran has the 14th most powerful military in the world, so any attempt (yes, just the attempt) of a war is gonna be extremely costly in all terms.

[Pannonian]

They may not have a choice.

Why not? We left the EU because we were being dictated to by other countries, didn't we?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

They will, no one wants to go in a war with Iran. Nobody.

On top of that, Iran has the 14th most powerful military in the world, so any attempt (yes, just the attempt) of a war is gonna be extremely costly in all terms.

On papa Iran has a large army, and it's likely to be well motivated - better than Saddam's in 1991. However, their Air Force is a full generation or more behind the American one and they have no Navy to speak of. A shooting war would begin with a comprehensive bombing campaign and air war that eliminated Iran's remaining air forces, missile forces, rail network and munitions dumps in that order. By the time the American and Iranian armed forces came to grips with each other the latter would be suffering major supply shortages and comprehensive lack of support.

America is very good at prosecuting a conventional war, it's asymmetric warfare they struggle with.

As to invoking the NATO charter - it depends on whether Iran escalates as they've threatened to.


Why not? We left the EU because we were being dictated to by other countries, didn't we?

Are we proposing to leave NATO?

[Pannonian]

Are we proposing to leave NATO?

What has this to do with NATO?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

What has this to do with NATO?

You replied to my comment which was a reply to Edzy.

NATO is America's alliance of its vassals where it uses said vassals to legitimise its wars, been that way for decades.

[Montmorency]

Are we proposing to leave NATO?

What would stop NATO members from contributing token forces according to their view of the direction and degree of aggression between parties?

If someone thinks Turkey, for example, will subject itself to a ground war with Iran for Trump's sake, they've got another thing coming.

[Pannonian]

You replied to my comment which was a reply to Edzy.

NATO is America's alliance of its vassals where it uses said vassals to legitimise its wars, been that way for decades.

How does the UK not have a choice? If we don't have a choice because we're in NATO, will you and others be campaigning to leave NATO? After all, foreign countries telling us what to do was why we left the EU. Does the sovereignty argument not apply when it's Washington ordering us around?

[Pannonian]

What would stop NATO members from contributing token forces according to their view of the direction and degree of aggression between parties?

If someone thinks Turkey, for example, will subject itself to a ground war with Iran for Trump's sake, they've got another thing coming.

NATO members aren't obliged to join in anyway. The treaty applies to North America and Europe.

[Greyblades]

I am suprised the man was stupid enough to leave Iran considering how much of a high value target he was. The timing is rather opportune as well; coming in so soon after the Iranian uprising.

[Crandar]

It's basically his job to be out of Iran. He has made several public appearances in Syria and Iraq before.

[Greyblades]

Head of the Iranian millitary, while also coordinating any number of insurgencies? Its a wonder he wasnt killed sooner if personally running about in enemy territory is a requirement.

[Crandar]

He's not the head of the Iranian military, but the head of a branch (Quds force) of a branch (Revolutionary Guards) of the army that was specialised in foreign operations.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

How does the UK not have a choice? If we don't have a choice because we're in NATO, will you and others be campaigning to leave NATO? After all, foreign countries telling us what to do was why we left the EU. Does the sovereignty argument not apply when it's Washington ordering us around?


NATO members aren't obliged to join in anyway. The treaty applies to North America and Europe.

If Iran retaliates by, say, launching a cyber attack on the US National Grid, shuts down the Eastern Seaboard and people die - that will be considered an attack against NATO. Likewise, if Iran launches assassinations of US military personnel in Europe that will be considered an attack against NATO.

If the US invokes Article Five then the European nations will have no choice but to go along because without the US we cannot collectively oppose Russia - certain key members are not meeting their basic commitments, and others are about to be kicked out.

Hence "no choice".

This is completely different to the EU, which is a political project that the majority of voters rejected - i.e. federalisation.

[Furunculus]

Useful insight:

https://mobile.twitter.com/cdrsalamander/status/1213847638170382337

[Montmorency]

So, Trump has threatened war crimes (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1213593975732527112) against Iran, which I'm sure will be persuasive in gaining the support of NATO allies.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is demanding (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/05/iraq-prime-minister-says-parliament-must-end-foreign-troop-presence-as-soon-as-possible.html) all US forces out of Iraq.


Iraqi parliament calls for US troops to be expelled —coalition suspends operations against ISIS



It's basically his job to be out of Iran. He has made several public appearances in Syria and Iraq before.

Yeah, his was not a desk job.

He wasn't killed before because that would have been a serious and unmistakable act of war (i.e. imprudent).


If Iran retaliates by, say, launching a cyber attack on the US National Grid, shuts down the Eastern Seaboard and people die - that will be considered an attack against NATO. Likewise, if Iran launches assassinations of US military personnel in Europe that will be considered an attack against NATO.

If the US invokes Article Five then the European nations will have no choice but to go along because without the US we cannot collectively oppose Russia - certain key members are not meeting their basic commitments, and others are about to be kicked out.

Hence "no choice".

This is completely different to the EU, which is a political project that the majority of voters rejected - i.e. federalisation.

"Cool. Have a logistics battalion, Yanks."

The implication of a military alliance demanding total commitment is of course a greater cession of sovereignty than economic integration.


Useful insight:

https://mobile.twitter.com/cdrsalamander/status/1213847638170382337

An unhelpful framework IMO. Rather (https://aelkus.github.io/problem/2020/01/04/normal):


People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Karl Rove, attributed, 2004


But I did not write this post because I wanted to offer my opinions about al-Soleimani and American Middle East policy and strategy. There are too many opinions. Many of them are totally useless. And others, even if voiced with great sincerity and erudition, are besides the point regardless. My excavation of the al-Solomeini affair’s context is only the backdrop for my underlying gripe: that we are analyzing any of this with the pretense of seriousness when we have known for some time that President Trump is pathologically unserious. His psychological profile – known to all of us prior to him becoming President – suggests he is incapable of being constrained by reality and will not take responsibility for any of his behaviors. His political profile – evident from the 2016 presidential campaign onwards – suggests his primary aim is to dominate the domestic public space in American politics and by design will tolerate or even cause frequent instability, abrupt policy shifts, baroque palace intrigues, and other quirks of his unique combination of reality TV politics and personalist governance. This has significant domestic consequences, but in the realm of foreign policy and national security it has far more sweeping implications. You see, Trump has a reality distortion field (RDF) that allows him to skillfully shape events in American politics. You do not have to like him to respect his ability to do so. It is what allowed him to become President despite the opposition of both the Republican and Democratic party establishments, even if that opposition was also inept, inconsistent, and weak. You do not have to approve of his actions to understand that something within him made him the man of our particular hour or note that the unique species “Homo Trumpicus” seems to be well-adapted to our current political ecosystem.

Still, it must be said: Trump’s RDF only operates domestically. The farther away one travels from American borders, the weaker the RDF gets. By the time one reaches the assault rifle or IED of a Middle Eastern militiaman, the RDF is nonexistent. But the Middle Eastern militiaman’s behavior is an nonetheless an input to the American domestic system that Trump lords over. And we know that the President and his men are unlikely to respond to such inputs in any way other than what we have repeatedly seen since January 2017. That is, sheer pandemonium. Its impossible to fully enumerate why but I will again make the futile attempt to provide a partially useful summary. The White House is a pirate ship of feuding personal and bureaucratic factions, all of which leak sensitive information promiscuously to the mass media. The President, primus inter pares among his collection of warlords, bandits, and princelings, presides over the chaos when he is not watching TV and shotgunning 12 cans of Diet Coke a day. Typical bureaucratic structures designed for national security policy decision have been hollowed in favor of personal channels, often corresponding as much to the President’s personal financial interests as they do to any publicly declared goal he ostensibly pursues. And as demonstrated by the case of the unfortunate General Flynn it is clear that a good portion of his aides are similarly freelancing, perhaps for multiple foreign and domestic interests. The President hires and fires key cabinet officials like a Hollywood starlet picking up and discarding boyfriends, preventing the building of long-term rapport with any one particular figure. Perhaps foreshadowed by his notorious habit of not paying contractors in private life, the President ultimately owes loyalty to no one but expects absolute loyalty and deference in return. Impulsive decisions by the President – often announced via social media – send his subordinates scrambling to adjust policy and implement them, only for the President to often forget them later and move on.

Worse still, many Trump decisions are slow-walked or even ignored and disobeyed outright, leaving some portions of the government operating more or less autonomously from political control. Even though many of the commands generated by unpredictable firings of synapses in the President’s Diet Coke-addled brain are nonsensical, outrageous, or even insane they are nonetheless lawful orders that must be obeyed. In thwarting his will, Trump’s subordinates go beyond what prior civil servants have done in response to the madness of Richard Nixon and other psychologically (and physiologically) unstable presidents, lending credence to the President’s dark allegations that a “deep state” is out to get him. If the President’s subordinates ignore and undermine his will, he in turn ignores their counsel in favor of insights from network TV shows he obsessively watches. It is said that Ronald Reagan had a “cinematic” style of governance, but the President at heart believes he is a TV character and that the ultimate measure of his performance is how well it plays on TV. The results of this fixation in the national security realm range from comedic to terrifying. We can laugh at the President’s angry tweeting during the 2017-2018 North Korea crisis. But it is much less humorous to observe that the President flew into a rage when he was told that the South Koreans would not move their capital from Seoul and had to be talked out of withdrawing American civilians from the Korean peninsula – a step that would almost certainly be interpreted by the North Koreans as a prelude to war. Trump would not be dissuaded from the course of action, but as his wont eventually dropped it after a fusillade of empty bluster. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, as is the habit of officials during the Trump administration, ignored and thwarted the lawful authority of the President rather than implementing it during this crisis. At least if reports are to be believed, because accounts of the President’s national security decision-making come from large numbers of “officials not authorized to speak on the record” or “individuals with knowledge of the situation.” Anonymous sources.

[...]

When analysts do not trust the President they trust that there are others around him who can moderate, shape, or otherwise direct his tendencies in a certain orderly fashion and impose discipline. This has never been particularly true and – given that Trump has done away with many of the more moderate and established figures of the cabinet – it is far less true today. And in some cases, bizarrely enough, the “adults in the room” have been even more out of touch than the President himself. H.R. McMaster, one such figure expected to guide the President, ended up arguing dubiously for military strikes on North Korea out of the even more dubious presumption that the North Koreans could not be deterred. If individual officials can moderate the President, cumulatively the pandemonium of the administration’s competing personalities and factions negates the benefits of their moderation. And yet, analysts nonetheless seem to persistently tie their hopes to the administration being able to do what it cannot: consistently make responsible national security decisions. For sure, it would be unfair and delusional to blame all of this on Trump himself. He has inherited decades of flawed, compromised, and otherwise difficult policy situations. In many cases he has simply accelerated what otherwise was a slow rot. In some cases he is unfairly blamed merely for highlighting that the rot existed to begin with. And it can be hard to argue that Trumpian chaos and frivolity is uniquely bad when non-Trumpian order and seriousness has brought catastrophe. That being said, the President bears ultimate responsibility for actions taken under his time in office. Quite literally, it is the price of command.

[...]

Each analysis of a core national security decision by the administration will very likely in some way ultimately lead back to the same abhorrent conclusion: that the analyst has devoted far more brainpower towards interpreting a Trump behavior than Trump has in formulating and executing it, that the entire thing is just another episode of the Donald Trump Show, and that we are all hostages to his stochastic narcissism. This is not always true, but is true enough to be one of the few reliable constants of the Trump years. Hence it is understandable that analysts would resist acknowledgement of the situation that confronts them and attempt to persist as if they could dispassionately and professionally evaluate national security policies, strategies, and tactics the way they always have. The alternative is too radically divergent and painful to fully accept.

[...]

During the height of the Bush II administration, Karl Rove is alleged to have said some version of the “we’re an empire now” monologue quoted at the beginning of this post. Setting aside the contentious debate about whether or not Rove – or anyone, really – ever said those words, it seems rather obvious to me that the Trump administration is the apotheosis of what they signify. This requires some further elaboration. If you interpret the Rove pseudo-quote literally, it seems insane. No single administration can control reality! George W. Bush could not simply just tap in the Konami Code and get whatever he wanted!

But the statement is best interpreted the way we interpret Jean Baudrillard’s infamous claim that the Gulf War did not take place. This too is a seemingly bizarre and nonsensical claim that becomes more legible with careful re-reading. The Cold War, Baudrillard observed, was as much conducted via simulations of conflicts that never occurred as it was by actual blood and force of arms. Therefore, it is not particularly surprising that the first Gulf War was rehearsed as a simulation, implemented for the viewing public as a simulation, and consumed in the same manner one might binge-watch a TV show. So we should look at the Rove pseudo-quote in a similar fashion. Let us now return to what Rove supposedly said in 2004. What Rove is “really” saying is that people who “study” mind-independent external reality are suckers. The epistemological equivalent of a Warner Bros cartoon villain building an elaborate (and comically flawed) trap to catch an elusive prey, they attempt in vain to analyze and interpret the news of the day and impose linearity and rationality on what is neither straightforward or rational. And just as soon as they are done doing so, another event occurs that overturns their analysis of the prior event and forces them to once again restart their analysis from scratch. They are passive, forever reacting to a stream of novel stimuli that they must force into fragile and rigid mental models that collapse as soon as they are constructed

[...]

