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- Remnant Soviet Union and the search for past glory
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Meta
No neocons as well.
Is there a paypal link on the site?
Yes
What about National Bolsheviks?
None of them either.
BB
All comments are moderated. Don’t send things more than once. The donation button takes you to paypal.
done.
O/T, but this seems (very) important:
Zero Hedge reported today an ABC News interview (transcript) with Trump in which he said the following:
“And, by the way, Iraq did not knock down the World Trade Center. It was not Iraq. It were other people. And I think I know who the other people were. And you might also.”
The conversation was on US involvement in the ME, no country specifically. Astonishingly the interviewer (George Stephanopoulos) did not follow this up.
Now I cannot believe Trump was referring to one of his key allies, so given the current context is this the sum of all fears – does Trump actually believe Iran did it? What else can it mean? Please tell me I am missing something.
Pat – Keep up the good work.
Yes, and it shows the low quality of journalism or even basic thought we can expect from Stephanopoulos that he couldn’t be bothered to ask: ” oh really? uhh . . . which other people do you mean? Who were those other people?”
Babara Ann, it was common knowledge, then and now, that Iraq had nothing to do with knocking down the WTC. It was al Qaeda. Do you think Trump someone other than al Qaeda?
No, he is NOT blaming his dancing buddies in KSA. Probably his NS Advisor, the Mustache-of-Idiocy or maybe NutsAndYahoo, led him to believe that 19 Sunni Arabs from KSA and UAE, with one each from Egypt an Lebanon were working for the Shiite ayatollahs.
What matters is whether he can get his fanboys to believe it.
That is why I wish Stephanopoulis would have been smarter than he actually is. A smarter man than “stephy” would have asked Trump who exactly these other people were . . . and gotten him to say it on camera.
Barbara Ann, This statement by DJT strikes me as quite typical. Trump has an uncanny ability to say things that will be interpreted in accordance with pre-existing beliefs and create little dissonance. This is exactly the kind of thing that will be seen as referring to members of whatever conspiracy is believed and there are many such believed by some segments of his diverse supporters. And it also doesn’t offend those of us that understand UBL orchestrated it and why he did so. To the degree that something he actually does goes against what some segment of his support believes, it’s often chalked up to N’th dimensional chess.
There is some possibility he actually has been led to believe it was Iran’s doing but I consider that a low probability. At this point I don’t underestimate his well honed ability to convey messages that mean different things to different people. All politicians and leaders develop that skill but DJT’s skill is exceptional.
But yes, if he actually believes Iran was behind 9/11 that is the sum of all fears.
Eugene Owens,
re: “What matters is whether he can get his fanboys to believe it.”
I think that beyond getting them to elect him again he doesn’t really care about the fanboys. They are a thing to use, just like the stuff that makes him so … generally orange on the top. He demands loyalty since it is practical for him but beyond that it appears to be a thing rather alien to him.
Some time ago the increasingly demented Giuliani uttered even for him unusual nonsense when he spoke of reality being … not reality and … a point of view. Likely his boss likes that, to the extent he still remembers the start of the sentence.
The other thing is the man’s general hostility to reality. To me a man caught 10.000+ times lying (and going on for some more) doesn’t appear to care about convincing anybody but himself.
Repeating lies again and again creates indeed a new reality, even though just a fictious and destructive one.
I see the real problem with that attack on reality in the subversive effect it has on the idea of democracy – discussing and voting on a “real reality”.
Or take
exEPAhaterhead Pruitt who asserted that burning US coal doesn’t produce CO2. Well, I went to school and thus strongly disagree.My point? Try to discuss simple mathematics like 2+2 with a guy who insists, repeatedly, that the result is 13. That’s a nightmare from Gaga-Land.
Why is Trump not getting laws through (except for that one tax law end of the first year, that iirc also happened to reduce the one tax he couldn’t avoid to have to pay)?
Well, he appears to prefer to tweet his ass off, telling London when high on a litre of ice cream and a 4567 calories snack that that London needs a new mayor and utters that BoJo shouldn’t pay the money the UK owes the EU as a
destructioncunning strategy.His choice is to instead make presidential declarations and whatever elses with his 3 square foot singatures (for which he has to talk with nobody but perhaps the ghost on the loot) and of course he needs his potato or rather pumpkin singature stamp.
The supremely idiotic story of the Clintons iirc selling porno and prostitution stuff from a pizzeria in iirc DC did get a rightwing nutcase to storm the place with an assault rifle to … “expose them”. That he didn’t get some more off the rail and kill anybody is just luck.
Iirc Bannon told Salvini in Italy that the pope is the enemy for lack of hostility to immigrants. Salvini agrees though he likes to get photographed for election posters with a rosary and a machine pistol. Alas, in the mood generated by that maybe some revived blackshirt perhaps takes a (literal) shot at the pope?
That underlines for me me thing that telling such BS a lot and lying a lot has effect: Idiocy like that is infectious. I see in that a problem.