And this, as Henry Farrell argued in 2016, is exactly what Donald J. Trump aspires towards as a politician. To force everyone to react to events he sets into motion, even when they are themselves opportunistic and impulsive reactions to events outside of his control. To keep on analyzing these eruptions and disruptions is mostly to grant this grotesque circus an air of dignity, nobility, and sobriety it does not deserve. This is true of domestic politics, and I see no reason why foreign policy and national security is any different or should be treated any differently. This poses a problem for analysts of all kinds, but particularly defense and security analysts. It gets tiring to say “this is the chaotic and muddled product of a chaotic and muddled administration” over and over again. It negates their unique and hard-earned currencies of expertise. It renders them just another group of people shouting in the cacophonous din of the Trump years, just more noise that can be ignored without much consequence. But this is far better than the fate that awaits those that insist on trying to impose normalizing assumptions on what is profoundly abnormal.

[...]

In many cases, analysts quite literally retreated into analysis of fantasy worlds because dealing with the world as it is today is too great of a burden. Fiction provides order and structure when reality itself feels fictional. If one cannot analyze the fever dream that passes for American national security policy, one can at least argue about how a fictional general ought to have deployed dragons or Star Destroyers. There is, after all, ample precedent too for that. The historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga argued that the late medieval court responded to the increasing savagery and disorder of the world outside by immersing itself in chivalric romanticism and expressions of nostalgia. However, this is not enough. At some point we have to at least momentarily abandon the comfort of childish things and put down the action figures, comic books, and video game controllers to deal with the harsh realities of the adult world. And one of the harshest realities of the adult world is traditionally the child’s realization that the adults themselves are no better than – and are frequently worse than – children. The recognition that the adults will not be coming to the child’s rescue – in part because they cannot be trusted to behave responsibly or benignly – is the basis for the child learning to cope with the world as it is, not as the child wishes it to be. This is not a task that ever naturally stops, it only ceases upon the moment of death.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

He's not the head of the Iranian military, but the head of a branch (Quds force) of a branch (Revolutionary Guards) of the army that was specialised in foreign operations.

The RG are parallel to the nation-state military in Iran. They have their own force structure and, often enough, their own agenda. They do not strictly conform to the dictates and direction of the current elected government. The RG are their own separate military of sorts as well as handling foreign insurgencies and support for guerillas/terrorists/theocratical fellow-travelers and the like. I tend to think of them as being a bit like the NKVD.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

If Iran retaliates by, say, launching a cyber attack on the US National Grid, shuts down the Eastern Seaboard and people die - that will be considered an attack against NATO. Likewise, if Iran launches assassinations of US military personnel in Europe that will be considered an attack against NATO.

If the US invokes Article Five then the European nations will have no choice but to go along because without the US we cannot collectively oppose Russia - certain key members are not meeting their basic commitments, and others are about to be kicked out.

Hence "no choice".

This is completely different to the EU, which is a political project that the majority of voters rejected - i.e. federalisation.

I do not think we have the "smoking gun" needed for an article 5 against Iran. We'd have to show Iranian material support for a terrorist organization that directly attacked one of the member states. Such evidence might exist, but...

[Pannonian]

If Iran retaliates by, say, launching a cyber attack on the US National Grid, shuts down the Eastern Seaboard and people die - that will be considered an attack against NATO. Likewise, if Iran launches assassinations of US military personnel in Europe that will be considered an attack against NATO.

If the US invokes Article Five then the European nations will have no choice but to go along because without the US we cannot collectively oppose Russia - certain key members are not meeting their basic commitments, and others are about to be kicked out.

Hence "no choice".

This is completely different to the EU, which is a political project that the majority of voters rejected - i.e. federalisation.

Has there been any evidence that that will happen? I suppose if Iran makes Sol go supernova, then it would count as affecting North America and Europe too.

Also, isn't NATO a defensive alliance?

[Montmorency]

lol

https://twitter.com/Mustafa_salimb/status/1213822979882143744


“I was supposed to meet Soleimani at the morning the day he was killed, he came to deliver me a message from Iran responding to the message we delivered from Saudi to Iran” Iraqi PM said.

[Crandar]

Cheeto in chief bombed the envoy that participated in an effort to deescalate a middle eastern conflict. Totally not a rogue state the US, just a Muslim terrorist terminated.

[edyzmedieval]

As we get more information about the circumstances, it becomes even mind boggling why this was done.

[Furunculus]

An unhelpful framework IMO. Rather (https://aelkus.github.io/problem/2020/01/04/normal):

entertainingly, i have followed adam aelkus for what must be nearly a decade now.

on the comment itself - i'm not sure i agree that it is unhelpful. yes, he tears down elements of process he doesn't like, but what i think i provided just how much 'deep' state process there is to wade through. i don't think its as rootin' tootin' as steve bannon tweeting trump with the message; "we can bag a big one if you're game for it?"

[Montmorency]

entertainingly, i have followed adam aelkus for what must be nearly a decade now.

on the comment itself - i'm not sure i agree that it is unhelpful. yes, he tears down elements of process he doesn't like, but what i think i provided just how much 'deep' state process there is to wade through. i don't think its as rootin' tootin' as steve bannon tweeting trump with the message; "we can bag a big one if you're game for it?"

Nice.

The bottom line is that the White House (Trump, and his administration) is not a coherent or rational actor, so a standard analysis in terms of institutional Courses of Action and risk calculi is neither descriptive nor predictive of observed behaviors (going back to the beginning).

For all we can speculate Trump did this because he wanted to, in his mind, look tough compared to Jimmy Carter. That is, with no consideration of how this would affect any larger strategy toward Iran because there is no Iran strategy, just a series of "hyperreal" media events.

[Greyblades]

He's not the head of the Iranian military, but the head of a branch (Quds force) of a branch (Revolutionary Guards) of the army that was specialised in foreign operations.

Technically correct, the man was however the most influential 2 star general in the revolutionary guard; the equivalent of the SS or comissariat, politically second only to the ayatolla. I also get the impression the Quds are also the only part of the Iranian millitary with recent combat experience, much of it supporting groups that are currently making american forces lives difficult.

Combined with personally taunting the god emperor (Gee, could it be I'm joking?) the man must have known he had a target on his forhead, making it foolish he was personally running about near a bagdad airport.


Cheeto in chief bombed the envoy that participated in an effort to deescalate a middle eastern conflict. Totally not a rogue state the US, just a Muslim terrorist terminated.

He wasnt some well intentioned diplomat, he was the coordinator of shia insurgents and millitias in the middle east, many of which are outright terrorists.

[Gilrandir]

As we get more information about the circumstances, it becomes even mind boggling why this was done.

To distract everybody from the impeachment ruckus?

[Furunculus]

Nice.

The bottom line is that the White House (Trump, and his administration) is not a coherent or rational actor, so a standard analysis in terms of institutional Courses of Action and risk calculi is neither descriptive nor predictive of observed behaviors (going back to the beginning).

For all we can speculate Trump did this because he wanted to, in his mind, look tough compared to Jimmy Carter. That is, with no consideration of how this would affect any larger strategy toward Iran because there is no Iran strategy, just a series of "hyperreal" media events.

For reference: i do not disagree with anything said by adam - or condone the hit - merely point to the process that evolves the potential of a legitimate target before it is presented as an option to the CINC.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

To distract everybody from the impeachment ruckus?

Possibly. Though to be fair, this individual would have been considered a legit target at any time by our leadership and the strike package was in position. Moreover, the current NCA is not known for waiting for all aspects of a choice to be parsed out prior to making a decision, and there would have been clear pressure to act before the situation changed.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

I do not think we have the "smoking gun" needed for an article 5 against Iran. We'd have to show Iranian material support for a terrorist organization that directly attacked one of the member states. Such evidence might exist, but...


Has there been any evidence that that will happen? I suppose if Iran makes Sol go supernova, then it would count as affecting North America and Europe too.

Also, isn't NATO a defensive alliance?

That's the thing about escalation, you can't necessarily tell where it's going to lead.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51004218

Iran rules out attacks on British targets saying "we are not idiots".

Separately, Britain warns America that attacks on Iranian cultural heritage would be war crimes.

[Greyblades]

"we are not idiots" says the nation that keeps poking the bear.


To distract everybody from the impeachment ruckus?

probably not, Trump's making a fair bit of political hay out of pelosi's hesitation.

[Pannonian]

That's the thing about escalation, you can't necessarily tell where it's going to lead.

You're the one speaking up for backing the Americans in this. Whether there's escalation or not, the Americans began this, so they can deal with it however they want, without our support. If you support tacking us to their military adventures whatever they decide, I will bring back your arguments against the EU. If sovereignty was a good enough argument to take us out of the EU, a solid demonstration of our lack of such will be good enough to take us out of NATO.

[Greyblades]

Considering this was done in retaliation for the iraq embassy attack, one in a tit-for-tat chain reaching back somewhere around about the formation of israel, the first one not the modern spiritual successor or the crusader knock off, I dont think it can be said with confidence who began this.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

You're the one speaking up for backing the Americans in this. Whether there's escalation or not, the Americans began this, so they can deal with it however they want, without our support. If you support tacking us to their military adventures whatever they decide, I will bring back your arguments against the EU. If sovereignty was a good enough argument to take us out of the EU, a solid demonstration of our lack of such will be good enough to take us out of NATO.

Speaking up for?

Where did I say war with Iran was a good idea?

As for comparing NATO and the EU - they're a world away from each other.

[Montmorency]

Technically correct, the man was however the most influential 2 star general in the revolutionary guard; the equivalent of the SS or comissariat, politically second only to the ayatolla. I also get the impression the Quds are also the only part of the Iranian millitary with recent combat experience, much of it supporting groups that are currently making american forces lives difficult.

Combined with personally taunting the god emperor (Gee, could it be I'm joking?) the man must have known he had a target on his forhead, making it foolish he was personally running about near a bagdad airport.

He wasnt some well intentioned diplomat, he was the coordinator of shia insurgents and millitias in the middle east, many of which are outright terrorists.

He's been doing this - business as usual - for decades, and knew he could die at any time from enemy bombs or bullets while abroad. Performing a dangerous job is not inherently foolish. Or if it is, the same applies to Coalition soldiers serving in the area.

This isn't a question of whether Suleimani was a good guy. He certainly wasn't. But he was a major general and a government official, a formal agent of the Iranian state in the same way a CIA director is for the USA, openly assassinated by a state party in broad daylight by massive explosion on the state property of another country, against the wishes of that country's government, while participating in diplomatic liaisons with that government.

The matter here is of an American act of war against at least one country, and the consequences. This was in fact the first time since WW2 that America has killed a major military leader of a foreign country.



For reference: i do not disagree with anything said by adam - or condone the hit - merely point to the process that evolves the potential of a legitimate target before it is presented as an option to the CINC.

More on this (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/killing-of-soleimani-follows-long-push-from-pompeo-for-aggressive-action-against-iran-but-airstrike-brings-serious-risks/2020/01/05/092a8e00-2f7d-11ea-be79-83e793dbcaef_story.html):


Pompeo first spoke with Trump about killing Soleimani months ago, said a senior U.S. official, but neither the president nor Pentagon officials were willing to countenance such an operation.

For more than a year, defense officials warned that the administration’s campaign of economic sanctions against Iran had increased tensions with Tehran requiring a bigger and bigger share of military resources in the Middle East when many at the Pentagon wanted to redeploy their firepower to East Asia.

Trump, too, sought to draw down from the Middle East as he promised from the opening days of his presidential campaign. But that mind-set shifted on Dec. 27 when 30 rockets hit a joint U.S.-Iraqi base outside Kirkuk, killing an American civilian contractor and injuring service members.

On Dec. 29, Pompeo, Esper and Milley traveled to the president’s private club in Florida, where the two defense officials presented possible responses to Iranian aggression, including the option of killing Soleimani, senior U.S. officials said.

Trump’s decision to target Soleimani came as a surprise and a shock to some officials briefed on his decision, given the Pentagon’s long-standing concerns about escalation and the president’s aversion to using military force against Iran.

One significant factor was the “lockstep” coordination for the operation between Pompeo and Esper, both graduates in the same class at the U.S. Military Academy, who deliberated ahead of the briefing with Trump, senior U.S. officials said. Pence also endorsed the decision, but he did not attend the meeting in Florida.

“Taking out Soleimani would not have happened under [former secretary of defense Jim] Mattis,” said a senior administration official who argued that the Mattis Pentagon was risk-averse. “Mattis was opposed to all of this.

Trump, too, sought to draw down from the Middle East as he promised from the opening days of his presidential campaign. But that mind-set shifted on Dec. 27 when 30 rockets hit a joint U.S.-Iraqi base outside Kirkuk, killing an American civilian contractor and injuring service members.

On Dec. 29, Pompeo, Esper and Milley traveled to the president’s private club in Florida, where the two defense officials presented possible responses to Iranian aggression, including the option of killing Soleimani, senior U.S. officials said.

Trump’s decision to target Soleimani came as a surprise and a shock to some officials briefed on his decision, given the Pentagon’s long-standing concerns about escalation and the president’s aversion to using military force against Iran.

One significant factor was the “lockstep” coordination for the operation between Pompeo and Esper, both graduates in the same class at the U.S. Military Academy, who deliberated ahead of the briefing with Trump, senior U.S. officials said. Pence also endorsed the decision, but he did not attend the meeting in Florida.

“Taking out Soleimani would not have happened under [former secretary of defense Jim] Mattis,” said a senior administration official who argued that the Mattis Pentagon was risk-averse. “Mattis was opposed to all of this.

[...]

At every step of his government career, Pompeo has tried to stake out a maximalist position on Iran that has made him popular among two critical pro-Israel constituencies in Republican politics: conservative Jewish donors and Christian evangelicals.

NB Pompeo (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/us/politics/pompeo-christian-policy.html) (promoted from Trump's CIA director to Secretary of State) is an apocalyptic evangelical Christian (https://www.ft.com/content/53087e90-174d-11e9-9e64-d150b3105d21) who believe a final conflict in the Middle East will bring about the Rapture.

Theoretically the Iranians would be licensed to assassinate him.


"we are not idiots" says the nation that keeps poking the bear.

'It all started when the Iranians hit us back.'

[Montmorency]

Speaking up for?

Where did I say war with Iran was a good idea?

As for comparing NATO and the EU - they're a world away from each other.

FYI we rejected the League of Nations in large part due to Article X, which provided for mutual defense against external aggression. This was considered an abrogation of Congressional sovereignty.

[Pannonian]

Speaking up for?

Where did I say war with Iran was a good idea?

As for comparing NATO and the EU - they're a world away from each other.

Is that your way of ensuring that your arguments are only applicable as far as you want them to be? "It's completely different, so the general philosophical argument that was universally applicable when I put it forward without need for specific examples is now completely inapplicable."

1. When the EU tells us to make sure that we comply with mutually agreed laws, it is an intolerable infringement on our sovereignty.
2. When the US tells us to send troops to their foreign adventure without even informing us beforehand, it is just a fact of life.

At least with the EU we knew the rules beforehand. With the US, we learn about it on the news.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

...At least with the EU we knew the rules beforehand. With the US, we learn about it on the news.

Nope. Twitter.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Is that your way of ensuring that your arguments are only applicable as far as you want them to be? "It's completely different, so the general philosophical argument that was universally applicable when I put it forward without need for specific examples is now completely inapplicable."

1. When the EU tells us to make sure that we comply with mutually agreed laws, it is an intolerable infringement on our sovereignty.
2. When the US tells us to send troops to their foreign adventure without even informing us beforehand, it is just a fact of life.

At least with the EU we knew the rules beforehand. With the US, we learn about it on the news.

That was never my argument though, was it, Pan? My argument was that the EU was specifically aiming to create a European Superstate without the consent of the governed peoples (not the plural) and that the ills of the EU has come to out-way the economic benefits.

In the case of NATO I think it's fair to say that with European disarmament we rely on the US for our safety against Russia. If the US continues to elect Trump and we rearm that calculation might change - but Trump can only be elected once more and we aren't likely to rearm.

[Greyblades]

He's been doing this - business as usual - for decades, and knew he could die at any time from enemy bombs or bullets while abroad. Performing a dangerous job is not inherently foolish. Or if it is, the same applies to Coalition soldiers serving in the area.
The coalition soldiers dont have the entirety of the nations armed forces abroad relying upon their continued leadership, he had subordinates he could use as intermediary, the iranians have diplomats; needlessly exposing himself to the enemy's air superiority was foolish simply as evidenced by the red smear he became. It is doubly so for the void in command his death left and that iran now is attempting to fill.


This isn't a question of whether Suleimani was a good guy. He certainly wasn't. But he was a major general and a government official, a formal agent of the Iranian state in the same way a CIA director is for the USA, openly assassinated by a state party in broad daylight by massive explosion on the state property of another country, against the wishes of that country's government, while participating in diplomatic liaisons with that government.
Fairly sure sulemani didnt have diplomatic status/immunity, the western media would be raving it about if he did.


The matter here is of an American act of war against at least one country, and the consequences. This was in fact the first time since WW2 that America has killed a major military leader of a foreign country.

Baghdadi and Bin laden didnt count apparantly. Is it the stable borders that makes this millitary leader special or the fact they got the bullet instead of the Tomohawk missile?

As much as I doubt that it has been so long since the US has killed a millitary leader (the CIA would probably dispute such) is it so because the US has some chivalric code or is it because this guy is the first one foolish enough to personally poke his head into american controlled airspace?


'It all started when the Iranians hit us back.'

Funny you should say that when currently it is the iranians who are crying about being hit back.

[edyzmedieval]

For the record, let us remember where all of this started - the 1953 Iranian Coup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

ttps://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690363402/how-the-cia-overthrew-irans-democracy-in-four-days (https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690363402/how-the-cia-overthrew-irans-democracy-in-four-days)

[Greyblades]

No it all started in 632 when noone could agree on who should be calif.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

No it all started in 632 when noone could agree on who should be calif.

Any historical "start point" to the current state of affairs is arguable. The current government of Iran was promulgated in 1979 following the White Revolution. That could be used as a start point. As could the first change in power under that constitution following the death of Khomeini. Or, quite validly, the 1953 coup pushed by the USA and UK that returned autocratic power to the anti-communist shah displacing the elected prime minister as head of government. Again, one could start the story in 1941 with the Soviet occupation of Tehran to support the removal of the father of the 1953 coup's power recipient -- who had himself seized power in 1921. Or you could date if from the period of Ottoman rule, or the impact of the Mongol invasion, or -- yes -- the dispute over the succession to the Prophet Mohammed. Heck, you could even make a case for the lasting impact of Megos Alexandros' absorption of the Persian empire by the classical "West" following Gaugamela in the 4th century BCE.

As there are enough of those still alive from the 1953 event to tell the story, and the first generation of those raised as children by those impacted by 1953 are often the ones in power at present, it is a pretty reasonable start point to explain the thinking underpinning the current set of events.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Any historical "start point" to the current state of affairs is arguable. The current government of Iran was promulgated in 1979 following the White Revolution. That could be used as a start point. As could the first change in power under that constitution following the death of Khomeini. Or, quite validly, the 1953 coup pushed by the USA and UK that returned autocratic power to the anti-communist shah displacing the elected prime minister as head of government. Again, one could start the story in 1941 with the Soviet occupation of Tehran to support the removal of the father of the 1953 coup's power recipient -- who had himself seized power in 1921. Or you could date if from the period of Ottoman rule, or the impact of the Mongol invasion, or -- yes -- the dispute over the succession to the Prophet Mohammed. Heck, you could even make a case for the lasting impact of Megos Alexandros' absorption of the Persian empire by the classical "West" following Gaugamela in the 4th century BCE.

As there are enough of those still alive from the 1953 event to tell the story, and the first generation of those raised as children by those impacted by 1953 are often the ones in power at present, it is a pretty reasonable start point to explain the thinking underpinning the current set of events.

1953 is an important index point but I think 1979 is probably more important to modern Iranians, even the older generation - of course that's our fault too.

As regards the assassination, my understanding is that the general was in the country to meet with non government militias - militias which tend to undermine the credibility of the elected government. This is not to excuse the fact the general was assassinated but Greyblades is right - this is basically the same as the assassination of Bin Laden (that was a kill or capture missions, note kill comes first).

[Greyblades]

Any historical "start point" to the current state of affairs is arguable. The current government of Iran was promulgated in 1979 following the White Revolution. That could be used as a start point. As could the first change in power under that constitution following the death of Khomeini. Or, quite validly, the 1953 coup pushed by the USA and UK that returned autocratic power to the anti-communist shah displacing the elected prime minister as head of government. Again, one could start the story in 1941 with the Soviet occupation of Tehran to support the removal of the father of the 1953 coup's power recipient -- who had himself seized power in 1921. Or you could date if from the period of Ottoman rule, or the impact of the Mongol invasion, or -- yes -- the dispute over the succession to the Prophet Mohammed. Heck, you could even make a case for the lasting impact of Megos Alexandros' absorption of the Persian empire by the classical "West" following Gaugamela in the 4th century BCE.

As there are enough of those still alive from the 1953 event to tell the story, and the first generation of those raised as children by those impacted by 1953 are often the ones in power at present, it is a pretty reasonable start point to explain the thinking underpinning the current set of events.


Forgive me, I forgot for the upteenth time to indicate my glibness.

In more serious terms I would point to 1901, where the 60 year term oil concession was signed that would lead to the foundation of the anglo-persian oil company, as being the starting point.

The perception of that concession being unfair was the motivation behind a renegociation in 1935 and mossadegh attempting to renege on the agreement in 1951, which provoked the british to embargo iran. Mossadegh proceeded to spiral in an (ironically considering he was persian) roman fasion; getting emergency powers through popular pressure against the shah, making massive societal reforms with said powers.

This ended up losing him support in parliament as his increasingly dictatorial actions alienated parts of his ruling coalition, combined with the british and american campaign of bribery put the kibosh on his ability to govern without the emergency powers. Faced with an increasingly shakey position he called a referendum, seeking popular approval to dissolve parliament and further extend his emergency powers, this he won in a remarkably corrupt fasion (seperate polling booths for yes or no, "suprisingly" ending up with 99% approval).

This display of amazingly bad politics combined with the economic depression the embargo had plunged iran into ended up turning everyone against him and pretty much handed the CIA the means of coup on a silver platter.

These details tends to be deemphasized in popular recollections of the event, or even left out completely. For some reason.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

1953 is an important index point but I think 1979 is probably more important to modern Iranians, even the older generation - of course that's our fault too...

Not entirely. Events in real life are democratic in that all parties to them get a 'vote' in the outcome. Certainly actions and inactions taken by the USA at the time played a major role, but the Khomeini and others were their own agents in enacting events too. Not all of their behavior or choices were simply reactive to those actions and decisions made by the West.

Though I tend to agree that the events of 1979/80 and their aftermath are the most salient for understanding the current state of affairs.

[Csargo]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51028954

Missiles fired at US military bases in Iraq.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51028954

Missiles fired at US military bases in Iraq.

Reasonably proportionate response, overall.

[Montmorency]

That was never my argument though, was it, Pan? My argument was that the EU was specifically aiming to create a European Superstate without the consent of the governed peoples (not the plural) and that the ills of the EU has come to out-way the economic benefits.

In the case of NATO I think it's fair to say that with European disarmament we rely on the US for our safety against Russia. If the US continues to elect Trump and we rearm that calculation might change - but Trump can only be elected once more and we aren't likely to rearm.

Your calculation appears to be that the UK can afford to leave the EU but cannot afford to leave NATO; it seems to me more the other way around. The US and EU all have their overall interests - balance of powers, maintenance of trade, territorial integrity - aligned with each other. This is the case whether the UK is in or out of NATO. Whereas if it were not the case, NATO would be basically inoperative and irrelevant to British security.


The coalition soldiers dont have the entirety of the nations armed forces abroad relying upon their continued leadership, he had subordinates he could use as intermediary, the iranians have diplomats; needlessly exposing himself to the enemy's air superiority was foolish simply as evidenced by the red smear he became. It is doubly so for the void in command his death left and that iran now is attempting to fill.

I don't think you understand what his job was. Air superiority had never been a problem before because he was protected by his position; usually it would have been a safe bet the US wouldn't be so foolish as to strike at him. What information do you have on any void created by his death?


Fairly sure sulemani didnt have diplomatic status/immunity, the western media would be raving it about if he did.

Diplomatic immunity? He had the immunity of being a high-ranking government official. Countries don't kill those unless they're at war or are overthrowing governments. In the abstract that's why the US, when it wants someone dead, relies on local proxies for plausible deniability. We could always have bombed Castro into oblivion, for example, but that looks a little worse than funding locals who already want to kill him (as seen successfully in many Latin American coups, unsuccessfully in the Bay of Pigs debacle).


Baghdadi and Bin laden didnt count apparantly.