TTG
Yes, exactly. The Iraq part is just Trump talking like Trump, but why would he then say “I think I know who the other people were. And you might also” if referring to the accepted version of events? No, he is referring to Iran.
It is my fear that people like Bolton & Pompeo have poisoned his world view to such a level that he thinks Iran was behind 9/11. How else can you read these words – that he is referring to conspiracy theories involving Mossad, or KSA state involvement? I don’t think so.
doug
You make a very good point and it is true that trying to parse Trump’s language is a sure route to insanity, just the way he likes it.
Try to get the emotions out. Makes it hard to read or follow you. He does not need to worry about his fan base I think, maybe about his cross base supporters?
MustangBlues says:
June 18, 2019 at 1:02 am
President Donald J. Trump is a leader, a successful business man and patriot, and we are lucky as Americans that this leader man came along in 2016.
We were saved, and the communist democrats are after him like pregnant hyenas but he prevails, And now we all must find a way to help him Make America Great Again,
Spread the word, President Trump can save America, He is the Doctor we need to cure and heal the Communist Democrat hard cold heart. We all must do best for Mother America.
Conservative_302 says:
June 18, 2019 at 6:21 am
Time to buy myself a new Women for Trump 2020 t shirt. MAGA! God bless trump!
foxbat
What are “National Bolsheviks?
Mr. Lang,
actually such creatures exist, for instance in Russia. According to Wikipedia they were banned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bolshevik_Party
joanna,
the point is that the man scares me and he should scare you. If you want to buy a MAGA t-shirt or cap – your choice.
I think that undermining the basis of democracy – which is to discuss and debate on determined and inarbitrary facts – is an unhealthy thing.
You simply cannot talk with a man like Pruitt about climate change, global warming or CO2 emission of burning coal because he denies all three.
And when Trump says that he at bad days just feels like a millionaire and on good days like a billionaire … well, too sad. I presume the bad days are the ones when he has to pay his taxes.
Had he gotten his penal taxes on mexican goods likely the US would be out of avocados in three weeks.
US cars would very likely become more expensive also since the US producers would pay more and thus very likely make the buyers pay more to prevent to do red numbers.
Mexico wouldn’t pay that penal tax. Americans would. It’s IMO a ‘shoot yourself happily in the leg’ idea. That written – the penal taxes are only stopped for now (and may be back in a tweet).
That is the reason why large US corporations who buy from and produce in Mexico protested that penal tax.
And the penal taxes are just stopped for now? What about the next six months then? Well, unpredictability is bad for business (and for politics also) and that is reflected in prices.
Putting on a red MAGA headcap doesn’t change that since it doesn’t, say, fix red numbers in book keeping.
What Trump does (and doesn’t do) has consequences, paid for by his voters and bystanders like Mexico who were en passant ordered to pay a couple billion for a gigantic wonderful beautiful MAGA super mega wall in the south … or penal taxes!
There is … some lack of finesse … in that approach. It is about as subtle as a whack on the head.
Or think about that D-Day proclamation which many European heads of state signed, as usual under the text (as in “Unterschrift”). Trump signed it on the top of the text, higher than the heading.
https://cdn.talkingpointsmemo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/GettyImages-1148198077-804×1068.jpg
Confused Ponderer:
Interesting about the Giuliani comment on reality. It relates back to Trump’s so-called ‘Reality TV Shows’, which in fact were Game Shows no different than ‘The Price is Right’. The only reality involved was when the winners did NOT get the promised jobs as VPs, but instead were shunted off to be low-level PR pitchmen.
Eugene Owens,
As an old television hack – my SWMBO and I between us have quite a large experience of ‘TV’ – I think your reading of the implications of Trump’s experience in the medium is quite wrong,
A good deal of ‘Reality TV’ – and the different versions of the ‘Apprentice’ format on both sides of the Atlantic were a classic example – has a strong ‘panem et circenses’ element.
This is, commonly, inherently ‘transgressive.’
A successful presenter not uncommonly ‘works’ because he taps emotions, often very unlovely ones, which is audience feels, but would not want to acknowledge publicly.
To do this, one has to start off with empathy with those emotions. And a successful performer, over time, will hone that.
And it is critical to be able to gauge, from the responses of the audience, where ‘transgression’ will pay off, and where it may go too far, and blow up in his – or her – face.
A central problem with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, as with that of the ‘Remainers’ in Britain, was that they listened to the kind of people who approach ‘TV’ in the spirit of those who decide what programmes to make by ‘market research.’
They came up against someone who actually understood, from direct personal experience (although probably assisted by the advice of competent producers and researchers) the complex relations which successful presenters have with audiences. These are not dissimilar to the complex relations successful politicians often have with audiences.
So, Clinton and the ‘Remainers’ alike got thrashed – and appear to have learned absolutely nothing from the experience.