We were already occupying half of Syria, so killing another terrorist in Syria (who the government, and pretty much all other governments, wanted dead anyway) isn't going to raise a fuss.

Pakistani sovereignty complaints were raised in the Bin Laden raid. It has permanently damaged our relations with them.

Importantly, neither were officials of recognized governments.


As much as I doubt that it has been so long since the US has killed a millitary leader (the CIA would probably dispute such) is it so because the US has some chivalric code or is it because this guy is the first one foolish enough to personally poke his head into american controlled airspace?

Most heads are free to poke because we don't normally bomb them when they're on official business. Unless we're at war. Because killing another country's officials is an act of war. It wouldn't be a good precedent to set for the sake of our own bureaucrats. Remember that our administration says it doesn't want war with Iran.

The last time the United States killed a major military leader in a foreign country was during World War II, when the American military shot down the plane carrying the Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto as revenge for Pearl Harbor.


Funny you should say that when currently it is the iranians who are crying about being hit back.

An Iraqi Shiite militia with Iranian ties killed an American, for which we assassinated an Iranian major general, a deputy chairman, a brigadier general, a major, a colonel, a captain, and various bureaucrats. Iran doesn't have to be a good actor for the United States to be a bad actor.


As there are enough of those still alive from the 1953 event to tell the story, and the first generation of those raised as children by those impacted by 1953 are often the ones in power at present, it is a pretty reasonable start point to explain the thinking underpinning the current set of events.

We're talking about American-Iranian relations here, so everything else is a distraction.

More importantly, we have all the instances after 1953 of America actively working to undermine the Iranian government and kill Iranians - even when Iran works toward a compromise. The Iran-Iraq war is the inflection point everyone currently remembers there. But after the two-punch of Bush and Trump, Iran would be crazy ever to deal with us in good faith again.


As regards the assassination, my understanding is that the general was in the country to meet with non government militias - militias which tend to undermine the credibility of the elected government. This is not to excuse the fact the general was assassinated but Greyblades is right - this is basically the same as the assassination of Bin Laden (that was a kill or capture missions, note kill comes first).

That is very incorrect on both counts. The PMF are formally part of Iraq's military organization, just like the similarly-autonomous Kurdish peshmerga, going up to the civilian leadership of the Iraqi PM; the Iraqi government is not unaware of their ties to Iran. Suleimani was first of all there to meet the Iraqi PM on matters of international politics, as I posted just recently. Osama bin Laden was not a part of any government, let alone a major figure. These are not incidental details.



https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51028954

Missiles fired at US military bases in Iraq.

Wow, that's it? Keeping it low-key, if there isn't something else on the pike.

[Pannonian]

That was never my argument though, was it, Pan? My argument was that the EU was specifically aiming to create a European Superstate without the consent of the governed peoples (not the plural) and that the ills of the EU has come to out-way the economic benefits.

In the case of NATO I think it's fair to say that with European disarmament we rely on the US for our safety against Russia. If the US continues to elect Trump and we rearm that calculation might change - but Trump can only be elected once more and we aren't likely to rearm.

When we joined NATO, it was a defensive bloc against the USSR and its satellites. The USSR and its empire are now gone, but NATO's remit has expanded and its advocates are now saying that we should send troops into the middle east for things that have nothing to do with its original purpose. Shouldn't we leave such an organisation that has expanded its goals so far beyond those for which we originally joined? Were we asked for our consent when it changed its goals?

[rory_20_uk]

When we joined NATO, it was a defensive bloc against the USSR and its satellites. The USSR and its empire are now gone, but NATO's remit has expanded and its advocates are now saying that we should send troops into the middle east for things that have nothing to do with its original purpose. Shouldn't we leave such an organisation that has expanded its goals so far beyond those for which we originally joined? Were we asked for our consent when it changed its goals?

Very good points.

How fortunate that we can not be forced to send troops on such deployments, do not have our laws altered by NATO to force us to do so and so allows us to maintain our national sovereignty. Might these paralells demonstrate the differences between a confederation with mutual principles and something that started out like this but expanded to force a political and economic union.

~:smoking:

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

When we joined NATO, it was a defensive bloc against the USSR and its satellites. The USSR and its empire are now gone, but NATO's remit has expanded and its advocates are now saying that we should send troops into the middle east for things that have nothing to do with its original purpose. Shouldn't we leave such an organisation that has expanded its goals so far beyond those for which we originally joined? Were we asked for our consent when it changed its goals?

Russia may not be the USSR but they still have a larger conventional military, larger population and more natural resources than Western and Central Europe combined. When we joined NATO we had the second largest battlefleet in the world, now that fleet is virtually useless for its intended purpose. When we joined NATO we had a massive airforce including hundreds of strategic bombers and the ability to single-handedly flatten most other European countries in a 1v1 fight.

NATO has become essential to our defence because we have sacrificed the ability to defend ourselves.

Unless you are suggesting we rearm?

It's not as easy as this, you know:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUxIUkoDTY

[Pannonian]

Russia may not be the USSR but they still have a larger conventional military, larger population and more natural resources than Western and Central Europe combined. When we joined NATO we had the second largest battlefleet in the world, now that fleet is virtually useless for its intended purpose. When we joined NATO we had a massive airforce including hundreds of strategic bombers and the ability to single-handedly flatten most other European countries in a 1v1 fight.

NATO has become essential to our defence because we have sacrificed the ability to defend ourselves.

Unless you are suggesting we rearm?

It's not as easy as this, you know:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUxIUkoDTY

What are we re-arming for? Why are we getting involved in these affairs? It's not as though we have a say. We had more say in the EU than you propose for our part in NATO.

Do we get to vote on whether we send our troops to this Iranian kerfuffle?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

What are we re-arming for? Why are we getting involved in these affairs? It's not as though we have a say. We had more say in the EU than you propose for our part in NATO.

Do we get to vote on whether we send our troops to this Iranian kerfuffle?

I think you're being needlessly obtuse now. The point of re-armament is to be less dependent on America and therefore to not need to acquiescence to American adventurism.

At present we are, in reality, almost totally dependent on America because we has chosen to progressively disarm to the point that we are no longer able to protect our own interests. This was illustrated to great embarrassment earlier this year when Iranian was able to size a British-flagged merchant ship with impunity. On a very basic level your military needs to be large enough to make any potential enemy fighting you is more trouble than it's worth - this is how countries like Switzerland maintain their independence - not through having a huge army but through having an army large enough to act as a deterrent.

Britain should make the same calculation, except that we are an island nation dependent on international imports of basic necessities from all over the world, we need a disproportionately large Navy to be able to protect our interests. Then we need an army and air force large enough that should the Navy be defeated we can stave off invasion long enough to make it unattractive. At present we are severely under-strength against this metric in all three areas. and this is why other countries can push us around.

The mistake made by the Entente after World War I was to treat the peace as perpetual so that the Axis believed they could capture all of Europe and hold it with an acceptable cost in men an materials. As it happens, they were only wrong because Britain chose to keep fighting and out massive fleet and air-force allowed us to hold of the Axis whilst we rearmed and persuaded the Americans to join in. Even then, it was a close-run thing.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Russia may not be the USSR but they still have a larger conventional military, larger population and more natural resources than Western and Central Europe combined. When we joined NATO we had the second largest battlefleet in the world, now that fleet is virtually useless for its intended purpose. When we joined NATO we had a massive airforce including hundreds of strategic bombers and the ability to single-handedly flatten most other European countries in a 1v1 fight.

NATO has become essential to our defence because we have sacrificed the ability to defend ourselves.

Unless you are suggesting we rearm?

I dispute your figures. European Populations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_population). European GDP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_GDP_(nominal)). Countries by military expenditure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures). Countries by military size (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_military_and_paramilitary_personnel). Countries by military power (https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing-europe.asp) (Russian not listed, but Belarus is; presuming Russia to be thrice as powerful as Belarus puts Russia on a par with Germany).

In short, Russia has numbers but not quality -- par for the course over history -- making them almost immune to conventional European aggression, but substantially less of an aggressive threat to NATO. Russia maintains and is modernizing a strategic nuclear strike force (still have some liquid fueled for heaven's sake). Barring a full-up nuclear exchange, the Russian threat to Central and Western Europe is limited.

[Greyblades]

No war today gents.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

No war today gents.

OK thanks.

*Goes back to fighting Russia in HOI4.*

In all seriousness, my figures may have been inflated but I stand by my general point that European readiness is dangerously low. Last year it was reported that almost all of Germany's Eurofighters were grounded due to them not springing for an updated part and the old part no longer being produced. Then it was reported they had rejected a new frigate after sea trials. Even the Heer is considered to be in pretty poor shape, literally, a couple of years back it was reported some German tankers were too fat to fit their tanks. Probably not literally, but in the sense that they couldn't operate them efficiently.

France also has issues, chiefly that they never ordered their second aircraft carrier to be built despite having a "two carrier navy".

[Pannonian]

OK thanks.

*Goes back to fighting Russia in HOI4.*

In all seriousness, my figures may have been inflated but I stand by my general point that European readiness is dangerously low. Last year it was reported that almost all of Germany's Eurofighters were grounded due to them not springing for an updated part and the old part no longer being produced. Then it was reported they had rejected a new frigate after sea trials. Even the Heer is considered to be in pretty poor shape, literally, a couple of years back it was reported some German tankers were too fat to fit their tanks. Probably not literally, but in the sense that they couldn't operate them efficiently.

France also has issues, chiefly that they never ordered their second aircraft carrier to be built despite having a "two carrier navy".

If you are so concerned about our weakness and unreadiness as a stand alone country, why is it so critical that we remain part of one group while we absolutely must leave another group as a matter of sovereignty? If we cannot stand alone as Britain because we are more efficient at looking after our interests as part of a larger group, why do we have to leave the larger group?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

If you are so concerned about our weakness and unreadiness as a stand alone country, why is it so critical that we remain part of one group while we absolutely must leave another group as a matter of sovereignty? If we cannot stand alone as Britain because we are more efficient at looking after our interests as part of a larger group, why do we have to leave the larger group?

The cost/benefit analysis is different. As I indicated, this is not about "efficiency" but about a defeatist attitude.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

These last few posts could be shunted to their own thread on UK rearmament.

This impeachment effort is ghastly to watch or listen to. But at least I can get to vote against him come November.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

These last few posts could be shunted to their own thread on UK rearmament.

This impeachment effort is ghastly to watch or listen to. But at least I can get to vote against him come November.

Sorry.

I'd start that thread but it would be me writing a long speel about how we should rearm, what that should look like, how a large but not super-power level country should conduct itself on the World Stage etc.

That all the Americans would slap me on the back for having a backbone and all the Brits would decry me for taking money form the NHS/disrupting the flow of trade.

Where are we impeachment now?

Has he been formally impeached or have they put it off?

[Seamus Fermanagh]

The HoR has voted two articles of impeachment. Yesterday they voted to forward those to the Senate for trial. They will be formally accepted today (Thursday 16 Jan). The Senate is currently set to begin votes on trial proceedings and particulars early next week.

No pundit is suggesting that the vote at the conclusion of the trial will remove Trump from office. All the discussion is centering on:

Who if anyone will break party ranks to vote against their "party's stance" on impeachment?

Will their be witnesses in addition to the evidence for removal proffered by the House Managers?

Will the whole thing run up to or past the Iowa Caucuses and, if so, what impact will that have on Dem candidates (since two of the top four will be sitting in the Senate trial and not out campaigning 6 days of each trial week)?

How will voters in the early states react to the information brought forward in the trial?

[Montmorency]

A Very Stable Genius. Book.

Trump, unsurprisingly for those who knew what impoundment (https://www.gao.gov/mobile/products/B-331564) is, violated impoundment law in his corrupt extortion of Ukraine.

Brazil's culture minister fired (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-51149224) for espousing Nazi ideology as the future of - what's Portuguese for Volksgemeinschaft?

Monty calls CSPAN about impeachment: https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1197573672313200640

[Beskar]

Monty calls CSPAN about impeachment: https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1197573672313200640
Trust you.

[Montmorency]

Trust you.

Different Monty!


An even cooler story of an even Realer American, Daniel Burke (https://obituaries.eagletribune.com/obituary/daniel-burke-770791971).


TUALATIN, Ore. — Daniel Edward Burke, of Tualatin, Ore., passed away peacefully on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at age 73, following an extended illness.
Dan was born June 17, 1936, in Lawrence. He went to school in Lawrence through his first years of college, received a bachelor's degree from the University of Hawaii, and an master's degree in political science from the University of Oregon.
Dan married Suzanne Dillard-Burke in 1986. He was preceded in death by his parents, Daniel and Theresa Burke, and his brother, David. Dan is survived by his loving wife Suzanne; his brother, Robert (Mona); his sister, Anne; his son, Erik (Jessyca); his grandson, Finnian, and nieces, nephews, and brothers and sisters-in-law. Dan was a generous and caring person who will be deeply missed by his family and friends.
Dan served in the U.S. Army, attended the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., and then served as a Korean interpreter. Dan worked for four years with the Multnomah County Sheriff's office, and ran his own closeout specialist business, KIRE Distributors, for the next 28 years until his illness.
Dan had a large appetite for life and gift for languages. He spoke Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Polish, and Yiddish and was conversational in several other languages. He loved to sing and enjoyed the original Latin Mass. Dan liked to work on math problems and logic puzzles, and was a voracious reader. He loved to spend time with his wife and family and enjoyed several trips to Europe and China with his wife Suzanne. Throughout his life, Dan closely followed political and social causes, and was always an advocate for the underdog.
https://i.imgur.com/dBdFkeN.jpg
https://media.giphy.com/media/5BidlV8vORHC8/giphy.gif

[Montmorency]

Wow, remember a couple years back when we used to joke about Trump's Stalinist impulses around presenting his in-group vs. out-group?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/national-archives-exhibit-blurs-images-critical-of-president-trump/2020/01/17/71d8e80c-37e3-11ea-9541-9107303481a4_story.html


The large color photograph that greets visitors to a National Archives exhibit celebrating the centennial of women’s suffrage shows a massive crowd filling Pennsylvania Avenue NW for the Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration.

The 49-by-69-inch photograph is a powerful display. Viewed from one perspective, it shows the 2017 march. Viewed from another angle, it shifts to show a 1913 black-and-white image of a women’s suffrage march also on Pennsylvania Avenue. The display links momentous demonstrations for women’s rights more than a century apart on the same stretch of pavement.

But a closer look reveals a different story.

The Archives acknowledged in a statement this week that it made multiple alterations to the photo of the 2017 Women’s March showcased at the museum, blurring signs held by marchers that were critical of Trump. Words on signs that referenced women’s anatomy were also blurred.

A placard that proclaims “God Hates Trump” has “Trump” blotted out so that it reads “God Hates.” A sign that reads “Trump & GOP — Hands Off Women” has the word Trump blurred out.

“As a non-partisan, non-political federal agency, we blurred references to the President’s name on some posters, so as not to engage in current political controversy,” Archives spokeswoman Miriam Kleiman said in an emailed statement.

Holy maloney, but it does track with his hollowing out of the bureaucracy and its replacement with personal whim and conditioned obsequiousness. Recall the similar but more dangerous (?) manipulation of official weather projections that did not comport with Trump's proclamations this past September.


(Just to be clear, National Archives have apologized (https://twitter.com/USNatArchives/status/1218613275656687621) and promised to replace the image.)

[Montmorency]

https://soundcloud.com/the-daily-beast-politics/lev-parnas-audio

Video reminder, too, of how stupid everything is.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYc8UXhjLH0&feature=emb_title

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I was surprised by the second article of impeachment. It was an interesting take that the managers proffered.

[Montmorency]

Impeachment:

The White House defense, as an extension of its revival of the failed theory that "if the president does it it's not illegal/corrupt," is that "If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment."

Aside from providing a pretext for establishing the first Galactic Empire autocracy, the logic entails:

Any of the fake news about malfeasance by Obama and Clinton would be above challenge if real.

"Controversial" doctrines of executive power with no direct foundation in the Constitution would a fortiari invalidate the textually-defined recourse to impeachment for all presidents past and future.

A communist president could literally justify installing the dictatorship of the proletariat.


Ultimately the Republican argument is much simpler and more coherent than many would like to admit in polite company, namely IOKIYAR.

[a completely inoffensive name]

"The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security.Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy—not that this is the intention of the generality of them. Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected. When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.'" -Alexander Hamilton, 1792

[Greyblades]

Trump's aquitted, as everyone knew he would be.

Romney crossed the isle but noone followed, only real thing to come out of the proceedings is to show how out of step he is with the rest of the party

Well, only thing aside from an expected clinton style bump in the polls for Trump.

[Montmorency]

Trump's aquitted, as everyone knew he would be.

Romney crossed the isle but noone followed, only real thing to come out of the proceedings is to show how out of step he is with the rest of the party

Well, only thing aside from an expected clinton style bump in the polls for Trump.

Romney's defection was a 50/50 prediction for me, but it's useful inasmuch as it relieves Dems and hampers Repubs in close races. The media also loves a "conservative maverick" so he'll always have a home on that welfare circuit, but it was somewhat brave of him to stick his neck out - undoubtedly he has thousands of redcaps out for his and his family's blood now. At least he can, unlike others, afford any amount of security personnel.

It seems doubtful an unpopular president in a popular impeachment can get a popularity boost that a popular president didn't get following an unpopular impeachment.

23290


In other news, Trump is openly purging (https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-nw-vindman-impeachment-white-house-pentagon-20200207-qa4vvljdznayzcdelngel2jp7e-story.html) everyone who testified against him and vowing revenge. Also neat that he reaffirms (https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-ties-impeachment-to-russiagate-claims-he-may-have-been-removed-if-he-hadnt-fired-james-comey/) his belief that firing Comey saved his presidency.

https://i.imgur.com/gqPkYQv.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Pox8bJH.jpg

[Viking]

Ueland, eh? That's also the name of one of the widest streets (https://www.google.com/maps/@59.9389779,10.7500148,3a,75y,189.01h,88.65t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sDqf-Bs2yfxFzkg5TyxHp9w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=no) in Oslo. Possibly a little crossover here between that other topic and a specific scenario concerning migration to the US you wanted me to address. Funny.

[Beskar]

Like John McCain was, Romney is pretty much one of the last Republicans keeping the lights on when it comes to the Republican party having any kind of moral backbone or honour.

[Greyblades]

Great, first mccain, then the bushes, now romney. Is there any neocon warmonger the left wont rehabilitate for providing token resistance to trump?

Honour? Moral backbone? We knew they didnt have that when they headed the republican party and they most certainly dont now. What motivates them isnt some higher standard; it's bitterness for rendering their wing of the party impotent.

So wound up they'd embrace the devil if he spits in trump's direction, its derangement, truly.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Great, first mccain, then the bushes, now romney. Is there any neocon warmonger the left wont rehabilitate for providing token resistance to trump?

Honour? Moral backbone? We knew they didnt have that when they headed the republican party and they most certainly dont now. What motivates them isnt some higher standard; it's bitterness for rendering their wing of the party impotent.

So wound up they'd embrace the devil if he spits in trump's direction, its derangement, truly.

I think you're both partially wrong, which is better than being partially right because it offers the opportunity for reflection.

On the one hand Rommey is more towards the Centre-Right (remember Rommeycare?) and doubtless finds Trump difficult to stomach at the best of time. On the other hand, being offended by Trump is a very low bar, morally speaking, and Rommey's 2012 presidential run, and his Primary campaign, helped to pave the way for Trump by pandering to the far-right.

[Greyblades]

Pandering to the far right helped cause trump? If you mean by the way his like failed to live up to the pandering when it came to action the electorate wanted: yes. If you mean he somehow turned the electorate "far right" through his pandering: no.

Trump came about because much of what he promised to do the neocon republicans had pledged to do themselves since the days of Reagan and failed to even attempt since Bush Sr. Intentionally or not; they could only fail so long before the electorate looked elsewhere.

[Montmorency]

Ueland, eh? That's also the name of one of the widest streets (https://www.google.com/maps/@59.9389779,10.7500148,3a,75y,189.01h,88.65t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sDqf-Bs2yfxFzkg5TyxHp9w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=no) in Oslo. Possibly a little crossover here between that other topic and a specific scenario concerning migration to the US you wanted me to address. Funny.

When Norway sends its people, they're not sending their best.


Great, first mccain, then the bushes, now romney. Is there any neocon warmonger the left wont rehabilitate for providing token resistance to trump?

Last I checked, the left hate them all.


So wound up they'd embrace the devil if he spits in trump's direction, its derangement, truly.

You do know these people all existed before Trump was a politician, right?


Pandering to the far right helped cause trump? If you mean by the way his like failed to live up to the pandering when it came to action the electorate wanted: yes. If you mean he somehow turned the electorate "far right" through his pandering: no.

Trump came about because much of what he promised to do the neocon republicans had pledged to do themselves since the days of Reagan and failed to even attempt since Bush Sr. Intentionally or not; they could only fail so long before the electorate looked elsewhere.

Notably, what the earlier Republicans "failed" to do was reestablish herrenvolk patriarchy. What enflames the fascists so -and, poetically, what makes their defeat likely - is that there are more of us than there are of them.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Trump came about because much of what he promised to do the neocon republicans had pledged to do themselves since the days of Reagan and failed to even attempt since Bush Sr. Intentionally or not; they could only fail so long before the electorate looked elsewhere.

Perhaps the promises they pledged were bunk to begin with and not real solutions to the problems.

[Montmorency]

Trump vowed to not cut Social Security and Medicare — hours before proposing just that (https://www.vox.com/2020/2/10/21131316/trump-2021-budget-entitlement-cuts)

He's been doing this all term, and he's slowly succeeding (via executive power).

And (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/10/trumps-budget-reveals-tremendous-fraud/)


For once, President Trump spoke the truth.

“We’re doing a lot of things that are good, including waste and fraud,” he said Monday, as his administration released its proposed budget. “Tremendous waste and tremendous fraud.”

Heh heh

Hahahahaha

Hee hee

It's funny because it's true.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Perhaps the promises they pledged were bunk to begin with and not real solutions to the problems.

Possibly true, in many cases, but the fact remains that these were promises that got them elected. That doesn't mean the polices should actually be enacted, or course.

The point about Rommey is that when a centre-right Republican moved to the Right he moved the Republican party to the Right with him. If Bernie moves the Dems to the Left it will leave a hole in the middle of US politics large enough that a new party might need to emerge to fill it.

[Greyblades]

Perhaps the promises they pledged were bunk to begin with and not real solutions to the problems.:coffeenews:
Seems to be a common refrain on both sides of the the aisle, the whole "they dont know what's good for them" angle, I mean look at bernie; there are more than a few democrats who say what you said about his promises, never mind republicans.


That doesn't mean the polices should actually be enacted, or course.
Not in any scenario that includes maintaining people's faith in democracy. Scenarios without that tend to have bad ends.

[Montmorency]

Possibly true, in many cases, but the fact remains that these were promises that got them elected. That doesn't mean the polices should actually be enacted, or course.

The point about Rommey is that when a centre-right Republican moved to the Right he moved the Republican party to the Right with him. If Bernie moves the Dems to the Left it will leave a hole in the middle of US politics large enough that a new party might need to emerge to fill it.

Darn it, you know little enough about American politics to be paid for your insight. What are you waiting for?

[a completely inoffensive name]

:coffeenews:
Seems to be a common refrain on both sides of the the aisle, the whole "they dont know what's good for them" angle, I mean look at bernie; there are more than a few democrats who say what you said about his promises, never mind republicans.


The difference with Bernie is that there has never been a US government ran by democratic socialists. If one day it happens and they don't deliver the policy then we must start to think about the practicality of said promises.
Republicans on the other hand...

[Montmorency]

Republicans on the other hand...

Be careful not to slip into a common misunderstanding. The truth is...

https://i.imgur.com/ojfYngd.jpg

[Greyblades]

The difference with Bernie is that there has never been a US government ran by democratic socialists. If one day it happens and they don't deliver the policy then we must start to think about the practicality of said promises.
Republicans on the other hand...

See, a lot of republicans would probably diagree with your first sentance. And your third for that matter, the republican party leadership doesnt exactly consider trump typical, to its detriment. Some would also say that before trump US government hadnt been run by thier idea of a republican since eizenhower or reagan.

Bernie and Trump are both reactions to failures to deliver; the desire to find a guy who will actually do what he says he will, as little watering down as possible. With the level of frustration that triggered these reactions whether or not the promised ideas work is almost immaterial.

Not that either of us would take much interest in the proclimations of inviability/bunk-dom by a competitor in such a polarized enviroment.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

The difference with Bernie is that there has never been a US government ran by democratic socialists. If one day it happens and they don't deliver the policy then we must start to think about the practicality of said promises.
Republicans on the other hand...

Well Bernie is no longer a Social Democrat, he's shifted to full-on Socialist after Warren took the Social Democrat spot. So, not very electable in the US, now.

[Montmorency]

For the first time ever (?), Mexico was the US top trade partner in 2019. China was knocked to third after a decline of ~$100 billion in trade from 2018, because trade war.


Story of a CBP (Customs & Border Protection) officer who discovered he was not a US citizen after all (his father had arranged a fraudulent US birth certificate and never told him), and what followed:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/02/a-former-border-agent-at-risk-of-deportation/606418/




One afternoon in April 2018, Raul Rodriguez was working on his computer at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office in Los Indios, Texas, when two managers entered the building. Somebody must be in trouble, he thought. The managers usually arrived in pairs when they needed a witness.