CP
That signing was figuratively and literally the true mark of the Übermensch. A large part of why he is so hated by Liberal conformists and loved by his devotees, is exactly that kind of audacity in exercising his will. How dare he not subjugate himself to the consensus, like everyone else. It is one of the few things I like about him.
DH –
True, all that you say. Still it does not change the main point that ‘The Apprentice’ and the spinoffs had nothing to do with reality as they were hyped.
Barbara Ann,
I don’t believe in Übermenschen. The last we had were so-so, had some severe moral and ethical deficits and killed my grandmothers employers (she was a cook for a jewish family).
Scepticism of Übermenschen is why democracies have these regular elections, police and a penal code.
There is a more modern AfD Übermensch around here who iirc likes to wear a Thor hammer as jewelry, probably useful for defending the christian-jewish Europe against the Islamic and/or mongolian hordes.
If I would imagine one Übermensch he or she would be very different and not invent the “Prince of Whales” or “cofeve”.
With that signing he made on the D-Day remembrance Trump turned it into a Trump Show. Indeed, it was just for people like Trump that the allies invaded the Normandy. Basically it was already part of his re-election campaign.
And that ‘how dare he not subjugate himself to the consensus’ line – well, it depends on what you want to get:
Be aware that that consensus also includes abiding laws, paying taxes and not to occasionally invoke national emergencies for not having to ask an unwilling congress for money and instead use emergency powers that allow for more unchecked arbitrary solo acts (and access to the military budget and personnel).
CP
I was afraid of this reaction, please do not misunderstand me, my comment was not intended to carry moral judgement. The comparison is solely in reference to Nietzsche’s original conception, not later perversions of the concept. Your imagined good and evil leaders would likely be similar to my own. But Nietzsche’s Beyond-Man is placed outside such a frame of reference and not, for example, required to care much for spelling.
Whist I believe Trump is a good example of such, I am not advocating that those with such psychoses should necessarily be in positions of power. Nietzsche’s, own views on the subject seem to be much misinterpreted and by all the worst people, perhaps predictably.
My fondness for this aspect of his character is limited to its rarity value and not intended to imply any judgement on the outcomes of his actions. These may yet lead us all to disaster, but then before his election it was quite apparent to me that we were headed for a different kind of disaster.
A functioning society absolutely requires us to enslave ourselves to the prevailing ethical code to some degree. But in Western societies today the scope of what is deemed ethically correct has been broadened to such an extent that adherence to it all has become a tyranny for many. The description “Liberal Bolshevism” fits well.
How to stop this slide into politically correct hell? Well it seems to me that a leader who is willing to exercise his/her will is absolutely necessary right now. Whether history will judge Trump a good president will depend on what he does next and of course on the prevailing morality at the time.
I can understand your fears. He is surly using established neolib neocon narratives. And yes: We are not that well prepared …
But look didn’t Maas, with verbal support from Angela, function as perfectly as simply another vassal?
Power is, what power can.
https://www.iiss.org/research/war-power-rules
While English Outsider ponders how to defend himself best against the rest of Europe. One club he can get easily out, but the other may have to stay in, other then the US, which historically I can understand:
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/06/russian-federation-sitrep-13-june-2019-by-patrick-armstrong-.html#comments
Barbara, if you are female you may not love everything about him, or his ideas, but we have a philosopher, not Nietzsche by the way, that you may want to study:
The world as will:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_Will_and_Representation
Thanks LeaNder/joanna, but I try to steer clear of pessimistic as well as idealistic philosophies. And given that I like Nietzsche’s work so much and given that much of this was inspired explicitly to refute Schopenhauer, I do not think he would be to my taste.
As far as I remember and can tell, “National Bolshevism” began as an artsy protest-movement against various thises and thatses in Yeltsinian Russia by edgy novelist Edward Limonov. He tried to make it into a movement and a party and I don’t know anything about it beyond that.
Here is a wiki about Edward Limonov his own self.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Limonov
Here is a hostile article about him by a detractor.
https://slate.com/culture/2003/02/the-parable-of-a-fascist-writer.html
He wrote a lot of feature-articles for an American-expats-in-Russia online publication called ” the eXile”. “the eXile” is now subscriptionized and paywalled. But some of its content loaded over to “the eXileD” when Mark Ames had to flee Russia and come back to America. Here is an post by Edward Limonov. There may be others.
https://exiledonline.com/limonov-files-i-have-one-year-left/
Deep contradiction that a Commitee of Correspondence refuses contributions from communists and proletarians. The etimology is clear, commitee-communism, correspondence-proletarian. But better that than a flat cardiograph line.
By the way, National Bolsheviks leader and founder Eduard Limonov, great writer and poet, expelled from the Soviet Union in the late 70’s spent a few years in New York and then France. Excellent writer, look for His Butler’s Story, quite sure you’ll enjoy it since it describes the NY elite that has brought your country to its actual sorry state.
Paco
This is a discussion forum for non Bolsheviks. They are the enemies of mankind and I will not provide a platform for their agitprop.