For nearly two decades, Rodriguez had searched for people and drugs hidden in cargo waiting to get into the United States. He was proud of his work as a Customs and Border Protection officer; it gave him stability and a sense of purpose. Even in the spring of 2018, when public scrutiny of CBP began to intensify—the agency had officially started separating children from their parents—Rodriguez remained committed to his job. Though he wasn’t separating any families at the border, he’d canceled the visas and initiated the deportations of thousands of people in his years of service.

“Hey, Raulito,” one of the managers said, calling him over. Rodriguez walked past agents who were trying to look busy on their computers. Just two years from being eligible to retire, Rodriguez says he had an unblemished record. He couldn’t imagine what the managers wanted.

Rodriguez had been crossing bridges at the border since his parents, who were Mexican, had sent him to live with relatives in Texas when he was 5 years old. He’d wanted to stay in Mexico, but his mother insisted that he go: He was a United States citizen. She’d given birth to him just across the border in hopes that he would have a better life, and it was time for him to seize that opportunity. He started first grade at a public school in Mission, Texas. From then on, he saw his parents only on school breaks.

Read: Trump ends Obama-era protection for undocumented immigrants

As a child, he’d admired immigration agents’ crisp uniforms and air of authority. When he grew into a teenager, though, agents began to question him more aggressively, doubting his citizenship despite his Texas-issued birth certificate. He chalked it up to simple prejudice, no different from the white students at Sharyland High who provoked him to fistfights by calling him “wetback.” He decided he’d defy their stereotypes by one day becoming an agent himself. He would enforce the law, but without demeaning people as he did it.

Rodriguez joined the Navy in 1992. As a recruit, he cleaned floors and toilets, cooked, and drove a bus. Visiting his parents in Mexico, he wore his uniform. They didn’t say they were proud, but the looks on their faces made him feel as though growing up in Texas really had been worthwhile. And whenever he headed back across the border in uniform, he approached the agents on the bridge and thought: Now they're going to have to accept me as an American.

But on that day in Los Indios in 2018, one of Rodriguez’s managers slid an envelope across the desk. Rodriguez remembers reading: “You are no longer a law-enforcement officer, pending further investigation.” His gun and badge were confiscated without explanation. He left the building in a stupor.

Days later, he sat down with investigators at a federal building in nearby McAllen, Texas. They told him his career in immigration and his military service before that—his identity as a veteran, an agent, and an American—were based on a lie. His United States citizenship was fraudulent. He was an undocumented immigrant himself.
Left: One of the bridges that Rodriguez monitored as a Customs and Border Protection officer. Right: Rodriguez in his CBP uniform.

Rodriguez joined the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a CBP predecessor agency, in 2000, after five years in the Navy. Soon after he graduated from training, Rodriguez’s parents hosted a cookout at their home, in the rural outskirts of Matamoros, Mexico. His wife chatted with his mom and sisters, while their two young children, Daira and Raul Jr., played with their cousins. Corridos played on the stereo and fajitas sizzled on the barbecue in front of the adobe house. Hurricanes had flattened similar structures nearby, but his family’s home still stood, because Rodriguez had refinished the walls with mud and grass every other year during school breaks.

His father, Margarito, had tutored Rodriguez in a strict vision of right and wrong. A farmer who wore a sweat-stained cowboy hat and a polyester shirt, Margarito kept big bags of cash at home earmarked for his agricultural co-op members’ hospital bills and funeral costs. He made sure Rodriguez understood that he never skimmed off the communal funds, though he could have gotten away with it. While other members bought new cars with stolen money, Margarito walked around town on foot asking for rides. “Always do the right thing, no matter what,” he told Rodriguez. Now Margarito advised him that, as an immigration agent, he must enforce the law no matter what—no exceptions, not even for family.

“You’re migra now,” one of Rodriguez’s cousins said during the barbecue. Immigration. As boys, he and Rodriguez had spent countless hours hunting rabbits and quail in the brush, gossiping like brothers about goings-on at the ranch. But the cousin had begun trafficking drugs and carrying a gun. “We’re on opposite ends,” Rodriguez recalled telling him. He cut ties with the cousin, and with close relatives who were living in the United States illegally.

Rodriguez began putting in long hours and overnight shifts, exacerbating tensions in his already rocky marriage. He and his wife eventually separated. His son, Raul Jr., who was 10 or 11 at the time, told me his father became an intermittent presence in his life as Rodriguez threw himself into his work.
Awards and honors from Rodriguez’s career with CBP.

By then, Rodriguez had already met his current wife, Anita, at the training academy they attended in Glynco, Georgia. During training, they’d found that they had a lot in common. Anita had grown up in Southern California, where immigration enforcement was a part of everyday life. As a kid, she would prank her undocumented cousins by yelling “La migra!” just to watch them run. Later, when Anita was 17, she became homeless and lived for a time in a car outside Yuma, Arizona, with an older sister and her sister’s five kids. Unauthorized immigrants making their way into the States ran over a footbridge near where they slept. Border Patrol officers noticed the homeless family and began bringing them food, water, and even Christmas presents. “Nobody was taking care of us except those Border Patrol agents,” Anita told me. “I wanted to be like them.” Her own father had moved to the United States from Mexico, and she wanted to help facilitate immigration. “The name of your company is Immigration and Naturalization Service,” she remembered an instructor at the academy saying. “I took that to heart.”

She moved from Arizona to South Texas, where Rodriguez was already stationed. After he separated from his wife, he and Anita married and had two kids of their own.

He was assigned to work one of the same bridges he’d crossed as a teen, and an agent who had given him a hard time back then became his colleague. His co-workers told him he looked like an undocumented immigrant, and they nicknamed him “la nutria,” after an invasive aquatic rodent that swims the Rio Grande—but now he was in on the joke. After long shifts, Rodriguez and his buddies would hang out together, drinking beer late into the night in the bridge parking lot.

Sometimes, he recognized employees of a Texas furniture factory, where he’d been a security guard, as they reentered the United States. One guy was so proud of Rodriguez for becoming an agent that he sought out his inspection lane just to see him in uniform. Rodriguez knew the man worked at the factory, in violation of the tourist visa he held. “Why did you have to come through my lane?” Rodriguez asked, before canceling his visa. He revoked about 10 workers’ papers this way.

Several years into his tenure with CBP, Rodriguez was buying cigarettes at a gas station near the bridge when a woman approached to ask if he would help her smuggle a child through his inspection lane. She wrote her phone number on a scrap of paper and pressed it into his hand. The proposition was brazen, but not uncommon—corruption was rampant within CBP. In the years after 9/11, officials had lowered hiring standards so that they could quickly bring in thousands of agents. Drug traffickers tried to infiltrate their ranks, Department of Homeland Security officials have said, and rogue agents seemed to flout the rules almost as often as they enforced them, accepting millions of dollars in bribes to allow drugs and undocumented immigrants to move into the U.S. undetected. (CBP did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson confirmed to the Los Angeles Times that Rodriguez had been employed by the agency but declined any further comment.)

Read: The Border Patrol’s corruption problem

Rodriguez called the woman’s phone number and set up a meeting. He agreed to accept a bribe of $300. The woman and child entered the United States through his inspection lane and were arrested immediately—Rodriguez had worn a wire and taped the encounter.

For his role in the operation, CBP flew Rodriguez to Washington in 2007 to accept the agency’s national award for integrity. “Nothing is more critical to CBP’s mission,” then-Commissioner W. Ralph Basham said at the ceremony. In a flat-brimmed hat and white gloves, Rodriguez walked across the stage to shake Basham’s hand.

Anita told me that when people of Mexican heritage become agents, their family members tend to be ambivalent. “On one hand they’re very proud of us, because to work for the government—that’s a lofty thing in Mexico,” Anita said. “But then on the other hand, traicionero—you're a traitor, because you're deporting your own people.” Rodriguez says he never let that stop him: Too much empathy could lead an agent to bend the rules. But some cases did haunt him.

In his early years as an officer, an English-speaking teenager walked up to him on the bridge from the Mexican side. Quiet and alert, the kid was not unlike Rodriguez had been at that age, except for his lack of papers. He admitted that he’d been living illegally in the U.S. most of his life; he needed to return to continue high school. Rodriguez asked why he had risked a trip to Mexico if he knew he wouldn’t be allowed back into the U.S. The boy explained that his grandmother had died and he’d gone to pay his respects before she was buried. “I wanted to see her one last time,” he said. Rodriguez told him his best hope for returning was to one day marry a U.S. citizen. But for now, Rodriguez had little doubt about the rules. He sent the teen back to Mexico.

That night, the boy attempted to swim across the Rio Grande. Agents found his body floating beneath the bridge the next morning.

Read: The Border Patrol–to–emergency room pipeline

In the twilight of the Obama administration, Central American children and families began arriving at the border in droves, seeking protection from poverty and gang violence, and reunion with family in the U.S. Rodriguez, by then a veteran CBP officer, believed that many asylum seekers had been coached to tell the same sad stories so that they would be released into the United States to await their day in court. The then–presidential candidate Donald Trump promised to lock these people up. Rodriguez voted for Trump. The Rio Grande Valley soon became the epicenter of CBP’s effort to deter migrant families by removing thousands of children from their parents.

Any parent could see the separations were inhumane, Rodriguez told me. Someone in Washington had taken the crackdown too far. But what could he do, as a nobody on the bridge? He told trainee officers, “Leave your heart at home.” He focused on his sense of duty and followed orders.
A CBP vehicle along the border.

As the uproar over family separations engulfed the Trump administration, Rodriguez sat before a pair of investigators in a dim room with a one-way mirror, facing a crisis of his own. They showed him a document filled out in longhand with his and his parents’ names. The header read acta de nacimiento—a certificate of birth, issued in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. It was evidence, they said, that Rodriguez had been born in Mexico, not the United States. “Do you recognize this?”

Rodriguez was incredulous. He wrote in a handwritten statement that morning, “I have always believed I was a United States Citizen and still believe I’m a United States Citizen.” His mother had died in 2013, so his father was the one living witness who could clear things up. Rodriguez offered to arrange for investigators to meet with Margarito later that day. He called a nephew and told him to get his father from Mexico to the meeting spot—a Starbucks near the border—even if he had to drag him there. A few hours later, Margarito arrived to speak with Rodriguez and the investigators.

Margarito was evasive when officials first showed him the acta. “I need to know the truth,” Rodriguez told him. “Tell me the truth.” Margarito looked down at the table. Rodriguez had been born at the adobe house outside Matamoros. He explained that about two months later, one of his sisters had arranged for a midwife to register a false birth certificate.

The fraudulent document had come to light because Rodriguez had petitioned for one of his brothers in Mexico to get a green card. An officer with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that issues green cards, flagged the petition because Rodriguez’s Texas-issued birth certificate had been registered by a midwife who was later convicted of fraud. (According to The Washington Post, government officials have said that cases against midwives during the 1990s uncovered roughly 15,000 falsely registered babies born in Mexico.) Rodriguez now had no legal status in the country, and was fired from Customs and Border Protection for failing to meet a basic condition of employment: U.S. citizenship.

Margarito stressed to investigators that he’d always hidden the truth from his son. (When Homeland Security finished its investigation into Rodriguez, a prosecutor from the U.S. attorney’s office in McAllen declined to charge him with any crimes.) A few hours later, still stunned by his father’s confession, Rodriguez placed an urgent call to his own son from his first marriage, Raul Rodriguez Jr.

Raul Jr. was inspecting a home for insect and rodent infestations when he received his father’s call. At 27, he was working at a pest-control company in hopes of moving his three young kids out of an apartment in Los Fresnos, Texas, and had just landed an interview for a job with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

He went to his father’s house, where he found his father and his stepmother, Anita, looking ashen. They had set out a chair for him. He thought his father might have a serious illness. Rodriguez began to tell Raul Jr. about the midwife, the acta, and Margarito’s confession. Raul Jr.’s disbelief gave way to panic when his father explained that he, too, would likely lose his citizenship.

In 1990, Rodriguez’s first wife, who was a Mexican citizen, gave birth to Raul Jr. in Matamoros. Though he was born in Mexico, he was American by birth because of his father’s nationality. Raul Jr. later obtained a certificate to prove his “acquired citizenship.” But those papers were based on a fraud. “I don't even know how to describe myself,” Raul Jr. told me. “I don’t know if I'm an illegal or not.” In order to avoid making a false claim to U.S. citizenship—which could have barred him from the country—Raul Jr. returned his certificate of citizenship to the government. He put his application to CBP, and a new house, on hold indefinitely. He applied for a green card through his wife.

While he waits, he, like his father, is at risk of deportation.
Rodriguez gets water for his horse, near graffiti by one of his sons.

Along with more than 100,000 undocumented immigrants in the Rio Grande Valley, Rodriguez and his son are geographically hemmed in. To the south is the U.S.-Mexico border, a deep-green river surveilled by thousands of federal agents and by blimps repurposed from Iraqi and Afghan battlefields. To the east is the Gulf of Mexico, where boaters are subject to immigration checks by the Coast Guard. Border Patrol checkpoints dot the major roads heading north out of the valley. Every driver must stop and answer the question: Are you a U.S. citizen?

An agent from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles deportations, set up a meeting with Rodriguez a few months after the fraudulent birth certificate was discovered. The agent said he wanted to help him by going over the details of his case. But Rodriguez, who knew the agent from work, sensed that this was a ploy to get more information out of him. He took it as a warning from ICE: We’re watching.

More than 50,000 officers patrol the border and the interior of the country, according to the nonprofit American Immigration Council. They’re easy to spot at Rodriguez’s kids’ high school. Former colleagues who noticed Rodriguez’s absence but were not privy to the details of his case figured that he’d been fired for corruption. He’s always been “chueco,” a retired agent named John Garcia told me he overheard someone say at work. Crooked. Just as Rodriguez had once cut ties with his undocumented family members, agents began to avoid eye contact when they saw him in public, at restaurants or the grocery store. “They treat him like he's a pariah,” Anita told me.

Rodriguez’s integrity award sits above the TV where he watches the local news every morning from the treadmill. He spends the rest of the day tending to his sheep, cows, and chickens, rarely leaving his property, because a traffic stop could ultimately lead to deportation. “I don’t have any legal status in the U.S.,” he told me. “I’m deportable.”

Rodriguez and Anita have refinanced their house and raided the kids’ college fund to supplement Anita’s income from her job at the Department of Homeland Security. Fired just shy of retirement, Rodriguez lost his eligibility to receive a $4,400-a-month pension along with his citizenship. Rodriguez feared that the stress of his new reality could lead to divorce.

Last fall, as the evening cooled to 90 degrees, he drove to his teenage son’s football game, careful to use blinkers at every turn. At the game, the band played the national anthem before kickoff, and an announcer asked veterans to rise and be recognized. Rodriguez remained seated. Anita, adamant that his service still counted for something, nudged him in the ribs. “Stand up.”
Left to right: Rodriguez’s one-eyed dog; remnants of a shirt caught on razor wire; Rodriguez’s tattoo, which he got after he was fired, of a CBP badge being split by a Mexican flag.

Soon after he was fired, Rodriguez got a large CBP badge tattooed on his left shoulder. A Mexican flag splits the badge into two halves.

He applied to become a lawful permanent resident as the spouse of a U.S. citizen, and was forthright in his interview. Yes, he told the official, he had made a false claim to U.S. citizenship, but only because he hadn’t known the truth. Yes, he had voted in a federal election as an undocumented immigrant. He expected no special treatment, just the pension, health benefits, and safety from deportation he felt he’d earned through his nearly two decades at CBP. With some patience, he was confident that he could get his status sorted out. By last fall, he had been waiting for a response for almost a year and a half.

Rodriguez says he can now see the impacts of immigration enforcement that he once preferred to leave unexamined. “I can relate to people who I turned back, people that I deported,” he said. “They call it karma.”

Still, he doesn’t regret his service, and distinguishes himself from other unauthorized immigrants. “There are a lot of people trying to do it the easier way,” he told me. “I just found out, and I’m trying to do it correctly.”

If deported, he would live on family property in Tamaulipas. The State Department’s “Do not travel” warning to U.S. citizens says of the area: “Murder, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault [are] common along the northern border.” As an agent, Rodriguez had put traffickers in jail, and his face is widely recognizable from his years on the bridge. “I don’t know how long I can survive,” he told me.

Read: An astonishing government report on conditions at the border

Despite those risks, Rodriguez dismissed the idea that he should apply for asylum—a legal pathway to U.S. residence that the Trump administration has sought to eradicate, claiming it is rife with fraud. “I'm not going to do it that way. I'd rather get deported,” Rodriguez said. “I'm going to practice what I preach.”

Once passionate about her work, Anita told me she has “lost faith in the system.” But without a college education, she sees no other option. Her job in immigration, she said, “is what’s feeding my family.” Rodriguez “lives by the rules … and even now he says that if the government chooses to deport him, he's going to go,” Anita said, her voice catching. He would turn himself in before he would hide from ICE. “I can't let that happen. What am I going to do? What are my kids going to do? What is he going to do over there? He's a federal officer.” Anita researches Rodriguez’s case most nights and keeps a close watch on other military veterans in the news facing deportation.

In October, Rodriguez received a letter from Citizenship and Immigration Services. His green-card application had been denied because he had falsely claimed to be an American citizen and illegally voted. The letter argued that Rodriguez did not qualify for leniency, even if he did not know about his status at the time. (USCIS declined to comment on specific cases.)
A gap in the border wall separating Texas and Mexico.

In our interviews, Rodriguez said he understood that the government had to apply the rules to him the way it did to everyone else—his undocumented relatives, his former co-workers, and the boy who drowned under the bridge. But he drew a distinction between how he’d carried out his duties and how officials were handling his case. “I wasn’t being strict; I was just abiding by what the law says,” he told me. “And these people are not doing what the law says.” He believed that he still qualified for an exemption provided by the law for those who make a false claim to U.S. citizenship unwittingly. But in its denial letter, USCIS said it could not make an exception for Rodriguez even if he was unaware of his status at the time, citing recent precedent. Still, Rodriguez held out hope that he could convince the agency to reverse its decision. Immigration lawyers told me, however, that federal officials are granting fewer exceptions across the board. “Apply the right laws, and apply the right rules,” Rodriguez told me. He believed the agency was singling him out unfairly. “Treat me the same—that’s all I want.” His problem might be that it already is.


As a child, he’d admired immigration agents’ crisp uniforms and air of authority. When he grew into a teenager, though, agents began to question him more aggressively, doubting his citizenship despite his Texas-issued birth certificate. He chalked it up to simple prejudice, no different from the white students at Sharyland High who provoked him to fistfights by calling him “wetback.” He decided he’d defy their stereotypes by one day becoming an agent himself. He would enforce the law, but without demeaning people as he did it.

His co-workers told him he looked like an undocumented immigrant, and they nicknamed him “la nutria,” after an invasive aquatic rodent that swims the Rio Grande—but now he was in on the joke. After long shifts, Rodriguez and his buddies would hang out together, drinking beer late into the night in the bridge parking lot.

Any parent could see the separations were inhumane, Rodriguez told me. Someone in Washington had taken the crackdown too far. But what could he do, as a nobody on the bridge? He told trainee officers, “Leave your heart at home.” He focused on his sense of duty and followed orders.

As the uproar over family separations engulfed the Trump administration, Rodriguez sat before a pair of investigators in a dim room with a one-way mirror, facing a crisis of his own. They showed him a document filled out in longhand with his and his parents’ names. The header read acta de nacimiento—a certificate of birth, issued in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. It was evidence, they said, that Rodriguez had been born in Mexico, not the United States. “Do you recognize this?”

Rodriguez now had no legal status in the country, and was fired from Customs and Border Protection for failing to meet a basic condition of employment: U.S. citizenship.

A few hours later, still stunned by his father’s confession, Rodriguez placed an urgent call to his own son from his first marriage, Raul Rodriguez Jr.

Raul Jr. was inspecting a home for insect and rodent infestations when he received his father’s call. At 27, he was working at a pest-control company in hopes of moving his three young kids out of an apartment in Los Fresnos, Texas, and had just landed an interview for a job with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

He went to his father’s house, where he found his father and his stepmother, Anita, looking ashen. They had set out a chair for him. He thought his father might have a serious illness. Rodriguez began to tell Raul Jr. about the midwife, the acta, and Margarito’s confession. Raul Jr.’s disbelief gave way to panic when his father explained that he, too, would likely lose his citizenship.

In 1990, Rodriguez’s first wife, who was a Mexican citizen, gave birth to Raul Jr. in Matamoros. Though he was born in Mexico, he was American by birth because of his father’s nationality. Raul Jr. later obtained a certificate to prove his “acquired citizenship.” But those papers were based on a fraud. “I don't even know how to describe myself,” Raul Jr. told me. “I don’t know if I'm an illegal or not.” In order to avoid making a false claim to U.S. citizenship—which could have barred him from the country—Raul Jr. returned his certificate of citizenship to the government. He put his application to CBP, and a new house, on hold indefinitely. He applied for a green card through his wife.

While he waits, he, like his father, is at risk of deportation.

Former colleagues who noticed Rodriguez’s absence but were not privy to the details of his case figured that he’d been fired for corruption. He’s always been “chueco,” a retired agent named John Garcia told me he overheard someone say at work. Crooked. Just as Rodriguez had once cut ties with his undocumented family members, agents began to avoid eye contact when they saw him in public, at restaurants or the grocery store. “They treat him like he's a pariah,” Anita told me.

Rodriguez’s integrity award sits above the TV where he watches the local news every morning from the treadmill. He spends the rest of the day tending to his sheep, cows, and chickens, rarely leaving his property, because a traffic stop could ultimately lead to deportation. “I don’t have any legal status in the U.S.,” he told me. “I’m deportable.”

Rodriguez and Anita have refinanced their house and raided the kids’ college fund to supplement Anita’s income from her job at the Department of Homeland Security. Fired just shy of retirement, Rodriguez lost his eligibility to receive a $4,400-a-month pension along with his citizenship. Rodriguez feared that the stress of his new reality could lead to divorce.

Soon after he was fired, Rodriguez got a large CBP badge tattooed on his left shoulder. A Mexican flag splits the badge into two halves.

He applied to become a lawful permanent resident as the spouse of a U.S. citizen, and was forthright in his interview. Yes, he told the official, he had made a false claim to U.S. citizenship, but only because he hadn’t known the truth. Yes, he had voted in a federal election as an undocumented immigrant. He expected no special treatment, just the pension, health benefits, and safety from deportation he felt he’d earned through his nearly two decades at CBP. With some patience, he was confident that he could get his status sorted out. By last fall, he had been waiting for a response for almost a year and a half.

Rodriguez says he can now see the impacts of immigration enforcement that he once preferred to leave unexamined. “I can relate to people who I turned back, people that I deported,” he said. “They call it karma.”

Still, he doesn’t regret his service, and distinguishes himself from other unauthorized immigrants. “There are a lot of people trying to do it the easier way,” he told me. “I just found out, and I’m trying to do it correctly.”

If deported, he would live on family property in Tamaulipas. The State Department’s “Do not travel” warning to U.S. citizens says of the area: “Murder, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault [are] common along the northern border.” As an agent, Rodriguez had put traffickers in jail, and his face is widely recognizable from his years on the bridge. “I don’t know how long I can survive,” he told me.

Despite those risks, Rodriguez dismissed the idea that he should apply for asylum—a legal pathway to U.S. residence that the Trump administration has sought to eradicate, claiming it is rife with fraud. “I'm not going to do it that way. I'd rather get deported,” Rodriguez said. “I'm going to practice what I preach.”

odriguez “lives by the rules … and even now he says that if the government chooses to deport him, he's going to go,” Anita said, her voice catching. He would turn himself in before he would hide from ICE. “I can't let that happen. What am I going to do? What are my kids going to do? What is he going to do over there? He's a federal officer.”

In October, Rodriguez received a letter from Citizenship and Immigration Services. His green-card application had been denied because he had falsely claimed to be an American citizen and illegally voted. The letter argued that Rodriguez did not qualify for leniency, even if he did not know about his status at the time.

In our interviews, Rodriguez said he understood that the government had to apply the rules to him the way it did to everyone else—his undocumented relatives, his former co-workers, and the boy who drowned under the bridge. But he drew a distinction between how he’d carried out his duties and how officials were handling his case. “I wasn’t being strict; I was just abiding by what the law says,” he told me. “And these people are not doing what the law says.”

“Apply the right laws, and apply the right rules,” Rodriguez told me. He believed the agency was singling him out unfairly. “Treat me the same—that’s all I want.” His problem might be that it already is.


The lamentable but poetic tale of a kapo living with hardcore internalized racism. Another family destroyed.

https://i.imgur.com/Q7gTsAn.png

[Montmorency]

Quiet part etc.

https://twitter.com/LisPower1/status/1244606910462136321

[ReluctantSamurai]

Love these two quotes:


Trump is afraid of smart people. Trump is very afraid of smart women. Trump is extremely afraid of smart black women.


Someone who can’t handle a tough question from the press shouldn’t have the nuclear codes.

[Gilrandir]

Trump is afraid of smart people. Trump is very afraid of smart women. Trump is extremely afraid of smart black women.


I imagine what he feels like when it is a smart black gay woman.

[Montmorency]

President Trump (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/us/politics/coronavirus-trump.html) arrives in the Oval Office these days as late as noon, when he is usually in a sour mood after his morning marathon of television.

He has been up in the White House master bedroom as early as 5 a.m. watching Fox News, then CNN, with a dollop of MSNBC thrown in for rage viewing. He makes calls with the TV on in the background, his routine since he first arrived at the White House.

But now there are differences.

The president sees few allies no matter which channel he clicks. He is angry even with Fox, an old security blanket, for not portraying him as he would like to be seen. And he makes time to watch Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s briefings from New York, closely monitoring for a sporadic compliment or snipe.

Confined to the White House, the president is isolated from the supporters, visitors, travel and golf that once entertained him, according to more than a dozen administration officials and close advisers who spoke about Mr. Trump’s strange new life. He is tested weekly, as is Vice President Mike Pence, for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

The economy — Mr. Trump’s main case for re-election — has imploded. News coverage of his handling of the coronavirus has been overwhelmingly negative as Democrats have condemned him for a lack of empathy, honesty and competence in the face of a pandemic. Even Republicans have criticized Mr. Trump’s briefings as long-winded and his rough handling of critics as unproductive.

His own internal polling shows him sliding in some swing states, a major reason he declared a temporary halt to the issuance of green cards to those outside the United States. The executive order — watered down with loopholes after an uproar from business groups — was aimed at pleasing his political base, people close to him said, and was the kind of move Mr. Trump makes when things feel out of control. Friends who have spoken to him said he seemed unsettled and worried about losing the election.

But the president’s primary focus, advisers said, is assessing how his performance on the virus is measured in the news media, and the extent to which history will blame him.

“He’s frustrated,” said Stephen Moore, an outside economic adviser to Mr. Trump who was the president’s pick to sit on the Federal Reserve Board before his history of sexist comments and lack of child support payments surfaced. “It’s like being hit with a meteor.”

Mr. Trump frequently vents about how he is portrayed. He was enraged by an article this month in which his health secretary, Alex M. Azar II, was said to have warned Mr. Trump in January about the possibility of a pandemic. Mr. Trump was upset that he was being blamed while Mr. Azar was portrayed in a more favorable light, aides said. The president told friends that he assumed Mr. Azar was working the news media to try to save his own reputation at the expense of Mr. Trump’s.

Aides said the president’s low point was in mid-March, when Mr. Trump, who had dismissed the virus as “one person coming in from China” and no worse than the flu, saw deaths and infections from Covid-19 rising daily. Mike Lindell, a Trump donor campaign surrogate and the chief executive of MyPillow, visited the White House later that month and said the president seemed so glum that Mr. Lindell pulled out his phone to show him a text message from a Democratic-voting friend of his who thought Mr. Trump was doing a good job. Mr. Lindell said Mr. Trump perked up after hearing the praise. “I just wanted to give him a little confidence,” Mr. Lindell said.

The daily White House coronavirus task force briefing is the one portion of the day that Mr. Trump looks forward to, although even Republicans say that the two hours of political attacks, grievances and falsehoods by the president are hurting him politically. Mr. Trump will hear none of it. Aides say he views them as prime-time shows that are the best substitute for the rallies he can no longer attend but craves. Mr. Trump rarely attends the task force meetings that precede the briefings, and he typically does not prepare before he steps in front of the cameras.

The solution, aides said, came two days later, when Mr. Trump appeared in the Rose Garden to declare a national emergency and answer questions from reporters. As he admonished journalists for asking “nasty” questions, Mr. Trump found the back-and-forth he had been missing. The virus had not been a perfect [Invisible!] enemy — it was impervious to his browbeating — but baiting and attacking reporters energized him.
[...]
When Mr. Trump finishes up 90 or more minutes later, he heads back to the Oval Office to watch the end of the briefings on TV and compare notes with whoever is around from his inner circle. That circle has shrunk significantly as the president, who advisers say is more sensitive to criticism than at nearly any other point in his presidency, has come to rely on only a handful of longtime aides.
[...]
Many friends said they were less likely to call Mr. Trump’s cellphone, assuming he does not want to hear their advice. Those who do reach him said phone calls have grown more clipped: Conversations that used to last 20 minutes now wrap up in three.

After he is done watching the end of the daily White House briefing — which is held seven days a week and sometimes goes as late as 8 p.m. — Mr. Trump watches television in his private dining room off the Oval Office. Assorted aides who are still around will join him to rehash the day and offer their assessments on the briefings. Comfort food — including French fries and Diet Coke — is readily available.

Lately, aides say, his mood has started to brighten as his administration moves to open the economy. His new line, both in public and in private, is that there is reason to be optimistic.

“And at the end of that tunnel, we see light,” Mr. Trump said in the Rose Garden last week.

If he is not staying late in the West Wing, Mr. Trump occasionally has dinner with his wife, Melania Trump, and their son, Barron, who recently celebrated his 14th birthday at home.

By the end of the day, Mr. Trump turns back to his constant companion, television. Upstairs in the White House private quarters — often in his own bedroom or in a nearby den — he flicks from channel to channel, reviewing his performance.


The failure of this administration will remain a mystery for the ages.




Donald Trump's (https://theweek.com/speedreads/575962/donald-trump-tells-biographer-hes-same-now-first-grade) temper-tantrum tactics have been explained by the man himself. The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination admitted to his biographer that, "When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different."

[rory_20_uk]

The failure of this administration will remain a mystery for the ages.

How a system was created that led to him as President is the mystery. Few expected him to succeed by almost any metric since apart from the pomp and showmanship it is nothing he particularly enjoys doing.

The Electoral College is a very odd system that I thought had one vestigial purpose and this was to ensure people like Dopey Donald don't get to be nominated since they are patently unfit. They failed this simple test.

~:smoking:

[ReluctantSamurai]

although even Republicans say that the two hours of political attacks, grievances and falsehoods by the president are hurting him politically

I was pissed off at first that the media was so fawning about the nightly Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, until I realized that Fearless Leader was doing more to hurt himself than all the attention having his mug on the telly was benefiting him. Just wait until some ignoramus tries his bleach tonic and dies (just like the pair in Arizona that tried his chloroquine remedy).

Rock On Donny Baby!!! :thrasher:

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Just listened to a few minutes of Mark Steyn subbing for Limbaugh today.

Apparently, the science around the recommended safe distances etc. is arbitrary and science has no ready answer for Covid-19 (Limited truth at best there. What distance is truly safe for COVID? Nobody is sure, but using the guidelines for flu seems as reasonable as any and not arbitrary as the host portrayed it).

The Limbaugh crowd -- now 80+% Trumpite -- seems to be embracing the FIDO plan for dealing with Covid. As in, we have eased hospitals systems through the worst of the first flare ups, the pipelines are starting to ramp up tests, equipment, etc., so stop government mandated safety and let individuals decide for themselves.

I am of mixed thoughts on this. I understand the economic strain is brutal, but ending restrictions entirely -- while it may not overwhelm the medical setup we've been extending for weeks now -- would still push the number of dead into the millions range within the year. I'm reluctant to embrace that casualty rate for obvious reasons.

[Montmorency]

Just listened to a few minutes of Mark Steyn subbing for Limbaugh today.

Apparently, the science around the recommended safe distances etc. is arbitrary and science has no ready answer for Covid-19 (Limited truth at best there. What distance is truly safe for COVID? Nobody is sure, but using the guidelines for flu seems as reasonable as any and not arbitrary as the host portrayed it).

The Limbaugh crowd -- now 80+% Trumpite -- seems to be embracing the FIDO plan for dealing with Covid. As in, we have eased hospitals systems through the worst of the first flare ups, the pipelines are starting to ramp up tests, equipment, etc., so stop government mandated safety and let individuals decide for themselves.

I am of mixed thoughts on this. I understand the economic strain is brutal, but ending restrictions entirely -- while it may not overwhelm the medical setup we've been extending for weeks now -- would still push the number of dead into the millions range within the year. I'm reluctant to embrace that casualty rate for obvious reasons.

Radio pundits have less than zero knowledge of science.

70-80% of the population supports a stringent pandemic response (though partisan hackery is surely chiseling away at the number). Most people will not make economic and personal decisions in line with what wealthy far-right degenerates imagine. You can't "open" an economy short of gunpoint. This is all a sick propaganda campaign to try to, by the time the 25% unemployment report comes out for April in early May, prime the Republican electorate to reject social relief measures in favor of chaos. Thankfully, even some of the most loathsome billionaires, such as Sheldon Adelson, understand that the economy can't and won't rebound anytime soon.

[Montmorency]

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1259954909467869184


Philip Rucker: You appeared to accuse Obama of the biggest political crime in American history by far ... What crime exactly are you accusing President Obama of committing...?

TRUMP: "Uh, Obamagate."

...

RUCKER: What is the crime exactly, that you're accusing him of?

TRUMP: "You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody."


There is a story in the annals of ethology about the research of Niko Tinbergen. He studied herring gull chicks, who evolved to peck the red spots on their mothers' bills, which triggered her regurgitation of food into their mouths. Tinbergen tested the limits of this behavior by presenting chicks with artificial beaks with red spots, which the chicks pecked. Then he presented them with plain sticks painted with red dots; the chicks reportedly gave these more of a response than even the real beaks.

(I may have misremembered some details)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus


A supernormal stimulus or superstimulus is an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved.

Tinbergen studied herring gulls, and found the chicks peck at the red spot located on their parent's bill. The offspring targets the red spot due to the contrast of color (stimulus).[4] They do this in order to receive food through regurgitation from the parent.[4] Tinbergen and colleagues developed an experiment that presented different models to chicks and determined their pecking rates.[4] They used different models including an adult herring gull's natural head, a standard wooden model of its head, the bill only, and a red stick with smaller white markings on it.[4] The pecking rate of the chicks were consistent with the natural head, standard head model, and the bill only model.[4] The pecking rate of the chicks increased when presented with the stick model.[4] This suggests that the chicks preferred the dramatic contrast of the red stick with the yellow markings, therefore the artificial stimulus of the stick model was favored over the basic herring gull head and bill models, proving that the artificial stimuli was favored over the naturally occurring stimuli. Following his extensive analysis of the stimulus features that elicited food-begging in the chick of the herring gull, constructed an artificial stimulus consisting of a red knitting needle with three white bands painted around it; this elicited a stronger response than an accurate three-dimensional model of the parent's head (white) and bill (yellow with a red spot).[4]

something something cognitive abstraction

[ReluctantSamurai]

I found this article by the NY Times, published in Oct 2019, to be fascinating. Perhaps you've already seen it, but if you haven't, it's a hell of a read. How a penultimate con-man became president, and continues to con the American public today. This time, the con is costing the US not only money, but lives.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html

.....right in your own backyard, Monty:creep:

[Montmorency]

I found this article by the NY Times, published in Oct 2019, to be fascinating. Perhaps you've already seen it, but if you haven't, it's a hell of a read. How a penultimate con-man became president, and continues to con the American public today. This time, the con is costing the US not only money, but lives.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html

.....right in your own backyard, Monty:creep:

2018, but yeah, we discussed it, this and the story about Trump's declared losses (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/07/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html) on his income taxes. Like with any number of stories that would end another administration, it dropped and immediately vanished into the void, never again to receive much media attention.

But the New York Times balances it out with stories like these (see if you can spot the tell).
https://www.mediaite.com/online/ny-times-gets-destroyed-for-absolutely-unbelievable-trump-disinfectant-tweet-some-experts-say/
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/05/08/us/politics/ap-us-virus-outbreak-pence-aide.html

[ReluctantSamurai]

2018, but yeah, we discussed it

Figured that, but I wasn't about to read through 91 pages of posts:creep:

[edyzmedieval]

Figured that, but I wasn't about to read through 91 pages of posts:creep:

Pshhh, weakling... real men read 91 pages in five minutes ~;)

[ReluctantSamurai]

Pshhh, weakling... real men read 91 pages in five minutes

Five minutes, eh?

~D

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Five minutes, eh?

~D

I've never heard that he took longer....




:rolleyes:

[edyzmedieval]

Five minutes, eh?

~D

I walked in that one... sleepwalked into it, no holds barred. :creep:

[Montmorency]

Today the DJIA (Dow) reached around 25000 again. Trump tweeted (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1265277965383983104):


Stock Market up BIG, DOW crosses 25,000. S&P 500 over 3000. States should open up ASAP. The Transition to Greatness has started, ahead of schedule. There will be ups and downs, but next year will be one of the best ever!

If you're not wondering why I'm posting this, then you may remember...

23744

Trump seems to have tweeted about 25,000 on the Dow each time it's happened, without fail.

[Askthepizzaguy]

Does he tweet about it when it goes down to 25,000? :laugh4: