ORIGIN Incensed—Presidents Elect have a right of freedom of speech and expression too.

Origen

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." (Preamble to the U.S. Declaration of Independence)

Last week, the social media got to me. I became for a time, really incensed, angry.

As a believer in the principles set forth in the Preamble to our Declaration of Independence, I find the burgeoning rhetoric of white nationalism quite disturbing. We have an unrepentant “platform” provider for white nationalistic rhetoric as the newly appointed Chief Strategist for our President elect.  The extent to which the Chief Strategist believes the rhetoric, nobody really knows.  In any case, the code words of the movement are beginning to infect the language of public discourse like a virus. 

White nationalism’s fundamental premise is that our nation should allow the creation of “Euro-ethnic” enclaves as a matter of “freedom” for those who hold a “white Euro-ethnic” identity. That premise carries with it a fundamental belief in the creation of an inevitable and “beneficial” (for the white nationals only) prospect of an ethnically cleansed region in the U.S.  The last time we had serious white nationalism take hold in a significant part of the country things did not end well for the white nationalists whose whole region was devastated with great vengeance.  

Ultimately, over the 151 years since that conflict ended, the American People have made great progress toward forming a society under a mostly ethno-neutral and, increasingly, also a gender-identity neutral government and polity.

White nationalism is a rejection of the ethno-neutral state focused on the guarantee of human rights for all of its inhabitants and the broader world that has been evolving since the beginning of the American experiment.  It is very easy to adopt white nationalism because it is a rejection of the need to get along with others who are different and it feels good to be superior to them.  The ideology requires little effort and almost no study to be good at it.  Shouting racist slogans and making others uncomfortable is even fun for some.  Today, the idea has real appeal to those who have little accomplishment.

Our culture has moved from slavery in the 1600s to racial integration and acceptance of gay marriage.  More so in the urban areas than in the exurbs and rural areas where there is less of  the "lots going on" of urban life and less interaction with the wonderful mosaic of diversity. Now, for the first time in generations, that progress towards neutrality appears to be at issue.  Many find this frightening, other find it good, exciting, and novel. 

 

On November 18, Mr. Pence, an expresser of extreme anti-gay rhetoric to say the least, attended a performance of Hamilton performed by a varied ethnic and sexually-oriented cast. Some in the audience booed when he entered.  Others cheered. 

After the performance ended, the cast made a simple petition to the Vice President Elect: “We, sir — we — are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights,”  he said. “We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”

The Constitution of the United States formed a government in peculiar form that initially had no real provisions as to how the rights of the citizens were to be structured and protected. To do that, in March 1789, the Congress adopted the Bill of Rights for the purpose set forth in its Preamble;

“THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.”  http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ah-billrights.html

While most are familiar with the First Amendment, many readers of this Committee of Correspondence may not be fully familiar with its exact text that states: “Amendment I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” 

The Hamilton actors’ petition for protection, made to an elected, sitting governor of Indiana and Vice President Elect of the United States was wholly within the tradition of the New York stage.  It was a First Amendment petition in classic format. 

For generations actors have made political statements and pleas to the audience and the broader public during their performances in the Theater District.  It is the premier venue for safe expression of meaningful free speech on all sort of issues.  The audiences have expressed their opinions with boos as well as cheers.  The fundamental purpose of theater is free speech to make some point. 

 The Vice President responded gracefully and respectfully to the cast’s plea for protection by hearing out the oration without giving a comment and leaving in a dignified and appropriate way.  Since then, he has commented wisely.

Then, a most inspiring series of events began to explode in the social media—free speech! An imbroglio of competing ideas and expressions of values flowered like a spectacle of Fourth of July fireworks.

The President Elect chimed in with his Tweet, “Our wonderful future V.P. Mike Pence was harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton, cameras blazing. This should not happen!”  Then later,  “The Theater must always be a safe and special place.  The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!”  And doubling down in another Tweet, “The cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated, should immediately apologize to Mike Pence for their terrible behavior.”

Following this, the massive, and surprising equally sized expression of our cultural divide came forth like a torrent. On one side, the Hamilton actors were praised and on the other, they were condemned for showing “disrespect” to Pence.  Some of my right wing Facebook friends parroted Trumps tweets, some quite viciously.

Personally, I was incensed by Trump’s statement. In my mind, the test as to whether a person believes in free speech and personal liberty comes at a time when free speech bites them.  The test is whether the person bitten attacks the ideas expressed while affirming the right to speak or attacks the act of expression itself.  Those of you who live under authoritarian regimes really understand the truthfulness of the Freedom Test. 

My interpretation of what the Hamilton actors’ Petition sought was that they were petitioning for assurance from the Trump administration that, as ethnic and gender-identity minorities, their rights would be protected. In my view, Trump’s response was a resounding “No!”  It was echoed by many of his followers.  Instead of affirming our traditions of equal protection, Mr. Trump demanded homage.  It was a demand to kneel and bow to his administration with a public apology. 

To me, Trump failed the Freedom Test. Would only that Trump have praised the demonstration of speech and given a solid assurance that his administration was not white nationalist and would guarantee the blessings of Liberty to all, including ethnic and gender-based minorities.  Trump did not do that in his Tweets.  He has still not done that. 

In fact, Mr. Trump in his glorious exercise of his right to speak freely as an American just cannot seem to understand why he is so criticized.  To him, the press are all just liars because they view reality so differently from his view.  Is Mr. Trump beginning to cross some line? http://nypost.com/2016/11/21/donald-trumps-media-summit-was-a-f-ing-firing-squad/

          Later, Governor Pence to his credit did acknowledge the actors’ privilege, but Mr. Pence is a surrogate who has been publically contradicted for misperceiving the new party line.  He is not the one who soon will be in charge.  We have seen so many surrogates speak inaccurately that we have no idea as to what the President Elect thinks until he Tweets and then he may Tweet the opposite in a few hours. 

I was really incensed by the Trumpist Tweets; angry.

Then, I went to Trump’s own Twitter account and made a marvelous discovery.

Even though clearly Trump failed the believer in freedom test, free speech itself passed with flying colors! The nation’s discourse is incensed with wonderful pungent vapors of the perfume of real freedom.  The comments on Trump’s site were diverse and showed a broad range of viewpoints.  The fragrance of free speech flowered also on Facebook and hundreds of other media and venues. 

Where else but in America can the People have a direct, unfiltered conversation with a newly elected leader?

For years, I have been posting on this site. In doing so, I have disclosed a lot about myself.  Some like me, others don’t, and some of you probably think I am an idiot.  Others, like Tyler, the Colonel, TTG, and Babak Makkinejad and hundreds of others have exposed their personalities and beliefs.  Each of us who post exposes something of their essence. 

The thing about speaking is that if a speaker speaks long enough, the speaker’s character will be show.

By Tweeting and re-Tweeting, Mr. Trump has given us a wonderful view of who he really is in a very personal way. At some level, he must value and heed the discourse.  Perhaps his participation in the conversation is one of the sources of his success.  All types of people Tweet back.  No doubt Mr. Trump uses Twitter to deflect us away from embarrassing things like his escape from the public airing of his business practices by settlement of serious fraud claims made personally against him.  However, Mr. Trump may use social media, as a source of intelligence about the electorate, deflection, or advocacy, one thing is clear: Presidents elect share the same right of free speech with all of us.  By his Tweeting, we have gotten to know him and he us.  Hopefully, his Tweets will continue.

Isn’t it marvelous? We must all cherish and protect the discourse no matter what view of the future of this country we each individual may hold.

Post and Tweet on everybody! We may recover some common ground and good outcomes.

And thank you Colonel Lang for this Committee of Correspondence!

Have fun all!

Origin

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273 Responses to ORIGIN Incensed—Presidents Elect have a right of freedom of speech and expression too.

  1. Jay says:

    When Broadway starts partitioning for the reduction of gang violence in low income neighborhoods. Then maybe I’ll listen to their chosen political pleas.

  2. kao_hsien_chih says:

    I think Origin has given us, and I mean this sincerely and respectfully, why we must rant and ramble and, hopefully have an audience to whom we can rant and ramble freely, within limits of proper decorum. Prepared, rehearsed, and polished expressions reveal very little of “us,” the people, although they may show that we have done our “homework,” which often, look the same.
    I think there are two aspects to the controversy surrounding Hamilton. Like you, I thought both the cast and Pence did the right thing. However, people can and do have opinions, independent of how power should be exercised, and I don’t think it is healthy as a society to insist that those opinions and sentiments don’t exist so that they fester. I don’t have to agree with those sentiments, but I sure do want to know what opinions are out there that I may not even be aware of, let alone agree or disagree with, and how the people who hold them arrived at those opinions. The caveat, though, is that because the internet has gotten so crowded, it is difficult to find opinions that you don’t know of and the thoughts behind those opinions unless you try very hard to dig them up.

  3. Lemur says:

    “Liberals believe that their nation states are associations formed by individuals for the purpose of ensuring their natural right to life, liberty, and happiness. They have an imaginary view of their liberal states as associations created by isolated individuals reaching a covenant, a contract or agreement, amongst themselves in abstraction from any prior community. They have a predilection to whitewash the fact that their liberal states, like all states, were forcibly created by a people with a common language, heritage, racial characteristics, religious traditions, and a sense of territorial acquisition involving the derogation of out-groups.”
    This was precisely the case in the founding of the United States. The Anglo-Celtic nation of the New World constituted themselves as a particular people according to the articles of the Constitution. Plato and Montesquieu, NOT Locke, were the main influences. Republics are always particular, rather than universal. The People Preceded the Proposition.
    Until 1965, most of the US population came from Northern Europe, and those who didn’t were ruthlessly assimilated according to WASPish norms. Likewise the Black population came from a small sector of West Africa – hardly the melting pot meme dreamed up by some Jew in London in the twenties.
    “Ultimately, over the 151 years since that conflict ended, the American People have made great progress toward forming a society under a mostly ethno-neutral…polity.’ It’s a complete non-sequitor to go from ‘the blacks had it tough, and so we straightened that out’ to ‘America should be an ethno-neutral country. That’s ahistoical nonsense, a retrospective end of history fever dream. America is now a domain of tribal competition thanks to the open borders efforts of oligarchs and leftists with a sick obsession with the other and a hatred of their own traditions. Diversity + proximity always leads to conflict. Here’s the studies which point to where the United State is headed. Trump’s just the beginning, and Bannon (who is only a white nationalist in the imaginations of Mother Jones types) are mere avatars of the social changes liberal ideology itself installed. And the research is on on the consequences… https://heartiste.wordpress.com/diversity-proximity-war-the-reference-list/
    Liberalism of course is the true ‘easy ideology’. Everyone is placed in little boxes – abstract units of production, consumption, and ‘self realization – where the ruling zeitgeist is ‘do as thou wilt’ with the parameters of the harm principle. But actually conserving the traditions of a spiritual organic community against the globalizing forces of dissolution – that is the hard choice. Actually generating and aspiring to something greater than a value neutral post-modernism poz-fest requires concerted effort. Liberalism is a contract with mediocrity that protects its practitioners from ever being more than political children.
    By contrast, ‘the wonderful mosaic of diversity’ is a series of decontextualized exotic cultural stimuli our bored last men and women amuse themselves with. The liberal state is ultimately the enemy of any true diversity, because the liberal state ethos leads to differentiation without difference.
    No more. As the National Front tweeted after Trump won, “Their world is collapsing, ours is being built.” The epoch of dissolution is over. The age of a new nationalism has begun.

  4. Valissa says:

    Origin,
    I recently came across this VERY LONG essay by a liberal psychiatrist (at Moon of Alabama, and have seen rec’d at other blogs as well), who is devotedly anti-Trump and thinks he would make a bad president, but he does not think he is a racist or white nationalist (“any more than any other 70 year old white man”). When you read the article I think you will be surprised at how incredibly small the following of such groups are. Apparently this psychiatrist was motivated to do all this research and share it because he had some suicidal patients come to him after the election, due to the election results and felt a strong need to provide knowledge to fight the fear.
    You Are Still Crying Wolf http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
    There have been many articles in the MSM about the fact that Trump did not win because he got more white voters than Romney, he actually got more Black, Latino and Asian voters than Romney. That combined with the 3rd party voters and many Dems sitting at home is what won him the election.
    Like many liberals I think you make the mistake of taking Trump (and Bannon)literally. He is trash talking on purpose, provocatively surfing the anti-political correctness wave to reach people at a different and more visceral level. This verbal WWF strategy worked for him to get him elected. Bannon is a key part of this “Fight Club” strategy; they’re tapping into the anger and assuming that many in the so-called minority groups are angry too and will join them. Yes, they really think this and they did get more minority voters. I posted two articles about him in The Democratic Party of 2017 post. And I think they are right.
    BTW, my black sister-in-law voted for Trump (in Monmouth County NJ, no less!). She told me that in her opinion he talked to everyone the same, and she was tired of the Democrats with their racist faux-black speech trying to bond with the black community. She’s angry at the establishment for various reasons, including the economy, and one of them is taking advantage of the black vote while doing nothing for the black community. Her angry vote went to Trump; Hillary represented the establishment that was scorned.
    The question is, what can Trump get away with as president and will it help or hurt the goals he is starting to set? Because he’s going to push the envelope to accomplish what he thinks is important. He has started to set out political goals for his administration. What will he risk to achieve them? Can he transition from the pugilistic campaign speaking style and his twitter wars that you and so many find distasteful to something more “seemly” or “presidential?” Or will he continue what he’s doing now and alternate acting more presidential with duking it out in a public sandbox on occasion? Maybe it’s just a way for him to let off steam. He’s certainly breaking lots of unwritten rules, and lots of folks are enjoying that.

  5. b says:

    @Origin
    “White nationalism’s fundamental premise is that our nation should allow the creation of “Euro-ethnic” enclaves as a matter of “freedom” for those who hold a “white Euro-ethnic” identity.”
    No – the point of white nationalism is to put all OTHERS into enclaves and have the whites have all the rest of it. Do the “whites” want to lay a pipeline, by force, through tribal land or the tribals through a white enclave?
    “Our culture has moved from slavery in the 1600s to racial integration and acceptance of gay marriage.”
    What are you smoking? That is wishful thinking. How many blacks are in prison just for smoking something? How many whites? How many, outside the coastal elites, really accept gay marriage?
    “Where else but in America can the People have a direct, unfiltered conversation with a newly elected leader?”
    Well, lots of states in Europe in Europe, in Asia, Africa and South America come to mind. You really believe the U.S. is THE vessel of enlightenment? Go travel. It is far from it. And where did you get that “conversation”? Do you really think Trump reads any of those tweets directed at him. When would he even do that?
    Trump simply CREATED the Hamilton affair when headlines crept about his $25 mill settlement payment to Trump University victims. He planted a diversion like he always does. It worked like a charm. Within four hours news about Hamilton was beating news about Trump-U by a factor of 4 to 1 in all major media. Trump-U was a major fraud committed on poor people. A real scandal. Hamilton was just some east-coast nonsense which, given that the musical is mostly a very elite, one-sided whitewashing of history, will bring him even more support from his voters.
    This was such an obvious fake scandal one really wonders how any media would fall for it.

  6. Balint Somkuti, Phd says:

    Origin
    With all respect I think you dont understand the meaning and the background of these simbolic events such as Brexit, President-elect Trump and to you of lesser importance but for us Eastern-Europeans big issues like Hungary’s not so new and Poland’s new govts’ efforts against Brussels, or an ever strengthening Visegrad 4 (V4) cooperation etc.
    This is not alt-right, populism, or demagoguery. This simply the revolt of normality against abnormality.
    If you say new-nationalism I say yes, since unlike the old it is not aimed against ALL other nations. Its main adversary is internationalism.

  7. Bobo says:

    Good Morning Origin
    Mike Pence took his family to a Broadway play at great expense to see the acclaimed play Hamilton. He received a less than stellar reception- not the first and not the last- and sat to enjoy the play. As per his security detail he left quickly at the end but stood and listened to the rant as a gentleman. The rant could have been delivered to him in writing but it was not . Personally I felt bad that he had to go through this with his family by his side. Have They No Decency Sir.
    The message from the Trump future administration is We Are All Americans. We solve problems together but create problems when we are not together.
    Twitter and Tweets are mindless trivia which is how I take them but then I’m getting to the age where others may call me an old man.
    Thank you for the opportunity to respond.

  8. LeeG says:

    Re. Yesterday’ Trump berating network bosses for being liars and unkind to the golden child liar. Maybe he can line up other professionals in science, engineering, industry, military, academia etc and give them the emperors decree on how things should be.

  9. Jay, haven’t you heard of “West Side Story?”

  10. Peter Reichard says:

    “We have an honored guest with us, the Vice-President Elect. Many in this city and audience including myself were disappointed in the results of the election but it has been fairly decided. We have a diverse nation that includes not only the cast of this play but also conservative White men from Indiana as well, this is what makes America great. After all, e. pluribus unum. So in the spirit of unity and reconciliation I dedicate my performance tonight to you Mr. Pence.”

  11. turcopolier says:

    Peter Reichard
    What is it that you are quoting? pl

  12. LeaNder says:

    b, you are only the occasional guest around here, due to the time needed for your own blog. Full discovery, and no harm meant to Origin, I didn’t manage to finish reading his long contribution.
    Do you really think Trump reads any of those tweets directed at him. When would he even do that?
    No, I would not assume that too, he surely can afford staff for those matters. But why not take a look occasionally or indeed, however hard to believe, write a comment himself? …
    Trump simply CREATED the Hamilton affair when headlines crept about his $25 mill settlement payment to Trump University victims.
    I both agree and disagree.
    Agree: consumer’s are often lured into traps by being offered dreams…
    Disagree: I do not have the least idea about the precise genesis of the Trump university. … Are you 100% sure, Trump wasn’t himself at least somewhat lured into the idea of profiting of his name or VIP status. Some people were interested in using his name? In Communication and Marketing VIP’s are a very, very central tool. And the crowd usually flows to success.

  13. LeaNder says:

    sorry, got the plural versus genitive case wrong. The ‘bloody’ apostrophe!!! German – English switch didn’t work satisfactorily. 😉
    The very, very best to my former neighbors in London, not all, but surely some of them. Among them a former class-mate and an SST member.
    Gone for a while

  14. Origin says:

    Lemur you must not know many liberals, or perhaps better now called, the Coasters. Few have any knowledge of the philosophers. What they do know is that they live in peaceable, diverse communities including all stripes of people. They love the milieu and they are prospering financially. I don’t want to be overly harsh, but if you are not prospering, move or learn to run robots. There are lots of open jobs in the Coaster areas.
    Also, the world is not collapsing. Quite the opposite. It is just that for some here, it seems to be collapsing. If there is any tendency toward collapse of the ES, that tendency will be encouraged by the emergency of white nationalism here. If there is disruption here, the world will simply pass us by as the baton or progress and prosperity passes to China or maybe Europe.
    As the US rejects globalism, GM and the other rust belt enterprises will simply pull up stakes and move to Mexico where they can employ competitively priced labor enjoy free trade with the globe.
    Today, Europe announced it was forming its own “Pentagon” for a unified EU defense force and Mexico, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, and more are meeting to establish a Pacific free trade zone under China’s leadership. The general idea is screw the US, we are bigger and we don’t need it.
    If you want to prosper, move to the coast and adopt Coaster ideas. White Nationalism is a dead-end street. While Trump “won”, the rust belt lost. Trump did win. He is a seasoned globalist and if things get bad, he will just relocate his enterprises to wherever the most profit lies. This week it appears he was lobbying the president of a South American government to approve a new hotel for him.

  15. Origin says:

    Proof is in the taste of the pudding. This morning discourse from all corners of the political spectrum has shown up; wonderful.
    Unfortunately, Trump continues to fail the Freedom Test. His spectacle on Twitter today is quite informative as he conditions his followers to abhor the free press. He said he cancelled his meeting with the principals at the New York time because he did not like their terms. I don’t know what the NYT demanded, but I would hope they wanted the meeting to be on the record and Trump wanted to keep it secret.

  16. The Beaver says:

    @ Origin
    FYI:
    “Parscale is one of the few within Trump’s crew entrusted to tweet on his behalf.”
    From: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go

  17. kooshy says:

    All
    Report of Trumps’ yesterday off the record meeting with MSM, very interesting.
    http://nypost.com/2016/11/21/donald-trumps-media-summit-was-a-f-ing-firing-squad/
    “Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said, ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed,’ ” the source said.”

  18. Babak Makkinejad says:

    In my opinion, the system of National Socialism, had it not attacked USSR, would still be with us today. In fact, given the rise of China and the Rest, a Fortress West led by Germany could have been an attractive option for many in Europe.

  19. Tyler says:

    Origin,
    “Free press”.
    You’re killing me here. There’s no free press in the US MSM. There’s a bunch of liars who were openly colluding with HRC to push a narrative and try to get her elected.
    Stop with the false piety about “muh sacred free speech” from the people who insisting Trump is a Hitler-Stalin in league with Russia (but also going to start a hot war with them). The MSM whored out the cachet of their reputation in the name of their ideology, and no amount of apologia from you can change that.

  20. Tyler says:

    Kooshy,
    Good.

  21. Tyler says:

    Origin,
    Yeah, I can’t get worked up over this when the Left is trying to put people in prison for not wanting to bake cakes for gay “weddings”.
    Or that the Hamilton actor who made an ass out of himself made a lot of commentary on Twitter regarding raping drunk white women.

  22. ex-PFC Chuck says:

    Ron Paul’s website passes along the work of someone who has combed through the Wikileaks and identified specific MSM journalists who collaborated with the Clinton campaign.
    http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/archives/revealed-the-real-fake-news-list

  23. Origin says:

    Tyler, you are doing free press here.
    This blog has more coverage than lots of print papers. I disagree with you on many levels, yet I push the “Publish Button” so you can speak to the world. I believe discussion proves-up ideas that get sifted in the discourse. In fact, you have taught me a lot through your posts.
    Were we in Turkey, Egypt, China, or a majority of the other countries in the world, either you or I would risk going to jail.
    As for your criticisms of the MSM, it has the right to express its values, be for the candidates it prefers, and diss the others with impunity. There is no law or rules that says it has to be fair, honest, or truthful. Of course they wanted HC elected because they were well familiar with Trump and thought him a bad choice for the country. The whole purpose of a press is to persuade the readers to the outlet’s viewpoint. The rule that there is no rule for speech is what has made our country great and mostly well run.
    Trump is trying to suppress free speech with bombast, intimidation, and legal actions so that he can control what people see of him. His tactic is to intimidate and sue those who diss him and hide his shenanigans like his oligarchical self dealing with his companies while in the national spotlight.
    How can you support such a man, you, who so eloquently, but misguidedly, perform free speech for the world? Such people want to shut us all up.
    Trump Tweets tell it all. Examine their assumptions and logic with common sense. Believe him in what he says! Examine the consequences if he gets what he wants, a totally docile press. If he beats down the press, people like you will never know how badly they have been deceived and taken.
    Thanks for participating. I enjoy contending with you.

  24. Ishmael Zechariah says:

    LeeG,
    Do you deny that the network bosses are consummate liars, abominable propagandists and fully-bought shills? They really bet on the wrong horse, they doubled and tripled their bets, and they lost. Now someone is calling the bet. What is wrong with that?
    Ishmael Zechariah
    P.s: Scott Adams on Trump’s win
    http://blog.dilbert.com/post/153480921421/persuasion-versus-populism

  25. Origin says:

    There is no reason MSM journalists should not collaborate. Like Presidents Elect, MSM journalists have a right to free speech.
    Outlets have a right to take sides and express their views in public and private regardless of their slant. That is their role in this Republic.
    Trump got secret previews of some of his questions from his friends in the press too. That is what free press and freedom of speech is all about; trying to advantage those who you agree with. Anyone who believes MSM news outlets are neutral or fair is uninformed and naïve.
    Celebrate the disorderliness of it all. It is good!

  26. Jack says:

    “..he conditions his followers to abhor the free press. He said he cancelled his meeting with the principals at the New York time because he did not like their terms.”
    “free press” That’s irony right??
    How “free” was the NY Times when it kept peddling the Iraq WMD stories or the Assad the butcher raining barrel bomb stories? The MSM has lost a lot of credibility with this election. They colluded with the Hillary campaign to first boost Trump during the primary as he was considered a walkover in the general election and then did their darnedest to take him down. It failed. What we have are a media elite who are card carrying members of the Borg. Trump is showing he can fight back as he has 25 million followers on social media that he can communicate directly without using the corrupt media’s filter. There are no news outlets it’s all propaganda masquerading as news. At the top of the list for fake news should be the NY Times.
    An example of where media ought to be with objective analysis is SST. But the MSM is all caught up in their own celebrity culture.

  27. Origin says:

    So what? Pence touted bogus electro-therapy to straighten out gay people and wants to jail transgenders for peeing in the wrong pot. The white nationalists brag about cuckholding black women and ethno-cleansing the continent. Which is worse?
    Don’t be suckered. These trivial issues are designed to deflect your worries from the real goal being pursued today in the secret Republican halls of power as they prepare their feeding frenzy of new bills. Focus on the real danger, the takeover of the nation by the oligarchs and the coming suppression of free speech.

  28. Origin says:

    Credibility is for the reader to discern. People only believe what they want and propaganda is rampant. The MSM is mostly owned by the oligarchs who have their own interests, not ours, in their choice of actions and what they publish.
    As for Trump’s Tweets, they are pure propaganda. Propaganda can be very informative. It shows where the powers want to go and gives us advance warning of things to come.
    As for where you can find a really free press, you are right that it is in such places as SST and even this place must be taken with a grain of salt filtered by broad inquiry into other outlets.
    Jack, you are the real free press. Study hard, discern closely, bring us reliable information, soundly considered views, and write often. Thanks for participating!

  29. Well, Origin, that was a shock. I click on my favourite site, as I do most evenings, to get some facts on what’s happening in the ME or in the unknown world of the American Defence Establishment, and to see those facts set in perspective by the Colonel and his group of knowledgeable insiders, and I get ambushed. No other word for it. There I was, strolling around, safe for the duration of my visit here, miles away from the frenetic PR and special pleading that we must accept for political discourse elsewhere and suddenly “Bang”. A lethal salvo of spin,right into my safe space and no therapy dogs around to help out because the cats would object.
    But free speech is free speech, however it’s used. Can’t object, therefore, but now I’ve taken cover might I be allowed a brief rejoinder?-
    Here is an article that seeks to paint the extraordinary achievement of Donald Trump’s election victory as a triumph of the “burgeoning rhetoric of white nationalism”.
    This use of the term “White Nationalism” is the worst use of spin I have seen for a long time.
    1. Much of the Trump phenomenon, and much of the Brexit result for that matter, is not to do with nationalism of any variety. The mainspring for both movements was popular revulsion against the excesses of the crony classes. Nobody called Mr Sanders, or Mr Corbyn in this country, a “white nationalist” when those two gave expression to this revulsion. An overclass looting its host is no unusual sight and nor are objectors to that looting. I think we can all of us, Mr Trump and Mr Sanders included, object to theft without having swastikas carved on our foreheads.
    2. I don’t know how many in the American electorate, or the English electorate earlier, take note of foreign policy. Not many, perhaps, but for those of us who do Western foreign policy has been a fumbling disaster. That was set to continue. Now, perhaps, after Trump’s victory, the killing will be scaled down. No nationalism there, I think, though there are in this case some real swastikas around. They belong to the Neo-Nazis the cronies support in the Ukraine, those crusaders for the white race who have publicly stated their mission is to clear Jews and Russians from their homeland.
    If you wish to gain an insight into the convoluted ideological world of the Clintonian progressives then look at who they support. Read back numbers of the Kiev Post or get hold of some sub-titled videos of TV broadcasts by members of the Verkhovna Rada. Ultra-nationalism in its most extreme form is alive and well in the Ukraine and in Eastern Europe. It’s thriving because Mr Trump’s opponents have used it to further their foreign policy objectives. As yet I have seen no sign that Mr Trump or those who voted for him wish to so use it.
    3. I think that Mr Trump might, however, be open to attack because he is clearly a patriot. But patriotism has nothing to do with skin colour and everything to do with where you belong. Call the patriotism of the average American “nationalism” if you wish, or white nationalism or ultra-nationalism if you wish to score a false hit on that American patriot, but belonging to a community and wishing to see that community prosper is no crime.
    The circumstances in which a community can prosper, and in particular how much mass immigration a community can absorb and still remain prosperous and a community, is certainly a question that needs debate. It’s a difficult and contentious debate. Donald Trump has brought that debate into the open. It won’t be a useful debate if his opponents seek to suppress it by putting the wrong label on it.
    This is dog whistle politics. I see it used a lot in the States at present, as it was in the Brexit debate. If the Trump movement can be given a false label, if people can be got to believe that it’s a white version of La Raza, then Blacks, Hispanics and Whites will inevitably come into conflict. In the resultant scrap we shall all forget that the cronies are still running off with the loot. Divide et impera may not be the intention of those who use this type of argument but it will certainly be the result.
    English Outsider

  30. Kooshy says:

    Yes , but as per KC
    “Confusion will be my epitaph
    As I crawl a cracked and broken path
    If we make it we can all sit back and laugh,
    But I fear tomorrow I’ll be crying,
    Yes I fear tomorrow I’ll be crying
    Yes I fear tomorrow I’ll be crying”

  31. Dr. Puck says:

    I’m interested to see if Trump departs substantially from the core motivations that are apparent in his biography, life story.
    For example, it would be a departure for him to go and drain the swamp. (In noting this, it is also true that in promoting a willingness to ‘drain the swamp,’ Trump never described what he meant by either ‘swamp’ or ‘draining.’)
    Valissa, this all could become unenjoyable if the hopes are dashed because it turns out Trump is just out to enrich himself and the 1%.

  32. Jack says:

    Yes. What we have is an environment where it is all a giant information operation. Propaganda is the name of the game. There can be no ability to discern in real time except for the few.
    What happens when the vast majority believe that no news is truthful and it’s all meant to deceive? What happens when skepticism and cynicism prevail?
    As Col. Lang noted the Borg attempted to manufacture the election result. They failed this time. Doesn’t mean they won’t try the next time. As I noted here the Borg will never cede power as the spoils are too enticing. IMO, the only way is to drastically reduce the scope and size of government.

  33. JohnsonR says:

    “We have an unrepentant “platform” provider for white nationalistic rhetoric as the newly appointed Chief Strategist for our President elect”
    The use of the term “platform provider” is revealing. It refers to the attempts by the left (broadly speaking) and various interested identity lobby groups, to suppress the effective expression of political opinions they dislike (including white nationalism, but also “racism” from the reasonable to the unreasonable, “antisemitism” ranging from insufficient respect for Jewish interests and mere criticism of Israel to outright Nazi-style thuggery, disapproval of homosexual behaviour, and all kinds of traditionalist, nativist and nationalist opinion) by depriving them of any major platforms in the media and elsewhere.
    This is dressed up as merely encouraging media property owners and operators to express their righteous disapproval, but what it amounts to in effect is the attempt to censor and suppress any and all expressions of the dissident opinions in question, anywhere. As such it should be resisted on principle, whether one agrees with the opinions in question or not.

  34. Origin says:

    There is a very dark streak sitting just under the surface of the American psyche. If you read the comments on a significant number of blogs, you will see it emerging. Mr. Bannon “platformed” the Alt-Right and Mr. Trump speaks often of throwing away “political correctness.” A particular nastiness is emerging where permission has once again been given to hate speech. Alt-right groups are coming out of the closet. Just last weekend, there was a public convention in D.C.
    I do not label Mr. Trump as a white nationalist, but he has yet to speak out to condemn the growing movement “platformed” by his Chief Strategist. His silence tacitly encourages it. Moreover, Trump’s picks for his cabinet, particularly Sessions, ring quite scary here in the American South where we are quite familiar with who and what Sessions is. The first “foreign” leader Trump met was Farange. LaPenn has boasted of contacts. Ivanka was set out in front of Prime Minister Abe as a clear advertisement of who to contact to make deals with the President’s Brand. No one will be able to control this. Too big a fortune is to be made. From here on out it is Trumpism a sour blend of crony capitalism and toxic nationalism to curry the gullible masses. There will be little resistance from Congress.
    As a white person who grew up in the Jim Crow South, Trump’s rhetoric has very familiar overtones from the anti civil rights rhetorics of the 1950s and 1960s, language that was used to suppress both black and white.
    For an English person whose ear is not trained, words that seem innocuous are toxic and scary to a huge swath of the population. Get a beer and watch a Trump rally or three in their entirety. Trump is a master in creating false fears and feelings of superiority among his audience. Who knows what he believes beyond the art of the deal and making a profit, but the seductive dark rhetoric worked. Trump got elected.
    Trump is not a savior, he is an oligarch and his interests diverge from the interests of most citizens. He will lead the flock of his kind. The Republicans are about to enter into a legislation frenzy which will take control of the government from the civil servants and give it to their friends, the contractors. The chumps are kept in line with hysteria over the diversionary issues like white supremacy, gays, immigration, and abortion while the goodies are carried away secretly during the dark.
    I do not want to be a complete Cassandra, but my post is a warning. Keep close watch. Things are not as the may seem from afar. Have a look at the comments on this post alone. There is real anger. There will be conflict. China will prosper. I hope the devils do not dance as they seem to want to do and we still have a modicum of liberty and prosperity when it is over. It is up to the wisdom of the People now. I am not encouraged.

  35. LeaNder says:

    In my opinion, … an attractive option for many in Europe.
    I can’t resist, Babak. Irony alert?
    Please recall, the larger part of Germany doesn’t lie within your Diocletian ‘European culture defining’ line. Except for the region on the left bank of the Rhine. Altogether that’s not much of it. Thus this statement feels at least a little inconsistent. If you don’t mind.
    How can a pretty uncultured people try to lead the rest? Why not GB, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Austria, the Balkans? All well within the boundaries of the culture defining line of the Diocletian Empire. Thus well prepared to spread the culture to the uncultured outside that line. Simply according to your second Makkinejad thesis, that cannot ever be us.
    And now I definitively shut up. Business.

  36. Valissa says:

    Balint, I very much agree with your point of view on this. I appreciate the simplicity and power of the statement that “new-nationalism’s… main adversary is internationalism.”
    I could complexify that a bit and restate it as… ‘the new nationalism is a response to a particular form of globalization that benefits the wealthy international elites at the expense of local economies.’
    But does globalization have to work this way? I don’t think so. Globalization has come in waves over the course of history and it has often benefitted local economies rather than gutted them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_globalization (note: I tend to agree with those who take the longer view of it’s history).
    I don’t see why the current modern form of globalization can’t be modified to adjust who benefits. There is no fundamental reason that globalization cannot co-exist with nationalism, as it has for most of it’s history. I don’t see it as an either-or, nationalism or globalization… and I think setting it up as a dualism, whether intellectually, economically and/or politically, is part of the inability to solve problem (epistemologically speaking).

  37. Dr. Puck says:

    It will be known very shortly whether or not Trump turns down or up the swampy crony capitalist “rigged system” dial, or whether he turns up or down the borgist deep state neocon dial.
    This will come about by his actions after January 20th. I’m discounting the transition circus.
    It does seem like Trump will turn the planetary thermostat up.

  38. BillWade says:

    Persuade, ok I have no problem with that after the real news is shown. Unfortunately, they lie often and well.
    Alas, us oldster in the US were brought up with the notion that the MSM was supposed to be neutral politically and just present us with the facts as news. After the news they were free to editorialize to their hearts content. It’s changed a lot and for the worse, why should I believe them?
    Anybody catch the deathly Zika virus? Ha ha.

  39. Origin says:

    Perhaps, the purpose of being a “platform provider” is to be a provocateur to engender conflict and to distract from the primary purpose of the venture: seizure of power.
    The removal of “political correctness” for the disaffected and marginal kooks brings in a whole new and malleable voting block in a narrow election. Political correctness was a correct approach to keeping the bubbling diverse polity within the pot of norms. Once the obligation of maintaining politically correct speech is removed, the super-heated fluid of discontent becomes explosive. Whether the discontent is containable or not depends of the volume of content in the pot. The resulting steam cloud will hide a lot of self-interested shenanigans.
    Be mindful, we are press! Study hard and bring in some good tidbits for us to enjoy. Thanks for your comment.

  40. Jack says:

    “this all could become unenjoyable if the hopes are dashed because it turns out Trump is just out to enrich himself and the 1%.”
    Yes, it would be not very enjoyable. But…not any different than what would have happened under Hillary and what has happened over the past several decades under both parties.

  41. Origin says:

    Perhaps, the purpose of being a “platform provider” is to be a provocateur to stir up things to accomplish the real end: seizure of power. If you give license to a group of disaffected kooks, you might be able to recruit enough adherents to flip an election.

  42. Jay says:

    Hell’s Kitchen! Even today that area has changed is now known as “Clinton”, how apropos I suppose. I do sometimes wish we could go, back to the future, when life and love was simple.
    So we’re the weapons systems…

  43. Origin says:

    There is a deep streak of dark nationalism just below the surface of the American psyche. If one reads the comments in numerous blogs, you will see it surfacing. We, here, are at a simmering point. My post is meant to be a warning of the essence of what I see growing.

  44. kao_hsien_chih says:

    Ha. Channeling Konrad Adenauer? (when he joked that he’s crossing into the wilds of Asia whenever he crossed the Rhein? 😛 )
    Diocletian line is an awkward divide–I always thought the boundary is between the “Catholic” Europe, “Orthodox/Islamic” Orient, and “Atheist/Legalist/Cabalist ‘China'” (I don’t know enough about India to say one thing or another.) But that’s for another time and place.

  45. Valissa says:

    Thanks Dr Puck for giving me an excuse to post Trump’s most recent video statement of what he intends to accomplish in the near future. Side note: I did not vote for him, I voted for Johnson-Weld, but I do see Trump having the potential to trigger some corrective measures for both the US economy and the political establishment.
    Trump’s first video speech, direct to the people skipping the MSM…
    Trump Says He Will Issue Executive Order On First Day In Office Withdrawing U.S. From TPP http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-21/trump-says-he-will-issue-executive-order-first-day-office-withdrawing-us-tpp [video is < 3 min, summary of points below] TRADE - Withdraw from TPP and negotiate bilateral trade deals in America's favor ENERGY - Cancel job-killing restrictions on American energy industry (including shale energy and clean coal) REGULATION - For each new regulation, 2 old rules must be eliminated NATIONAL SECURITY - Develop a plan to protect America's vital infrastructure from cyber-attacks and all other forms of attack IMMIGRATION - Direct Department of Labor to investigate all abuses of visa programs ETHICS REFORM - Drain the swamp by imposing a 5-year ban on executive officials becoming lobbyist after they leave the administration (and a lifetime ban on lobbying for foreign governments) ----------- I was impressed by the tone of the delivery of his speech and by how presidential he sounded. But I am old enough and have seen enough presidents make promises they couldn't deliver that I remain skeptical, and am taking a wait and see attitude. I agree with Kissinger that given his unique position, we should give Trump a chance. Don’t Nail Donald Trump for his views during campaign: Henry Kissinger http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/dont-nail-donald-trump-for-his-views-during-campaign-henry-kissinger/articleshow/55528820.cms

  46. kao_hsien_chih says:

    Origin,
    The point about “the real goal being pursued today in the secret Republican halls of power as they prepare their feeding frenzy of new bills.” will be the real test.
    There is a strong belief among many fans of Trump that Trump will not fall for these–I’ll confess that I don’t trust Trump enough that he will resist the regular GOP hard, but I’ll be happy to be proven wrong. To be fair, a lot of the giddiness is driven by the belief among the Republicans that Trump is indeed “secretly one of them” and that he will be somehow “easy.” That they were deathly afraid of him only some months ago, hopefully, will be justified and that, much the way he ran the campaign, he will prove himself an independent in Republican clothing. But we have to see how things unfold. I am really hoping that he will take up the provisional olive branch offered by the Democratic left.

  47. Tyler says:

    Origin,
    You are believing the big lies I see while pushing your own lies and doubling down on NOTHING TO SEE HERE.
    Good luck.

  48. Tyler says:

    Origin,
    This is mendacious hair splitting, taking comments out of contest, and ridiculous hyperbole.
    Is your day job with the NYT?

  49. Valissa,
    I think the ‘Reality TV’ part of Trump’s background is important, and may be inadequately understood.
    This kind of television comes in many shapes and sizes, but sometimes it has something of the ‘circenses’ element – going back to Roman times. The audience actually enjoys an element of brutality and outrage.
    One central point, however, is that while it is commonly manipulative, it cannot be simply that.
    For a presenter to work, he – or she – has to have an instinctive sense of the audience. And to have this, it is necessary, at a gut level, to share a lot with them. (And the fact that someone is very rich may be of limited and ambiguous relevance here.)
    By the same token, experience can help someone who has a natural talent for sensing what their audience wants, and will accept, to ‘hone’ that talent, and give them an instinctive confidence in their ability to, as it were, ‘play’ an audience in thoroughly unconventional ways.
    The virtuoso element in Trump’s campaigning style was I think bound up with his understanding that a very large swathe of people – including precisely those whom Hillary Clinton thought would naturally support her – are absolutely fed up with ‘political correctness’.
    But he also displayed a ‘finely honed’ sense of the kind of transgression which would play well with a ‘white’ audience, but not antagonise many blacks, Latinos and Asians – and women – in the way that the Clinton camp expected.
    Unfortunately, understanding how virtuoso his campaign was does not make it much easier to assess what Trump is likely to do, confronted by the concrete decisions a President has to take.

  50. Tel says:

    So suppose you are on a bus ride between cities, and then somewhere out on the road the bus driver pulls over, stops the bus, singles out one particular passenger and starts a long lecture about why this passenger should support gay marriage.
    That would be a legitimate First Amendment petition then?
    Then someone else who heard about the incident says, “How rude! I’m not using that bus line,” this would be an attack on First Amendment rights, I suppose?

  51. mike allen says:

    Origin –
    Well said! But pls remember that Trump’s tweets are just smoke and mirrors to get the MSM talking about them instead of his unethical business practices, his bogus charity foundation, and his sucking up to Wall Street banksters now that he has been elected. It is just more of the same-old same-old but using new technitronics the media loves. The press has been bamboozled again. Ignore his tweets, focus on his actions.

  52. Green Zone Café says:

    Well, accusing him of “raping” is adopting the frame of his and my, maybe yours, adversary, isn’t it?

  53. Tel says:

    You are effectively saying that freedom of speech = freedom to tell lies.
    Fair enough, yes the act of telling lies is protected; but no one is protected from the consequences of the lies they tell. This especially applies to people in positions of trust and responsibility.

  54. Origin,
    You write:
    ‘Lemur you must not know many liberals, or perhaps better now called, the Coasters. Few have any knowledge of the philosophers. What they do know is that they live in peaceable, diverse communities including all stripes of people. They love the milieu and they are prospering financially. I don’t want to be overly harsh, but if you are not prospering, move or learn to run robots. There are lots of open jobs in the Coaster areas.’
    I have seen fewer clearer examples of the condescension on the part of ‘liberals’ – or what votaries of a creed in which I use strongly to believe has degenerated into – which is largely responsible alike for Brexit and the Trump victory, and could even conceivably end up causing a second American civil war.
    As it happens, I live in a ‘peaceable, diverse community’in West London. But we do not include ‘all stripes of people’.
    The Indian lawyers with whom we have dinner, and discuss which schools are appropriate for their children, are people who are different, but also want to share very much of our culture. Likewise, the Muslim man who the daughter of another neighbour is marrying shares a great deal of our culture.
    When however immigrants from the rural areas of Pakistan come into places like Rotherham the situation is quite different. Currently, a bit under half of British mosques are Deobandi.
    (See http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/06/who-runs-our-mosques/ .)
    The tensions which result have been visibly building up for decades. However, the kind of people who work for the BBC and the ‘Financial Times’ didn’t want to know thirty years ago, and haven’t wised up since. Increasingly it has come to seem to me that they make the pre-1789 French aristocracy look ‘ear-to-the-ground’, and ‘in-touch’.
    As the article to which I have linked brings out, the situation in relation to Muslims is different in the United States. But it is generally true that ‘multi-culturalism’ is at its easiest, when it does not have to confront real and radical cultural difference.
    With regard to immigration from Eastern Europe, of course people in streets like the one in which I live benefit from it. The British middle classes haven’t had servants since 1945 – they’re loving it. (There is a very complicated story here, but simplistic ‘multiculturalist’ cliché does not help.)
    When you tell me that few of your kind have ‘any knowledge of the philosophers’ I can readily believe you. As it happens, the kind of concrete matters I am talking about are becoming involved with a revival of philosophical arguments against liberalism about which you and people like you may indeed be ignorant, but which have a long history and are not simply to be treated with condescension.
    If you really think that the kind of ‘conservative’ ideas put forward by Lemur and Tyler are simply the product of the resentments of people who are ‘not prospering’ and an appropriate response is to tell them to ‘move, or learn to run robots’, you simply do not know what is happening.
    Moreover, it is a fairly basic point about human nature that condescension tends to make people very angry indeed.

  55. Fred says:

    Tyler,
    The hasbara have been given new marching orders or haven’t you caught on to the change in tone from the dynamic duo over the last few days. The establishment is in a panic still. Why else would there be all the “Actung! Trump orders up the Zyklon B” posts on the net.

  56. Fred says:

    Origin,
    Is this your legal advice to news organizations that broadcast over the airwaves under license from the government?

  57. Origin says:

    Johnson R.
    It seems to me that the purpose for Bannon’s platform providing was provocation and license. First, he gave a variety of fringe groups a well-trafficked site, and second, he gave them license to speak. In such a close campaign, getting a sizeable number of kooks vehemently performing for you is helpful, especially if those kooks can express a discomfit experienced by a broader audience. There has been a long held tacit, meaning unspoken, disconnection between the realities of a sizeable group of the population who really had not invented verbal tools to express their understandings. Platforming the kooks provided verbal tools to bring those thoughts held by the broader, disaffected group into expression. It worked great!

  58. Kooshy says:

    So if understand correctly for you is ok if one party or even one person has a bigger control and share of mind forming instruments and win the elections ? What kind of democracy is that?
    In this elections American voters resented and rejected the media, IMO one of the reasons Clinton was defeated was her campaign’ abusing use of MSM in her benefit and against Trump and Bernie during primery.

  59. Origin says:

    No, both would be free speech.
    When one adopts a free speech environment, it is nearly certain it will include jokes, lies, profanity, and rudeness. The question is how the target of the speech responds. Did the hearer learn something? Can that person make a change in the speaker or not by the response.
    However, with respect to Pence, there is a long and sour relationship between him and the LGBT community. He came into their territory and set himself up as fair game. To his credit, he responded well and appropriately.

  60. LeeG says:

    Yes I do. That many network news organizations provide a product for customers and venue for advertisers that goes through filters doesn’t mean they straight up lie. Trumps whine and condemnation of those he got miles of coverage from is hysterical because it’s exactly what he wants, attention.

  61. Origin says:

    Mike Allen,
    They may be smoke and mirrors, but in aggregate, they expose the character of the man.

  62. Valissa says:

    “Unfortunately, understanding how virtuoso his campaign was does not make it much easier to assess what Trump is likely to do, confronted by the concrete decisions a President has to take.”
    I quite agree! And I think your insights on Trump’s background in reality TV are relevant as well. However, I have no personal drive or need to “assess what Trump is likely to do.” This is just one benefit, IMO, of being non-partisan (or anti-partisan). As a student of history I am quite content to wait and observe the Trump presidency as it unfolds and then, once I have actual evidence to assess after he’s been in office for a bit, maybe I will be able to formulate some theories and predictions. I find the need to try and predict what Trump might do, though natural and normal, produces articles that are often quite entertaining (I admit to an offbeat sense of humor), with the exception of the irrational and primal scream type of emotional fear mongering and hysteria that some throw out.
    The MSM has been wrong about Trump repeatedly, and many in the various forms of alternative media have had the same problem. I have observed very little intellectual capability to generate useful insights about him, and I think this is because most people’s worldviews are rather fixed and limited by the conventions of our time… which Trump is challenging. My favorite thing about his existence 😉
    As I have tried to tell some of my liberal friends, Trump is the most liberal/independent president the Republican party has put into office in a long time. He’s not a social conservative (he used to be a Democrat), though he will have to give some of those types positions in his administration. He’s not beholden to the Republican establishment they despise. By any rational assessment, liberals should be slightly pleased with this aspect. But instead many are full of fear and loathing, courtesy of the never before seen level of MSM propaganda, and they appear to hate him even more than establishment Republicans. I used to be a liberal, partly because I thought liberals were more understanding and tolerant of differences… and more compassionate. Bwahahahaha…
    With the great popularity of psychology and personal growth among liberals, I have been quite surprised at the collective lack of ability to confront the “monsters of the id” within themselves and instead project it all onto Trump as a reasonable response to how horrible they think he is. Please note, I think there are liberals that understand this, especially at this blog, and hopefully they will be the ones to rebuild their coalition into something that’s more geared to all Americans and not centered on political correctness.
    In times of trouble some people find comfort in hate and fear. – Odo (DS9, Season 7 #551)

  63. steve says:

    Waste, fraud and abuse. We already know what happens when people campaign on those issues.
    Steve

  64. Valissa says:

    It is a very popular campaign theme around the world. It is a rather timeless meme as all societies that have any kind of wealth or resources have this problem.
    As a realist and non-partisan and student of history, I always have extremely low expectations of ALL political promises and goals. I am also aware that many people do believe politicians when they say such things. It’s right up there with desire for HOPE and CHANGE which Trump won on … same thing the Obama campaign won on, and that Bill Clinton won on, etc, etc.
    The Romans recognized this as well…
    Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.
    –“The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.”

  65. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Look at the history of the Franciscan Order in the lands that became Germany.
    You should know these things; are you sure you attended a Gymnasium?
    Are you even German?

  66. There’s some surprising news out of the Trump-NYT meeting. He addressed the white supremacist conference in Washington DC saying, “I disavow and condemn them.” and “It’s not a group I want to energize.” That’s got to be a kick in their fashy stones. I don’t know if this is Trump throwing cold water on the alt-right or just a move to keep them at a slow simmer rather than a rolling boil. Time will tell.
    He’s also moving away from his notion that man-induced climate change is a Chinese hoax. In the same NYT meeting he said he’s keeping an open mind about whether to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Treaty. He said, “I think there is some connectivity. Some, something. It depends on how much.” I find this hopeful, but, again, it’s way too early to tell. I figure we’ll know the winners and losers before next Summer. Until then, enjoy the show.
    BTW, Origin, good discussion. Go 1A. Go free press (and bought press). Go Wikileaks and whistleblowers.

  67. ex-PFC Chuck says:

    It depends on what you mean by “collaborate.” IIRC there were many instances exposed by Wikileaks in which semi-final copies of stories were submitted to Clintonville not for the purpose of fact checking but for approval of the tone and thrust of the writing, and an excessive willingness to change the copy to please.

  68. Kooshy says:

    Mike, I don’t know if Trump will suck up to wall street’ banisters or not, but to be fair, IMO no one, in recent history of this country has sucked the Wall Street banksters more than the last two democratic party’s presidents meaning Clinton and Obama, do you agree?

  69. Origin says:

    “I have seen fewer clearer examples of the condescension on the part of ‘liberals’ – or what votaries of a creed in which I use strongly to believe has degenerated into – which is largely responsible alike for Brexit and the Trump victory, and could even conceivably end up causing a second American civil war.”
    I accept your criticism and if I have offended Tyler or Lemur by getting a little militant, I apologize. There is a certain amount of anger against those who chose Trump because I see that choice as being really harmful to me personally. Some of us Coasters are having a hard time seeing the US lose its global leadership that seems to be evaporating under Trump.
    However, the main point intended was not condescension, it was to state the fact that, economic realities do change and mobility is important. The country is full of opportunity and either you have to go get it or invent it in your own place. The old Move west young man, may now mean return to the Sunny southeast.
    The converse of condescension seen on the right is gloating. It is just as bad. What is important is that we keep communicating. That way we are all educated and humbled.

  70. Origin says:

    The beauty of conversation is that it tends to expose the lies and the liars are prone to lose their following quite quickly. Truth fairly presented is the best way to carry a point. If a point cannot be carried with truth, it probably should fail and it usually will.
    Thanks for being here.

  71. Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg says:

    “White Nationalism” is more than a little ridiculous. Talking about a lot of people with a pretty wide variety of backgrounds that could be called ‘white’. Many of whom have ancestors who were hunting one another down like animals not so long ago. A hundred years or so ago, Irish wouldn’t have been accepted into a ‘White Nationalist’ milieu. Nowadays a lot of their descendants are on the cutting edge of dingbat tribalism.
    As to “Hamilton” it seems to me that Pence was trolling those people. He gets to look like a reasonable guy on every level and the cast behaved like chumps.

  72. Jack says:

    I second you Sir on “Go Wikileaks and whistleblowers”. They are the ones taking the risks and paying the terrible price to shine the spotlight. The press are mostly bought and paid for and focused on the memes pushed by their owners as well as sensationalism to drive ratings.

  73. Origin says:

    Who was trolling who? The fake news has it that Biden gave him the tickets.
    Love your term “dingbat tribalism” that is much clearer than white nationalist. https://thinkprogress.org/thinkprogress-alt-right-policy-b04fd141d8d4#.d7mh3h5ko

  74. Valissa says:

    “Trump is not a savior, he is an oligarch and his interests diverge from the interests of most citizens. He will lead the flock of his kind.”
    Origin I think you are 100% correct in this. Where we probably differ is that I think Hillary would be no different. Perhaps a slightly different set of oligarchs, but essentially similar. I think many liberals know this and perhaps assume their oligarchs are somehow better just because they claim the liberal mantle and are PC.
    The US has been a plutocratic oligarchy for some time now. There’s a reason I’m now a third party voter. Just take a look at the Clinton family net worth since Bill left office, and which jumped again after Hillary left being SoS. No doubt Obama is equally looking forward to making the big bucks doing “good works” with his rich buddies as well. I do not blame any of them for taking advantage of the system, as that is human nature as well.
    Had Hillary won it would not have been unreasonable to be concerned about the role of Bill Clinton in the White House, with all his rich friends and highly paid speeches and connections around the world via the Clinton Foundation and more. While I do think the Clinton Foundation is doing some good work, I think claims of corruption are also true given human nature and the urge to help out one’s “friends” which the rich are very good at doing. And don’t get me going on all the corruption involved in the so-called rebuilding of Haiti. But it is human nature for ambitious egotistical people to wheel and deal and to rationalize their “sins” as ultimately being for the greater good. Which Trump will do as well.
    And Chelsea is very involved in the Clinton Foundation, and would have had input to her mom the president as well. Not so different from Trump’s kids, and they are all friends with each other.
    Notice that Trump is not eager to prosecute Hillary because he thinks she’s a good person and has been through enough. What a monster! (/snark) But this is just another example of oligarchs sticking together.
    Hillary would have been a very pro-war president as well as continuing to be a very good friends with both Wall Street and the Military Industrial complex. Does this really represent the ideals of the Democratic Party that you can believe in? No wonder she ran against Trump and used hate speech about him and his followers more than touting her own merits. I was big Hillary supporter in 2007-8 and she ran a very different campaign back then (and I was more naïve about power and money back then too). I think having finally become one the of oligarchs herself changed her, and not in a good way IMO. But I expect that is true of many of them.
    Trump will have to figure out how to deal with the pressures from various big money groups as well, and will no doubt get sucked into at least some of the agendas presented to him, if not all of them. Trump is a deal maker not an ideologue, and he’ll have to make deals to get along with various factions of the elite establishment. The Borg is very powerful! However, the Borg is not a complete monoculture and if the Realists can get back in power under Trump and cut back somewhat on the military adventurism and related coup games that would be a small improvement.
    I have very low expectations of how much change any president can accomplish. After all, once they are elected they ARE the establishment.

  75. Fred says:

    Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg,
    “it seems to me that Pence was trolling those people.”
    Perhaps he decided that the strategy of that draft dodging American convert to Islam, Muhammad Ali, would be a good one to follow: “Rope a dope”. The diaper pinned safe zone anti-bullying CTR-L is out in force against Pepe, Harambe and the left defined “alt-right”. Meanwhile Trump, who won’t take office for almost two months has managed to … dress down the media executives and send out a tweet! How Deplorable of him.
    The latest thing to outrage the left is that some folks over the weekend were shouting that supremacist chant “Hail! Hail!” at the top of their lungs. Of course like Governor Pence few of those Americans from Indiana were happy about that because their Hoosiers were crushed by the Wolverines 20-10. Well, at least now they know how Hilary felt.

  76. Jack says:

    Origin
    While this as been a great discussion and I appreciate your bringing this to our attention, I note that one hand you say when the media lie and act provocatively in pushing falsehoods it is fine because they are pursuing their free speech but when Bannon’s firm does the same then they are kooks to use your term. Seems like a double standard and makes whatever argument you make sound disingenuous.
    Further, you imply that Trump’s ascendance will lead to the oligarchy firmly in power and acting rapaciously. Haven’t we already got there? And didn’t Bill Clinton and Barack Obama play an enormous role in that?
    Your comments on others posts on this and the previous thread leads me to conclude that you are rather bitter that Trump won the election.

  77. jerseycityjoan says:

    I hardly know whether to laugh or cry.
    If you mean the elite of our cities when you say “Coaster” your profile of them here rings true to their self-perception.
    If you mean everybody’s doing wonderfully well in New York, Boston, etc. and please go run and join them if you want to, well, things are not like that.
    The nonelite are being pushed out of housing by higher prices and teardowns to build new towers, they are not getting good private industry jobs outside of healthcare (but then, who is?)
    For the overwhelming majority of us Americans out here — whatever we think, wherever we are — harder days are ahead because we have more people and because we will have still more people, all competing for the same resources within our country.
    I am a Democrat myself. I am not conservative. But I feel doomed — and I feel the future member of my family are doomed too — if we, the people, don’t reassert control over our own lives and our own country.

  78. jerseycityjoan says:

    Valissa,
    My guess is that most of the higher-income Americans pushing blacks out their long-time New York area homes are Democrats.
    And how many of them had any guilt about that?
    Or how about the ones that take a couple of hundred thousand (or more) from the parents and grandparents to get set up near NYC and other cities, help that others simply cannot get from their own families? How much guilt and regret that they can compete because they had help due to the family they came from?
    de Blasio-style big-city liberalism is just full of so many fantasies, so many of which are so blind to what’s really going on.
    Anyhow, I do wish your sister-in-law the best of luck in her protest votes. I myself did Sanders and then Trump.

  79. steve says:

    “draft dodging American convert to Islam, Muhammad Ali”
    If we are going to go after draft dodgers, that would include a lot of politicians, including POTUS-elect.
    Steve

  80. steve says:

    I have never thought Trump was racist. While he was willing to accept support from anyone, including real racists, there just isn’t support in his adult history to believe it. Plus, I think he is really too self-involved to be a racist. Now that the election is over he knows he needs to disavow those who supported him, so he is. As to the rest of what he really believes or will pursue no one knows, so just wait and see.

  81. Tyler says:

    TTG,
    Let me give you some background. Trump was specifically asked about Richard Spencer throwing a gladiator salute and shouting “Hell Victory! Hail Trump!” after Spencer was framed by the interviewer as another Nazi who wants to Holocaust 6 gorillion Jewish babies.
    Full disclosure: I tangled with Spencer once over the fact I am a LEA and he insisted that I was an FBI plant from the Civil Rights Division. The general consensus is that Spencer is an idiot who, given a soapbox, can’t help LARPing as an edgelord and is on the autism spectrum. No one has their “fashy nuts” in a bind and everyone understands that between Spencer’s actual actions and the way the question was framed, he wasn’t going to be down with the AR. And more to the point, no one cares.

  82. Tyler says:

    Origin,
    And I thought I had seen histrionics before.

  83. Tyler says:

    GZC,
    Yes. You make the enemy live up to his own standards while ignoring them.
    This is an argument of rhetoric. You don’t bring diadetic to a rhetoric fight. Trump understood that. Its why if someone calls you a racist, you call them a pedophile.

  84. jdledell says:

    Origin – Thank you for stimulating a very interesting discussion. We all have to remember that our nation is very closely divided. It looks like Clinton will win the popular vote by 2 million. As a believer in the Electoral College, I am not disputing Trump’s legitimate victory. However, this tussle between the left and right seems destined to be closely fought for the next few decades, at least. Trump’s election is far from being a mandate and I hope he governs recognizing that fact.

  85. Valissa says:

    ROTFLMAO… smart wordsmithing there Tyler 🙂
    But I think liberals are mostly too “nice” to appreciate that strategy or it’s merits.

  86. Fred says:

    Steve,
    Those draft dodgers have a of winning, don’t they.

  87. VietnamVet says:

    Origin
    2016 was a change election in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The main culprit was the destruction of good paying manufacturing jobs there. Democrats and Republicans ignored the Rust Belt since both parties are funded by the rich and the professional classes who benefited from outsourcing and offshoring. Both parties used identity politics and dog whistles to divide up the nation and loot the Middle Class. Then came along a TV salesman who in plain English attracted the Deplorables by his stance for jobs and against trade pacts and immigration.
    Already Donald Trump is moderating. I am afraid once again we will have a continuation of the George W Bush administration. But, apparently, thanks to his Eastern European wives and Trump Towers worldwide; he recognizes that a world war with Russia and supporting Islamists is not good for his businesses. In the long term, the only way to increase demand and to end the current depression is to write off all the bad debt and provide living wages so that families can have shelter, food, health care, education, consumer goods and maybe a purpose in life. The 1930s are our best guide on how this will turn out. Donald Trump is no FDR or Mussolini. I expect a lot more low quality Private Public Partnerships like Lexus Lanes or Maryland’s Purple Light Rail Line that provide investors a continuous stream of the public’s money until they fall apart. After all, they are rental properties.

  88. Tyler says:

    LeeG,
    Did CTR cut funds after the election, or did Paymaster Soros open the coffers?

  89. Tyler says:

    Fred,
    Oh, I’ve noticed. That and this product of a triggered amygdala are pretty much the two modes of thought I’m seeing from the Left.
    I’m actually amazed he thinks he is “contending” with me at all. Delusion truly extends to all aspects of life.

  90. Tyler says:

    PFC Chuck,
    Origin’s default response is “Nice argument, but look at these gymnastics!”
    Personally I’m amazed watching his special pleading. He’s good.

  91. Tyler says:

    jdledell,
    300+ EV is indeed, a mandate, and not a license for California to decide the fate of the nation as a sore loser.
    Deal. With. It.

  92. mike allen says:

    Origin –
    It is a trick he uses to bamboozle the press. That is all. It keeps them off his back on other things they should be looking at.

  93. Jack says:

    Valissa
    You’re on a tear these past couple threads! Well said.
    IMO, at worst Trump will be like the presidents we’ve had over the past 2 decades. At best he’ll reduce the influence of the Borg and prevent an escalating conflict with Russia. At the end of the day the Borg has all the levers of power.

  94. Ishmael Zechariah says:

    Sir,
    Your prevarication is disingenuous. The depraved mendacity of the press is acknowledged even in the “apology” letter of Pravda on the Hudson:
    http://nypost.com/2016/11/15/new-york-times-edits-its-election-apology-letter/
    Providing a “product …that goes through filters” indeed! Do you have no shame?
    Ishmael Zechariah

  95. Origin says:

    This afternoon has been frustrating because my post have not been uploading properly.
    To talk about the apparent double standard. As I see it free speech is very broad and includes a wide spectrum from willful lies to total truth. As soon as there is free speech, someone soon will disagree with you and you likely will think someone is lying. The scope of speech does not have within it any value measure of right or wrong, sort of like a technology. It can be used for good or ill. I do not like liars, whether in the MSM or Bannon’s firm. The challenge is to sift the reliable information from the lies. As for the strange, racist and anti-semetic denizens of the “platformed” sites, they are kooks.
    I am bitter that Trump won. I think it is a disaster for the country for many different reasons. When he won, the demise of the nation’s world position commenced its demise. The baton of leadership has shifted to the EU. No world leader in their right mind will ever follow Trumps laad.

  96. Tyler says:

    VV,
    Its amazing that you and so many others are swallowing the “he’s moderating!” nonsense after an election season where the MSM committed itself to lie after lie.
    Do you really believe they’re going to tell the truth?

  97. Origin says:

    true and it is fair to experience the consequences of the lie.

  98. mike allen says:

    Glad to see that General Mattis has apparently talked Trump out of using torture.
    http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/22/in-stunning-reversal-trump-scraps-his-calls-to-bring-back-torture/?utm_content=buffer1ca95&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
    Another reversal. But I give him credit for this one.

  99. Jack says:

    VV
    “write off all the bad debt”
    This would have been a lot easier couple decades ago. And it was imperative after the 2008 credit crisis. But the TBTF had our politicians by the balls. They instead decided to bail out Wall St and put the pedal to the metal on credit expansion led by government backed debt. Obama at the behest of Wall St got Holder as AG. He said it was too risky to prosecute. Then we got the big inflation in financial assets as liquidity from the central banks was poured into them. Never mind the bottom 80% have practically no financial assets. As the Deplorables saw their standard of living collapse wealth inequality reached incredible heights.
    This story is not over. The denouement of the Chinese credit explosion is yet to come. Nor the final act of the incredible monetization in Japan. And of course the holding together of the inherently flawed Euro.
    Those expecting promises of escalating unfunded liabilities well into the future may be in for a rude shock that will pale in comparison to the past. The city of Dallas police and firemen pension fund will soon need a bailout. And so will many others. Those that get their promise out first will consider themselves smart and lucky. This period of mass delusion will pass just as others did. And the piper will be paid. It would pay to read Charles Kindleberger more than Draghi, Bernanke or the MMT fantasy.
    https://mishtalk.com/2014/04/11/85-of-pension-funds-to-fail-in-three-decades/

  100. ISL says:

    Tyler, IMO Trump decided he is better off with the media as an enemy than a friend. Worked well in the election, and if he is going to move on any of the items to keep and grow his base, the campaign has only just started.

  101. Jack says:

    Origin
    I empathize with your bitterness. This is the first time in decades I have voted for both a major party candidate and a candidate that won. I am rather sanguine about Trump in comparison to our other recent presidents. Don’t underestimate the inertia and lethargy to change in our sclerotic and bureaucratic system.
    Yes, this was a brutal campaign. Hillary had all the institutional advantages. The big money, the MSM, and the establishment of both parties backed her. She had a 700 person headquarters staff, he had 70. He was overspent by a few factors. He had no choice but to run an insurgent campaign the way he did. The Democrats must reflect on their selection process and campaign strategy. Read this story of an interview with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3961098/Kushner-speaks-credit-Donald-s-win-ran-Trump-campaign-like-tiny-startup-used-Silicon-Valley-connection-target-voters-insisting-didn-t-push-Christie.html
    IMO, Breitbart has much less influence than the combined reach of all the Democrat media from Huffington Post, Talking Points Media, Daily Kos and the big media of the NY Times, WaPo, Rolling Stone, etc.
    They failed to push her across the finish line. All the traditional GOP leaning pundit class from David Brooks, George Will, Krauthamer all backed her. Trump got I believe one newspaper endorsement. Yet, Hillary received millions of votes less than Obama. Appreciate the improbable win that Trump achieved despite the immensity of the forces arrayed against him. You don’t have to like him or support him.
    I think you’re wrong that the EU or China will pick up the mantle of world leadership. The EU may not even survive the next 12 months if Renzi loses his referendum and Le Pen wins the French presidency. China is not exactly stable either. I think we would have dodged a real bullet if Trump and Putin achieve a new detente. IMO, the biggest problem is financial. Not just for us but globally.

  102. Peter Reichar says:

    The speech he should have given.

  103. jld says:

    I see you do quite well with cognitive dissonance, free speech is free speech as long as it is politically correct otherwise “the super-heated fluid of discontent becomes explosive”, huh?
    Political correctness is the harbinger of crimethought and its promoters are not immune from it, just ask the huge number of “good communists” who ended up in the Gulag or remind of the enthusiastic Khmer Rouges who were purged by Pol Pot.

  104. jld says:

    “To talk about the apparent double standard”
    It’s a really, really, really good “appearance”.
    (I’m not adding a LOL/LMAO/whatever because it’s not at all funny)

  105. Ingolf says:

    Even many who hold out some hopes for Trump seem to think that feathering his nest will be a priority.
    Maybe, but then again maybe what will really stir him now that he’s achieved this improbable victory is his long-term legacy. It’s not often someone is handed the opportunity to write himself into history as one of the greats.*
    Improbable I know, but he does seem to have that rare touch that lets someone cross boundaries. As has been pointed out, his score with black and Hispanic voters wasn’t too bad. In the article Valissa linked to, Bannon said: “If we deliver we’ll get 60% of the white vote, and 40% of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years.” The numbers are almost certainly ridiculous but I’m not sure the principle is wrong. Providing, that is, Trump tries to do what he tries to do with an even hand and minimal nonsense.
    As Jack pointed out (at 11:12 PM), great economic dangers lie ahead and could easily hobble any president’s best efforts. Still, if Trump is seen as fighting the good fight reasonably fairly, he might even survive that. It helps that he’s repeatedly pointed out that US markets are in a bubble.
    All pure speculation of course. He may be a disaster but my guess is he won’t be. We’ll know more once we see some of the cabinet picks. It’s at least good to see some fresh names amongst those he’s talking to.
    * He’s got the confidence (and ego) to believe he might be able to do it and anyway, even if one views these things cynically, what could be better for the long-term Trump brand?

  106. Paul Escobar says:

    To all,
    I am a Trump admirer. I have been since he announced the wall.
    When I say the following, I am not trying to be clever.
    It is just the gut reaction I have, based on personal experience.
    – I found Tyler’s last article to be disingenuous.
    – And I find this article to be somewhat naive.
    I will try to explain why.
    Trump should be lauded for his defense of Christianity, nationalist trade policy, strict immigration policy, and anti-WW3 foreign policy. Before him, no one of any prominence dared to point out the social & economic costs. Tyler was correct when he pointed out these attractive aspects some weeks ago. It is what attracted me to Trump.
    But there is a sad & depressing reality, which social media & free speech exposed. Christians & the working class are not Trump’s personally prioritized “base”. They’re not his “die-hards”.
    This was first evident when Trump’s Twitter account knowingly re-tweeted obscure white *supremacist* accounts. He and his staff knew the media sit around Twitter all day, obsessing over each of his tweets. They knew these particular re-tweets would be isolated & amplified.
    This would have the effect of drowning out all of Trump’s other supporters. The Christians who want a strong social policy. The working class who want fair trade & jobs. In one swoop, they would all be demoted & marginalized. And this was purposefully initiated by the Trump campaign.
    This would also compound a reality for Trump supporters. It quickly became apparent that the most relentless champions of Trump’s campaign were racist accounts. All day long, they kept putting out soothing polling data analysis & witty retorts to journalists…interspersed with impassioned arguments about the intellectual inferiority of other races.
    The idea of inferiority is significant, in its implications.
    This chosen base aren’t White “nationalists”.
    They are all-out White *supremacists*.
    There is a difference.
    If the concern was that whites should remain the majority & not be subjected to demographic & spiritual sabotage by outside forces…this does not actually threaten other ethnicities who happen to reside in the United States.
    To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, it is not an extreme proposition that people be deported for ILLEGALLY entering the United States. It is not an extreme proposition that schools & media refrain from teaching junk sex-science to impressionable children.
    But that is not what the prioritized base are arguing. Their core belief is that the rest are IRREDEEMABLE & untrustworthy. So why educate? Why employ? Why even tolerate their existence?
    Frankly, if you watch how they interact with each other online…it’s not even a question to them. They have no second-thoughts or self-reflection. Their days are spent egging each other into a state of sociopathy. It’s like a kid practicing on animals, before the eventual human.
    As much as I find liberals & progressives insufferable, I take their point. If Trump is truly a like-minded *supremacist*, there is an incredible mortal danger to innocents.
    If he is truly the nationalist he claims to be…we are all saved. But just in case, I hope there continues to be large-scale & sustained vigilance.
    Best,
    Paul

  107. Balint Somkuti, Phd says:

    Valissa
    All valid points. Please also take note that proportionally pre WWI ‘globalization’ was bigger in volumes (tonnage) than that of today. Only difference being that raw materials were shipped from the underdeveloped countries to the developed ones, which shipped high-added value items back.
    IMHO this new-nationalism (or should we call it patriotism for its non-exclusion?) is aimed at undoing neoliberalism. Of course firstly it intends to undo the elite’s greediness, but almost as importantly its influence on everyday life, namely
    – gay marriage, and other gender nonsenses
    – compulsory charity to illegal immigrants
    – other social engineering nightmares
    – liberalization and media support of drugs
    – interference with family issues
    – growing pressure to dismantle families and nation states
    – safe spaces, political correctness and other superflouos educational issues
    – and most importanty growing centralization of power
    as simple as that. Of course there are those who always exaggarate and use strawman rhetorics. To those I always answer: “The hundreds of millions of dead in WWII should and must not have had died in vain. We have learned from our mistakes, there is no need to be scared.”

  108. LeaNder says:

    kao,
    Konrad Adenauer was a sly dog (ein Schlitzohr), I heavily struggled with him when younger. Not least since he integrated his former enemies of all stripes. He was the mayor of Cologne before the Nazis took over, and a Center Party (Catholic party) man. Came to mind post “Mission Accomplished”.
    I was more a Willi Brandt fan, admittedly. I think versus the CDU his ‘Ostpolitik’ (eastern politic, Détente) was the right thing to do, all the way down to his spontaneous Warsaw genuflection. Apparently his own advisers were surprised.
    Admittedly I was very, very sad when he announced his resignation.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Affair
    But basically concerning religion in Germany it is ‘Like Master, Like Man’/Wie der Herr so’s Gescherr (slight slang) if you go back to the historical roots:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuius_regio,_eius_religio
    As kid and juvenile I often lived in what is called the “Catholic diaspora”.

  109. Sorry, Origin, but though I accept you are well-intentioned I believe that what you are saying is dangerous. It plays right into the hands of those who, at whatever cost to their country, wish for their own benefit alone to maintain the status quo.
    There are bits of the status quo that we all, in your country and mine, would like very much to see maintained. Salaries, pensions, welfare benefits, savings, policing, defence. That means security. All that security, fraying round the edges for many and gone for some though it is, is well worth hanging on to. We can put food on the table for the family and walk down the street unmolested and that’s plenty good enough to be going on with.
    There are some less acceptable sides to the status quo. What Trump will try to do and Sanders would have tried to do is to reform the worst sides – drain the swamp and get foreign policy more sensible – while keeping the show on the road more or less as it is.
    I don’t think that’s going to happen. That’s why, for me, both the Brexit struggle and the recent American election were so unreal. We were all fighting, bitterly at times, about how to run the farm. Apart from maybe a hint or two from Trump no one discussed how we were to get on when the farm’s fallen apart.
    We don’t of course know how it’s going to fall apart. In an earlier post you lay out one scenario. That’s the globalist scenario in which we accept that salaries and the rest must decline for most of us to third world levels. (above – “As the US rejects globalism, GM and the other rust belt enterprises will simply pull up stakes and move to Mexico where they can employ competitively priced labor.”) You don’t, in that post, explain how we are to match first world expectations with third world incomes but however it’s done, fast or slow, the farm won’t be anything like what we have now. Nor will our pensions and savings and welfare benefits.
    An alternative and revolutionary scenario is to stop outsourcing. That’s revolutionary because the consequent rise in prices must either lead to a reduction of the income gap seldom before attempted in the West, or to even greater poverty for those whose wages don’t rise in proportion to the new prices. No one talked about that in the election I noticed, but unless Trump does indeed go for a sharp reduction of the income gap – and that in America, of all places – we can forget about stopping outsourcing. And if he does go for that reduction in the income gap and succeeds then it won’t be only the cronies who’ll feel the draught. Anyone on higher incomes must find those incomes reduced. Not a recipe for a happy progressive, by the way, given that most influential progressives are on or expect to be on higher than average incomes. So there’s ample scope for social tension there.
    There are other scenarios. Automation might progress even faster and again no one has thought much about the practical politics of a world where there’s nowhere near so much work around. Or we might fall off the debt cliff and crash. The economists differ on that and it’s as well the more optimistic ones are running the show because defying arithmetic does seem to be the only solution we’ve got if that cliff is to be avoided.
    The point is that in none of these scenarios or in any other is the farm going to keep running as it runs now. Trump’s hope of steering the country through some necessary reforms but otherwise keeping the show on the road we’re used to isn’t going to come off; and although we in the West have been through depression or worse many times before we’ve never done it at a time of such extreme demographic change.
    We’ve been close to such a time before. Not in America in the past – “Go West, young man” was an adequate safety valve for a couple of centuries and later you had the unexampled prosperity of the post war years – but we’ve been there in Europe. It’s precisely at such times, when social tensions rise because of new groups jostling with the old, that extremists come out of the woodwork and pull the rest of us along with them.
    That’s why, Origin, I find what you are writing so foolish and dangerous. Under any of the above scenarios, or any combination of them, a new politics is needed. New solutions need to be debated because the old ones don’t work. If you attempt to squash that debate by pretending that it’s all about “racism” then we don’t get that debate. Failing that debate we fall back into the well-trodden paths of extremism and failure. Don’t go there. It’s not a good place to be.
    English Outsider

  110. LeaNder says:

    What’s your point, Babak? Did I ever suggest I studied Church History?
    The history of religious orders, or of the church for that matter, was hardly part of the curriculum in either history or religion classes. It no doubt was touched on in the former necessarily, but definitively NEVER in the latter. That I can assure you. I seriously doubt it is today to a large extend. But maybe I am wrong.
    The history of the order and the founder I am most familiar with are the Cistercians. That surely touches on a lot of topics in the larger historical context in France and beyond, e.g. Cluny but also the secular context beyond, or struggles between the secular and religious, the scholastics?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluny_Abbey#Cluny_and_the_Gregorian_reforms
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistercians
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_of_Clairvaux
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Abelard#Conflicts_with_St._Bernard

  111. jld says:

    So, what would be a mandate?
    98% of the votes?
    Reminds me of something but I can’t get exactly what…

  112. turcopolier says:

    PA
    “without regard for the opposition” Yes, but IMO, he will not try to do that. Instead he will seek allies in the Democratic Party for issues on which they hold views similar to his and there are quite a few of those. pl

  113. Nancy K says:

    Our new president was also a draft dodger, or have you forgotten that. Everyone in this country left and right should be outraged at the antics of white supremacists. Trump has denounced them.

  114. Fred says:

    PA,
    That turnout is right in line with the averages in presidential elections for the past 4 decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections

  115. Nancy K says:

    Winning the Electoral and popular vote is a mandate, that is what Obama had. Trump won the election but does not have a mandate from the people. I think I will respond to Trump as you did to Obama and refer to him as the Orange Messiah. Actually I imagine I will treat President Trump with much more respect that you had for President Obama.

  116. Tyler,
    I’m calling bullshit on your description of what went down. There was no specific mention of Spencer, “Hiel Trump,” Nazi, Holocaust or “6 gorillion Jewish babies. The transcript is out. The bulk of the discussion was about Trump’s defense of Bannon, which I found reasonable and effective. He said Bannon was not an alt-right type or racist and that he would not have picked him if he was either. He was then asked specifically about the alt-right convention in Washington. The only characterization given was that they are “angry about the country” and “-along racial lines.” Trump then disavowed them. There was no reporter’s leading question and his answer’s on record.
    Who cares about this? The lefties, of course. This kind of talk by Trump could help reassure them that he does not share the alt-right white supremacist dream and that he has no intention of rounding them up for internment camps. Hell, he just chose a Hindu daughter of Indian immigrants as UN Ambassador. He is a supreme con man and master bullshit artist who has/is playing all sides, left and right, in his quest to win big league. He’s no more alt-right than he is a Communist. A successful presidency would be the ultimate deal. To fail in this would kill him.
    I agree with your description of Spencer. He is a fringe idiot. His wife, “Nina Byzantina” is far more interesting.

  117. LeaNder says:

    The hundreds of millions of dead in WWII should and must not have had died in vain. We have learned from our mistakes, there is no need to be scared.”
    Balint, I wish I was sure about that.
    But I acknowledge that it wasn’t “New Europe” that surfaced post 2008 European-states-in-the-serious-troubles-context but Ireland, Spain, to a lesser degree Italy and most famously Greece. I also have not the least bit of knowledge of the problems on the ground in “New Europe”. Apart from glimpses via the rare warnings of concerning possible negative facts on the ground (social context) in one or the other European sponsored publication.
    You seem to be a military historian or scholar of the military.
    I sure hope that Europe survives and does not fall apart into its earlier nationalist parts. That would certainly need a lot more awareness for the special state beyond a one-size-fits-all rule.
    For me Greece, not yet the initial events but the latest, so far, provided the necessary fodder for our own new semi-parlamentarian-alt-right–with all its complexity concerning supporter–to jump-start into election success. Not as some in the media suppose only underhand Russian sponsorship. They had been lying in wait for longer at that point in time.
    For a long time, I haven’t looked into nationalism. Maybe I fear its basically ethnogenetic core for the wrong reason. I surely respect and honor Europe’s diversity:
    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnogenese
    I haven’t looked at the right to recently. Watched it decades ago over here, more on the wolf-in-sheep’s-cloth layers, if I may. Alluding to a German weekly here. But I noticed there are mutations among the the good old right and its diversification into whatever term you prefer: neo-right, nouvelle droit, identitarians.
    In other words I understand fears, but I also find it curious that Origin writes this above:
    US lose its global leadership that seems to be evaporating under Trump.

  118. kao_hsien_chih says:

    Valissa,
    I think you are exactly right on all these things. My take is that the choice last election was, to mix Orwell and Dostoevsky, between a boot stomping on human face forever and taking chance on 2 times 2 being 5, and Dostoevsky’s answer beat out Orwell’s. It’s crazy. It’s probably not true–in fact it’s probably crazy–but sometimes, we do have to try argue with mathematics and, sometimes, math is wrong, to our pleasant surprise.

  119. kao_hsien_chih says:

    I don’t know about “national socialism,” but I do suspect that fascism was a viable political path for many, and, in a sense, without calling itself fascism explicitly, it might even have won out in a lot of countries.
    I’ve always thought that “fascism” is not an ideology but method to political power. There’s nothing really consistent about the goals sought by Mussolini, Horthy, Franco, Metaxas, or whoever except for doing what they could to maintain power. But there was something very consistent about how they maintained power: they were not especially brutal or violent in their methods (the number of executions under Mussolini’s regime was very small, although number imprisoned was quite large), but relied on top level compromises and co-optations. Mussolini’s Italy, in particular, relied on making pacts with top level leaders of businesses, labor, religious, and civic organizations under “beneficent guidance” of the Duce, and enforced by means formal and informal, violent and sly. Everything was top down, with most paths of bottom up representation cut off. But a large number of people were bought off with a mixture of side payments and the happy myths propagated through mass media that everyone “officially” bought into, dictated from the top.
    This is not atypical of politics in a lot of countries, whether nominally democratic or dictatorial. Grass roots representation is mostly dead. Top leaders, claiming to be all knowing and all beneficent, claim to speak for the masses and most politics is about them, either as individuals or as corporate bodies.

  120. kooshy says:

    I agree with your point, IMO Mr. Trump since he did not win the PV doesn’t have a national mandate.

  121. Fred says:

    Nancy K,
    See my reply to Steve above. Here you go: I denounce white supremacists. Should I also denounce the black and yellow ones or are those types okay?

  122. Valissa says:

    Just to be clear, my sister-in-law is firmly middle class, as is the great majority of her extended family. Lots of successful people, in the middle class sense of that word. Her father was a college professor (he’s mixed race and light skinned). Although she originally grew up in Massachusetts (where her father taught) various members of her extended family own houses in several of the more well off predominantly white towns in Monmouth County NJ.
    My brother expressed frustration that the corporate HQ of the company he works for (health industry) has recently moved to Ireland due to lower corporate taxes. He almost lost his job in the last corporate takeover of the company several years ago he has been working at for over 20 years. He had to take a demotion to stay due to internal politics. He was a QA supervisor and wouldn’t go along with his bosses plan to cut back on QA procedures, so when the buyout happen that higher level boss dinged him. Fortunately another dept who was familiar with his strong work ethic took him on, but with lower pay. Although now he is eligible for overtime so his total pay is similar. Not surprisingly he voted for Trump as well.

  123. MRW says:

    Origin,
    There is no reason MSM journalists should not collaborate.
    WHOA!.Wrong. The press in the US is the Fourth Estate, the fourth arm of the government. [For foreigners, the other three are the Executive (WH, State, Treasury, etc), the Legislative (House, Senate), and the Judicial (Supreme Court, federal court system)].
    The press is given certain protections under the Constitution because its duty is to The People. Its duty was considered so important it was granted The First Amendment. Its duty is to explain the workings of the three other Estates to The People for The People’s benefit, providing a check and balance from The People’s POV, not for the personal benefit of the press, or to allow members of the press it to use their power to collaborate in secret with a political party. Hence, the outrage in the US at what Wikileaks exposed, and no one would have known without their exposure.
    That is why there are clear distinctions between reporters and columnists (opinion) and broadcast talk show hosts, a distinction Sean Hannity to his credit is constantly making these days. Outlets make their opinion known as news outfits in editorials, not reportage.
    When radio and TV came on the scene, Congress locked down the The People’s interest by declaring the air waves owned by The People (1934?). It is the reason why radio and TV license their ability to broadcast from the owners, The People. Newsrooms were sacrosanct. They had their stars as a result: Cronkite, Murrow. They were never profit/infotainment centers until Cap Cities bought ABC, brought in the accountants, and got Reagan to deregulate the media in 1985. Reagan was on a deregulation roll and not understanding the constitutional importance of the press—and still recuperating from a head shot—ripped up the strict regulation of news ownership within states that dictated how national outfits could function. Hence we went from 50 distinct voices (50 states) nationally to the current six uber owners. Boomers didn’t understand what was happening, and didn’t object. They didn’t understand what they were losing.
    Trump got secret previews of some of his questions from his friends in the press too.
    How do you know this? This is the first I heard of it. That is NOT what “free press and freedom of speech is all about.” That is NOT “their role in this Republic.” “Trying to advantage those who you agree with” is called advocacy (or PR), Origin, not a free press or freedom of speech.
    You have it very very wrong.

  124. JohnsonR says:

    Your speculative opinion as to Bannon’s motivation is really neither here nor there. There’s a far more obvious and simple explanation, which is just that he didn’t feel inclined to go along with the globalist and socially liberal establishment’s dogma requiring the imposition of blanket censorship on any expression of political opinions that are “unacceptable” to them. Presumably as a professional he was confident that following that inclination would not cost the business any more than it would gain elsewhere, but that’s all that’s needed, not any devious strategic plotting.
    The attempt to “no platform” dissident political opinions is wrong in itself, regardless. It is wrong in principle, as violating the very same establishment’s claimed allegiance to “freedom of speech and the right to offend”, it is wrong in theory (since it removes any way to win an argument against those views – essentially it is an admission of defeat), and it is wrong in practice, since it is likely to trigger a political backlash against the imposed orthodoxy. And so indeed it has come to pass, though we are barely at the beginning of it.

  125. MRW says:

    “You Are Still Crying Wolf” is a must read.

  126. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Thank you for your comments.
    What German Resistance Groups?
    May be those who had a second thought after the war started going badly for Germany?
    Or do you mean Die Weise Rose?
    At any rate, expecting some sort of “implosion” has proven to be a delusion – it has proven to be so in Iran, in North Korea, in Russia, in Ba’athist Iraq and in many other places.
    Where things have imploded have been in Africa: South Sudan, Somalia, Congo, and now Libya (caused by NATO War).
    Looking for “implosion” has been a wishful fantasy of those in US Government who have been looking for a cost-free foreign policy. Someone ought to teach them that both War and Diplomacy have costs – like everything else – and that they need to decide where they want to bear costs and where they cannot afford to do so.
    Likely, after Hitler’s death, the Third Reich would have changed and became more palatable, as it would have run out of people to murder or to expel.
    I never put Trump in the same category as the National Socialists nor have I ever commented on or otherwise taken any position regarding the so-called White Nationalism etc. – I find that entire discussion inaccurate and a distraction.
    I agree with you, NATO was Fortress West and after the demise of USSR and the pan-nationalist Communist political ideas there was no reason for it to continue to exist. Ostensibly.
    But it did continue to exist; waging wars in the Balkans, in the Middle East, and in North Africa – all the while extending the boundaries of Fortress West East.
    Does Fortress West wish to have a common land border with the World of Islam? Seems that way to me, and I find it really, really foolish.
    I think technology can solve a lot of problems – tooth loss, hunger, blindness, premature death from all sorts of causes etc. In US, I think, food costs are low compared to what people earn – consuming less than 15% of the disposable income. That achievement is owed to the application of high technology to agriculture and animal husbandry.
    On the other hand, I agree with you that Technology will not alter the fundamental characteristic of Man – his crooked timber.
    That after 5000 years, we are still discussing the issues of war and peace – as though the Revelations of the Prophets or the Deductions of Spinoza had never taken place – attests to that.

  127. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Thank you for your comments.
    So, if I understand you correctly, the civilizing influence that the Diocletian Rome exercised over Germanic lands for centuries through the Catholic Church and its Religious Orders was never covered in gymnasia.
    That explains why you have so much trouble with the idea of the Diocletian Line.

  128. Origin says:

    The Colonel has asked me to disclose something about who I am.
    I am a trial lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia. I have practiced now for forty-one years. I initially came to this site when it was very new and posted under the name WP. The name caused confusion, both because Col. Lang’s initials are WP and so are the initials for the Washington Post. The Colonel requested that I adopt a new pseudonym.
    I chose Origin. Since my college Freshman year, I have studied the use of language as a tool for the creation of realities. Fundamentally, this is what a lawyer does for a living. Origin, the cross-point on a graph, is for my starting place, tacit knowing that is the origin of understanding.
    Political language is most interesting to me. In politics, the polity always has an gut understanding of its experiential reality that is tacitly known, but often not expressible within the current language.
    What politicians do is that they invent linguistic tools to make the reality only tacitly known explicit and able to be discussed. Once the tacit become explicit, it often creates rapid change in thought, even revolution. (Example, “Crooked Hillary”) Hence, as an observer of the world, I look for the origins of change and my belief in the efficacy of free speech as a medium for finding and creating working realities. In that quest for observing the development of linguistic tools, it is quite clear that free speech is akin to technology that can be used for good or ill.
    Politically, I view myself as a moderate Democrat. A Democrat because I think that party is the only party that appreciates the importance of the commonweal and broadly based human rights for all as the prescription to a just and functioning society.
    As a youngster with a degree in economics, I practiced for a while as an economist and have continued to observe economic issues mostly from a political rather than an econometric perspective. That observation of the economy as a political construct has convinced me that capitalism, the workings of which is native to the human animal, has within it a terminal flaw. If left to function, markets always tend towards concentration and when concentration becomes politically excessive, the markets cease to function resulting in a breakdown of political order. As a part of the workings of capitalism, enterprises must ruthlessly minimize their costs of doing business. The easiest way to do that minimization is to externalize every cost possible. Often this is done through pollution and occasionally, theft and legal limitations of various liabilities (product liability and healthcare tort “reform”) Thus, in order to insure fairness and human rights within the economy, there must be taxes, regulations, and a reasonable policies that promote a reasonable level of equality across the broad society. (My view of the Republican Party is that it unjustly seeks enterprise concentration and externalization of costs as one of its tacit principals with the result that it tends toward creating an overly stratified and dysfunctional society where the people are unhappy.)
    Another premise is that none of us are self-made and that all in the polity should be given an opportunity strive. All of us are the product of our community to which we owe an obligation of stewardship. While ach person has an obligation of self-support and independence, the polity must provide educational and employment opportunities to all. As a part of that principal is that the workings of society are vast which means that many get sidelined and need assistance through no fault of their own and as a part of stewardship of the commonweal, the polity and the individuals within it have an obligation of care through governmental subsidy and private charity.
    Finally, racism, sexism, and religious discrimination are deplorable hindrances to the development of a peaceable polity and must always be discouraged and resisted.

  129. Tyler says:

    Nancy K,
    California’s Hapsburg Empire of minorities and the prog-globalist enclaves on the coasts do not dictate to the rest of the United States mandates on how they lost.
    Keep it up with the slave mentality.

  130. Tyler says:

    PA,
    Any port in a storm, lawl.
    It really doesn’t matter what you and the rest of the progs want. I look forward to AG Sessions using your own tools against you to dismantle the last sixteen years of nonsense.

  131. MRW says:

    Paul, you need to read You Are Still Crying Wolf
    http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
    Now.

  132. Tyler says:

    TTG,
    The general framing of the alt-right is indeed, that it consists of gay nazi bodybuilders that want to gas 6 gorillion jewish babies. So of course he’s going to disavow it. But we don’t care.
    Yes, Spencer is another internet aristocrat looking for attention.

  133. I’m wrong about Haley being Hindu. She’s Sikh converted to Christian. I must have been thinking of Gabbard, a Samoan Hindu.

  134. MRW says:

    jdledell,
    Trump absolutely has a mandate. He currently has 290 Electoral votes, 20 more than necessary. Hillary isn’t anywhere close. She only has 232.
    No president since 1789 has won on the popular vote. It’s Electoral votes or nothing, period. Hard-wired in Article Two of the Constitution.
    People can spin he popular vote all they want, but had that been the criteria, the Trump campaign would probably have set up shop in Manhattan, LA, Chicago, Houston, etc., and ditched the Great Lakes states and the rust belt, where the population is much sparser but the Electoral vote count is rich, and what put Trump over the top.
    So people can debate for decades all they want, but it’s a waste of time and clearly not tied to reality. It’s Peter Rabbit Land.

  135. MRW says:

    He has 290 electoral votes to her 232. He has a mandate. Period.
    Those votes were won on campaign strategy because he had to win the electoral votes to win the election. It has been ever thus since the writing of the Constitution.
    If it were won on the popular vote, he would have campaigned differently: in the most populous areas.
    2 million votes is a quarter of NYC. Big whoop.

  136. Fred says:

    PA,
    I kneel in submission to your non provided non-nonsense data.

  137. LeaNder says:

    As far as I know Diocletian didn’t introduce the Catholic religion into the Roman empire. … Sol Invictus versus Christ?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Invictus
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great#Early_life
    Let’s give this up. I can assure you I don’t have the least bit of interests to be right, always, leave alone on a lower pecentage. That’s something I will without any regret leave to you and your followers.
    My suspicion is that you are interested in religion mainly based on what you perceive as political weapon or power over the crowd. Since I am human and often wrong, it would be no big surprise if I was in this case.

  138. Sam Peralta says:

    Paul
    I read hysteria in your post. I can understand considering the concerted attacks on Trump as a racist and misogynist xenophobe. It would be natural to be fearful. The propagandists have achieved their desired result at least with you.
    Can you point to any statement or more importantly action directly from Trump that would lead one to believe that he is a white supremacist?

  139. Sam Peralta says:

    Since you’re the expert why don’t you provide us with the turnout chart over the past 4 decades.
    “complete nonsense”??? It seems the way you disagree is to use the word “nonsense” a lot without providing any facts to back your argument!!! Sheesh!

  140. Dr. Puck says:

    I beg to differ. There are metrics with which one can use to understand and denote substantial outcome-based differences between the two parties.
    These correspond in a qualitative way with certain differences that one could expect in differentiating between a party that tends to want to privatize risk and socialize profits, and amplify free movement of capital, and, the other party that wants to socially engineer results via welfarism and progressive taxation and technocratic experiments.
    Yes, overarching both is neoliberalism, but this does not erase actual differences. Both parties are utopian too, but in opposed ways.
    That both parties are operated by elites, and that there is a Deep State not beholden to either party, does not flatten two decades (or more,) worth of the details which speak to difference, rather than your “not any different.”
    This is not to over-differentiate in a partisan way the complex historical unwinding of manufacturing. But, both ideologies made different contributions to the attenuation of the working class, and the accentuation of precarity.

  141. jld says:

    Otherwise – no “mandate” plausibly exists.

    Ok, then, since all regular elections hover at 50%+/-5% nobody ever gets the kind of mandate you seem to claim including YOUR side, so what is it with the hysterical squealing of the lefty crowd?

  142. jld says:

    However the alt-right is very ungrateful to Scott Alexander:

    I would unkindly interpret his essay has “Please do not set fire to the Reichstag while Trump has the army and the police, and stop being mean to the legacy Americans until we have imported enough brown allies to kill them all.”

    http://blog.jim.com/war/dont-stop/

  143. jld says:

    “Politically, I view myself as a moderate Democrat.”
    Holy Sh*t!
    You mean non-moderate Democrats will not be content with only reeducation camps for the “bad thinkers”?

  144. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Please…
    And I suppose Pontifix Maximus title of the Pope had nothing to do with Rome either?

  145. Sam Peralta says:

    Great job MRW in making it explicit what is reporting vs advocacy vs opinion and the role of the Fourth Estate.
    Origin is advocating propaganda as long as it is his kind while couching it in pseudo intellectual language.

  146. kao_hsien_chih says:

    The idea of “mandate,” at least in an election, always struck me as fictitious. Trump won the election. Now, he has to earn the mandate by showing that he deserved to win it. We’ll know if he had a mandate, and from whom, in four more years. Until then, we are talking about nothing other than projecting our own prejudices and preconceptions.

  147. Sam Peralta says:

    TTG
    Here’s a story about Nikki Haley. She was born into a Sikh Indian family. So, she’s of Indian ethnicity, born into the Sikh religion and now identifies with Christianity as her religion.
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3963816/Nikki-Haley-set-Trump-s-ambassador-South-Carolina-Governor-unveiled-powerful-post-TODAY.html
    Considering that she’s a two term governor of South Carolina, what does it say about the people in South Carolina who voted for a “brown” person. Hardly racist.

  148. Tyler says:

    PA,
    I know I said it to PP in the OTHER thread we have going here where the Prog slaves are out in force, but again:
    – Progs lie
    – Progs double down
    – Progs project
    “Waah I lost you have to listen to me” is indeed slave mentality. The rest of it is the most mendacious and ridiculous interpretation of Nietzche, shoehorning his philosophy into your own narrow paradigm. Everything you said can and should be applied to the prog mentality you’ve attached your plow to.
    An expat philosophy student living in East Asia. Can you get any more of a stereotype? Perhaps you should take your own advice, but I’ve come to notice while philosophy students are quick to engage in external mental masturbation, they’re unwilling to do it internally.

  149. Tyler says:

    jld,
    I laughed. Nice.

  150. Graham says:

    Newcomer here, but struck by the range of views on offer;
    I was particularly interested in a couple of your broader comments here and wonder if you could elaborate:
    “This religious faith that Technology is going to somehow spin the world away from the very clear socio-political trajectories it’s hurtling towards is precisely what has allowed the range of political rhetoric and social solutions available to The West to become so narrowed and brittle, these last 20 years.”
    Do you here refer to such things as our pervasive assumptions that things like internet-driven access to information and social media will drive the whole world to liberal democratic political systems and market economic systems [such as in the western reaction to Arab Spring], to the until recently common American assumption that all countries would converge on the American model, to the Washington Consensus financial and commercial order, to our faith in the spread of pop culture as a leveller, or to all or none of such things? And when referring to the sociopolitical trajectories the world is otherwise heading toward and against which American technological optimism will not be proof, were you referring to the rise of rival economic powers/regions, or something more subtle?
    Or did you mean that our faith in technology has narrowed our options to a very limited set of socially liberal, economically neoliberal ideas that do not find wide global purchase and will not win out?
    Or if I have misinterpreted you entirely, to what sociopolitical trajectories did you refer?
    Separately, could you elaborate on this ” those of us on the left believe that living in proximity to someone and sharing a neighborhood with someone and living in the same political territory guarantees certain basic human rights and fundamental freedoms, and that those freedoms are not being met, now”. Just curious.

  151. Thought Police says:

    Nikki Haley: “Haley was raised as a Sikh. In September 1996, she married Michael Haley with both Sikh and Methodist ceremonies. Haley identifies herself today as a Christian. She attends Mt. Horeb United Methodist Church.” (wiki).
    It’s hard to believe that Nina is/was married to a white supremacist.

  152. turcopolier says:

    PA
    April G. told me that what she said to Saddam was that she had no instructions with regard to Kuwait-Iraq relations. What was needed to prevent Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was a public statement by GHW Bush that an attack on Kuwait would be considered an attack on the US. The administration was being advised by almost everyone including the Arab states that Iraq would not invade Kuwait and so such a statement was not made. the Borg was looking for the post Cold War “peace dividend.” pl

  153. Paul Escobar says:

    MRW,
    I read your article.
    But did you read what I actually wrote?
    Nothing in that link addresses my personal experience & observations. The thrust of the article is that Trump’s public positions are not indicative of any racial animus.
    My post acknowledged that. As I said, I agree with his stated positions.
    Rather, what I described was the digital milieu. And its potential effect on participants in the Trump movement.
    I think TTG (The Twisted Genius) understands what I was getting at. To my mind, some of his past posts indicate as much. Perhaps you have to be immersed in a certain sub-culture to get it.
    Best,
    Paul

  154. kao_hsien_chih says:

    Drawing “civilizational” boundaries is, in the end, somewhat of an endless challenge, I think, even if I myself get drawn into it. From Korean, Vietnamese, or Japanese perspective, China looks distinctly foreign, with a completely different and alien mindset–it is much more “cosmopolitan” and “multicultural,” even if all East Asians look the same, so to speak, to non-East Asians (j/k but if I had a dime for every time I was asked if I’m Chinese/Korean/Japanese…well, depending on how one counts, one or two of them are kinda correct, I guess.). Between the Shi’a and the Sunni, and again, among the Arabs, the Persians, the Turkic peoples, and Southeast Asians, the views towards what “Islam” means diverge wildly, as Babak keeps reminding us. The ways in which the Orthodox and the Muslims have a similar (but also very different) view towards the world and knowledge is something that can go on forever. I do think that the Catholic west, in the Middle Ages, did come up with something very different from the rest of the world.

  155. Babak Makkinejad says:

    “Iran…I pity the Iranians their current domestic situation”
    Please bear in mind that is still the best government that people in the region between the Afghan-Chinese border to the Atlas mountains have ever experienced in over 3000 years.

  156. Paul Escobar says:

    Sam Peralta,
    I have always found the re-tweets of white supremacists & his answer on David Duke to be *significant*. In my original post, I offered two possible outcomes.
    One outcome is what you term “hysterical”. But it is simply an incrementalist path, if Trump were so inclined. He need not say anything. He simply needs to tend the soil correctly.
    The incrementalist path would involve the following. He would simply hang around & become a fixture. Eventually, media & business would come on-board. The like-minded would be installed into positions of power & distribute inducements. “Free Speech” would be cynically exploited to allow NGO’s the space to proselytize & recruit. The culture would shift from promoting one extreme (BLM+Pedasts) to the other (KKK+Alt-Right).
    The other outcome is what I hope & pray for. It is what Trump’s stated policies allude to. That he is a genuine nationalist. That while addressing the demographic question, he harbors no ill-will toward those that remain.
    That is why I encourage the current vigilance among the press & public. We should look closely at what is occurring below the surface. Lives do depend on it. Granted, maybe not yours Sam.
    Best,
    Paul

  157. shepherd says:

    Babak,
    Slight bit of history. There is a huge air gap between the use of the term Pontifex Maximus in Roman times, and its use by popes. The Pontifex Maximus was a separate religious office in the Roman Republic (up to 33 BC). The official Roman religion was largely superstitious paganism. In the imperial period, the title was one of many functions given to the emperor. “Emperor” is not a word in the Roman world. The emperor actually described his powers by assuming many important titles in the old Republic. So “imperator” refers to his command of the army; “pontifex maximus” his supremacy in religious matters.
    The term was used sparingly in the early Christian empire by bishops of all types (it did not specifically refer to the bishop of Rome). It was officially abolished in the late empire. A thousand years later, it was revived during the Renaissance, when the Western world became interested in Rome. Interest then discontinued, and it has remained out of use since then.
    Pope is not related in any way to pontifex maximus, nor is that an office title of popes today. The word “pope” comes from the Greek for “father.”

  158. kao_hsien_chih says:

    Well, I think we should have some difference in opinion about politics of South Korea. Roh Moo Hyun was a populist demagogue, on par with Trump, but with much thinner skin–quite a few people I know thought Trump reminded them of populist demagogues like Chavez, Thaksin, or Morsi, and not unlike Chavez or Thaksin, or indeed, Trump, Roh derived a lot of support from the marginalized, but “politically incorrect” classes, which, in South Korea, tended to be of the left rather than right for historical and social reasons (assuming you can meaningfully define “left” and “right” there to be compatible with “left” and “right” elsewhere). It’s worth noting that South Korean polls completely missed Roh’s election much the way US pollsters missed the election of Trump–actually for similar reasons, i.e. underestimating the turnout by South Korean equivalent of the Deplorables. Again, like Trump, Roh won by combining the support from the conventional left parties and the “Deplorables.”
    The analogy between Trump and Roh might not be a bad one, though, in the sense that Roh had some interesting ideas, especially on “foreign” policy, that defied conventional wisdom that might or might not have worked out in the medium to long term, if they were continued. Still, Roh’s chaotic and often heavy-handed governing style did a lot of damage to South Korean politics and ensured that a majority would just tire of the crazy antics he resorted to. Roh basically discredited much of own his policy and politics (the traditional South Korean leftist parties don’t want a repeat of his kind of politics because Roh effectively ruined them organizationally for a decade or more–which they are still trying to recover from) something that I fear from a Trump presidency. But, like Trump, the South Korean Deplorables are still worshipful of Roh, though, as the socio-economic situation there has not improved much in the last decade.

  159. Nancy K says:

    I was not implying you were a racist, and I am against any form of racism. Racists come in all colors.

  160. kao_hsien_chih says:

    Nazis didn’t become “Nazis” as we know them in retrospect until Reichstag Fire and the Enabling Acts. Yes, there were strains we could see, but only if we look back with the full knowledge of what followed. Until things really started hitting the fan, whether the Nazi regime was fundamentally different from the Fascist regime in Italy was not apparent yet, and might not have become apparent. Remember: without the Enabling Acts, the means to control the state so thoroughly would not have been availed to the Nazis. They would not have been able to do whatever they wanted to do and would have had to operate via compromise, cooptation, and dealmaking, not unlike the Fascists.

  161. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Thank you for your comments.
    I am aware of all of that; I only needed to establish a connection (one among many) between Rome and what followed it West of the Diocletian Line.
    LeaNder is in the state of denial – that something done around 399 could cast such a shadow over subsequent millennia. I suppose it disturbs her – and many others with her. I am not sure why.

  162. Babak Makkinejad says:

    In my opinion, USA is not teetering on the edge of implosion; that is just not what I see.

  163. In reply to Origin.
    I hope you don’t mind if I come back at you again. This comment of yours goes to the heart of the matter:-
    “For an English person whose ear is not trained, words that seem innocuous are toxic and scary to a huge swath of the population.”
    English and European ears have been trained pretty well over the past few decades. Not as well trained as American ears, no doubt, because it takes a little time for American usage to become adopted here, but we’re not doing badly. We do know the code. It’s got a name. It’s called the progressive code.
    It’s the one that invariably calls anything outside a very narrow band of approved discourse “racist”. It’s the code that shoves large numbers of normal people, irrespective of their abilities or their personal circumstances, into a tight little box labelled “victim”, and encourages them live their entire lives inside that little box, simply because they have a skin that is a different colour.
    It’s true that there are bits of the code that the less advanced of us are still exploring. “Micro-aggression”, for example, might seem at first sight daunting, but once you grasp the essential fact that that’s also anything outside a very narrow band of approved discourse you’ve got to the root of it. In fact we all have to be pretty good at the code in its entirety, like it or not, if we want to hold a job down, or if we want to function at all in most situations. It’s another little box, really, that we put ourselves into and lock ourselves up in; and for many in your country and mine, from national politicians to local functionaries, there can be trouble, real trouble, if they step outside it.
    We also, many of us, know the emptiness of that code. I have commented elsewhere that the progressive who is deeply worried when the wrong codeword is used to identify an immigrant doesn’t turn a hair if we bomb that immigrant’s country into ruin. I remember vividly the consternation of friends in Germany when, discussing Brexit, I mentioned that I didn’t feel all that attached to a European Union that was supporting Neo-Nazis. You can in fact get put in prison in Germany or Austria for advocating atrocities that we subsidise people to commit in real life in the Ukraine. Some code.
    Some progressivism, too. I’ve watched as the so called “left” in England has become no more than an apologist for half-witted and poorly executed neo-liberal economic prescriptions. We’ve watched with amazement as tens upon tens of millions of “left progressives” in the States have fallen in behind a Democratic candidate who’s an avowed standard bearer of the neo-cons and,if not one of the cronies herself, no stranger to them. There’s little constructive idealism remaining in the American mainstream left. Not when it throws up all those contradictions. It’s disappeared into it’s own little echo chamber of futile mantras and futile carping. For proof we need only look at half the posts above. At a time when a great nation is uneasily moving to an unknown future grown men and women are squabbling about what occurred at some unimportant theatrical event, or obsessively giving some random tweet an analysis it can’t merit and doesn’t support. Progressives aren’t doing too well at the bread at present, not for millions of their fellow Americans, but they’re all in for the circuses.
    And as the “left” disappears into its echo chamber it leaves behind it a great vacuum. Never forget that the old Left, for all its millennarian silliness and its hankering after command economy prescriptions, was the source of most social and economic advances in the past. If there’s now a big hole where that old Left used to be, what’s going to fill it?
    We’re about to find out, I hope. For I can’t believe that that larger than life American democracy, with that weird ability it has to throw up innovation and change, will now settle into decline. Something’s going to evolve to fill that hole. It won’t be anything coming from the American progressive left, locked as it is into its fantasy world of irreconcilable contradiction, that’s for sure. I suspect that the best the progressives could do for their country at this point is simply to get out of the way, and not seek to import into a new world the shopworn and futile mantras of the old.
    So yes, I do know the code. It’s been getting in the way for decades and it’s time it was got out of the way.. I hear the scaremongering too, “dark nationalism” and all. The “White Nationalists” and the ultra-nationalists and the Neo-Nazis aren’t out in force at present, in your country or mine, for all the ominous warnings in these posts. The truth is that they will only gain in numbers and become a force if they are let. If there’s nothing else there. If an alternative politics doesn’t evolve. Get out of the way and let it evolve; and do please get out of the habit of calling out “Racist” whenever anyone outside the echo chamber attempts to contribute to that evolution.
    English Outsider

  164. LeaNder says:

    Great comments, EO.
    Highly appreciated.

  165. Origin says:

    The press at the founding of the nation was much broader than merely a few newspapers. It included a very active blogosphere in the form of one-off pamphlets and letters widely distributed that performed in much the same was a this blog.
    Perhaps, the best known examples of pamphleteers were under the pen name of “Publius”, written by three bloggers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. They were opposed by the bloggers, Cato (likely George Clinton), Brutus (likely Melancton Smith or Robert Yates or perhaps John Williams) and a few others. These pamphlets (just blogs in print form) are now known to us as the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers. All, like this blog, the essence of free speech press. Other than in the First Amendment, the press is never mentioned. The term “Fourth Estate” is a nick name for the press that goes back to Medieval times. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fourth%20estate
    Also, consider that the members of the professional media organizations are also individuals who have their own political preferences and will work for their positions to win. It is fair that they work the channels they have to promote their ideas.
    Unlike, in some countries, the press is not licensed subject to revocation for being biased. The success of any journalist is dependent upon the strength of the ideas.

  166. Origin says:

    Free speech is free and hopefully it serves to produce cognitive dissonance. Being free, it can be politically correct or not. Following some sort of political correctness means that that people do not diss each other so much that they lose the ability to converse. Departure from political correctness, such as openly stating racist views can be a provocation that causes the speaker to lose credibility or event to gain white nationalist power. Free speech is like a technology, it can be used for good or ill.
    Suppression of public free speech deprives the society of its most important tool for human interaction. “Crime thought” is simply speech trying to be free in a repressive society that is so unwise as to deny itself the technology of freedom of speech.
    Usually, “crime thought” breaks free into the open. i.e. the Russian Samizdat.

  167. Tyler says:

    PA,
    Good grief, 25 years later and you still talk like a philosophy undergrad. As God Emperor Trump would say: Sad!
    “Rancher..life outside the US”. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. How does anyone like you make it through the day with all your digits still attached when you get home being so wrong? Definitely stay in a safe East Asian country.
    I’ve got you tagged and bagged dead to rights, and you’re fumbling in the dark. I’m almost embarrassed for you, but you’re old enough to know better.

  168. Tyler says:

    Paul,
    Bother me with this when white people are attacking Democrats and killing cops because of ginned up identity politics.
    Not sure why you’re going full bore virtue signalling about how you’re a “goodwhite”, but sorry to see this concern trolling from you.

  169. virginian says:

    All this election business as a well-informed Virginian whose connections go way back, especially where “parties” are concerned, I am fascinated by it all. My theory is that there are what I call “little men from Oz” often pulling strings and sort of setting people up to run and eventually to “win”. With an undergraduate degree in History with an emphasis ofcourse in “Virginiana”, it is the story BEHIND the story that interests me. Jared Sparks was the PR guy for Washington and others pulled strings on his behalf. Was he a figurehead like Sir Stephen Runciman one told me? “Pick a tall man and put him on a horse”.
    Like so much of the Bible, as scholars are now learning, it is usually guys in robes or uniforms who tend to tell the “story” and twist reality a bit, mainly to fit their agendas. As a patient listener in some rather important conversations through the years, I learned a great deal power and politics. Girls couldn’t go to Shad Planking or UVA or Tech in my day. And still the Commonwealth Club is where decisions and deals are made. Annapolis and VMI were just great places to meet guys. We knew some of them might eventually become political “elites” one day.
    My Dad graduated from Washington and Lee and his best friend from VMI. My entire family were WW II Naval officers. I wonder just what my Father must be thinking about this “election”? My library is full of a few thousand non-fiction books which I READ. Political and military history fascinate me. Tend to be written by guys, about guys. Since the time of our Scottish-American “founders” -Jefferson, Monroe, P. Henry, John Marshall, James Monroe, etc.- our nation has been on quite a ride. We have had good presidents and some not so good. Elections have always been nasty. The citizens have tended to be on sidelines. The insiders ( Good Old Boys ) have never cared to listen to what the little people think.
    Women in Virginia were meant to stay at home. Even a woman like Nancy Langhorne. She had to leave her country for Britain in order to be recognized for her intelligence and courage. Cowards and bullies are cut out of the same cloth. You can spot them because they hide behind trees, behind medals, titles and robes. The courageous soldiers like Patton and MacArthur Robert E.Lee and Stonewall Jackson, ride in FRONT! Nancy Langhorne, a Virginian, became the FIRST FEMALE member of British PARLIAMENT. So what about Hillary and Donald?
    Who in his right mind today would really WANT that job? to me, the jury is out. In college, as a girl, I was in both the Republican and Democratic club…simply because I wanted to know both sides. Funny. Women tend to be the ones who symbolize such things as our Virginia symbol, the Statue of Liberty, and Justice, balancing equally and fairly what is true. Women tend to be more interested in such things as PEACE. Seems to me that it is a good thing to talk to our “enemies” and I like that about Trump. Like Ike said, the military industrial complex and its hunger for new bigger and better toys is something to beware. Our wise first President Washington and Jefferson wrote of the dangers of meddling in other nations business, especially when we don’t speak their language or understand their culture. Even JFK, that smart President who was indeed conspiratorially murdered, intended to pull back on our expensive habit of global intrusions into our neighbors business. No coward he. Challenged the Princeton Dulles brothers Presbyterian Saudi club ( Eddy, etc.) and the mobsters who invited cross-dressing Hoover to the races.
    What worries me are the Zionists, the right wing Marxist-Leninist “revolutionaries” whose blood lust is part of their medieval Purim “cult” which continues to genitally mutilate our baby boys. The games played on our wonderful American heroes like Stephen Toth and others on the Liberty continue unabated. Dirty tricks are part of their culture. Certainly they are not capable of being termed a “democracy”. They are a right wing “theocracy” and since the days of Christ have seemed to be totally unable to “assimilate”.
    My son tells me that Trump’s mom is from the Hebrides. THAT is a good thing. He really is a Scot. But he does not want to play the game cowards play. He is too out-spoken. Not politically correct. He and Putin and yes even Castro are not afraid to talk. This frightens the BEJESUS out of the warhawks. Those big military spenders, money-launderers, drug dealers, contractors, and globalists are not too happy with Trump. Hopefully they will grow up and start thinking about this wonderful country and their wives for a change. Bet few of them have ever changed a diaper, held taken a bleeding wounded landmine Afghan child, or even sung a Burns tune to a fiddle the way Jefferson did.

  170. Origin says:

    Tyler, you say you laughed. So, tell us the basis of your beliefs in 500 words or less if you have the guts.

  171. Origin says:

    jld,
    You post here a lot what are your basic beliefs, so they can be examined here too if you dare.

  172. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Tell them about labor unionists disappearing on the streets…
    Tell them about the Korean President who was a 2nd Lt. in the Japanese Imperial Army…
    Tell them about the tanks rolling out into the street and the state radio announcing the election of the new president.

  173. Kooshy says:

    As far as I understand and read about Iranian politics, Geopolitics and regional strategies Iran has no war nor wish to have a war with Saudis or for that with any one of her nighbours or enimies, it is the other way around is the Saudies or the Israelis or on broader view the Americans and the west that can not see Iran at its curent political standing whithin thier regional/ international geopolitical plans, IMO that is the main problem. Due to this reason Iran has no choice but to expand her alliance mainly with friendly sects, and or with states who have similar geopolitical need with respect to west. Arab monarchies such as SKA as well as Israel due to thier own domestic security fear an forign policy independent Iran, that was obvious during and after the nuclear negotiations.

  174. kao_hsien_chih says:

    Roh introduced politics of thuggery and intimidation masquerading as vox populi. He did not like parliamentary politics so he mobilized crowds of supporters to blackmail them, often with physical intimidation and threats of violence. He attacked the press for daring to criticize him (he literally called it “war on press”) and arrested journalists on technicalities. Were the politician he attacked corrupt? Probably. Were the journalists critical of him? Sure. Was Roh genuinely popular among important segments of South Korean population? Yes. However, all these are true about Trump as well. I’ve seen both Roh’s rallies and Trump’s rallies up close. They are eerily similar. They might seem grand if you are with the crowd. But if you are not one of them, they are frightening spectacles. (I’m imagining that Chavez people in Venezuela were a similar lot.)
    Tools for orderly politics, democratic or otherwise, they are not. I am as sympathetic towards Roh and Chavez as I am towards Trump, which is to say actually a lot with a huge dose of skepticism, fear, and suspicion. This is how political institutions unravel and chaos emerges, setting the stage for worse things to come. Whatever happens, rule of law cannot be cast away–even if the law has to bend along the way to accommodate the problems unfolding.

  175. Fred says:

    Nancy K,
    You should try explaining that lefty activists some time.

  176. Kooshy says:

    With regard to Iranian system of governance, a new idea, a new ME system, based on a mixture of modern progressive western values, and Iranian traditional/religious values accepted by a wide majority ( a soup of imam Hossain and Cyrus the great) ,understandably this is hard for a western person to understand. A westerner thinks if Iranian present system falls today, all Iranian women in every village will at once get rid of thier hijab and fill the discos.I myself still wonder how come there is no single carving of any female in Persepolis when it was built a thusand years plus before Islam, although apparently females where instrumental on the constructions according to discovered tablet construction receipts.

  177. Paul Escobar says:

    Tyler,
    Think you know I got no problem with your first paragraph.
    Think you also know your second paragraph is like an uncontrolled reflex at this point. There’s a metaphor there, I guess.
    Best,
    Paul

  178. Kooshy says:

    Don’t you think part of the reason for inaccurate poles in this election was due to denial participate or misinfomation to pollsters by pissed off
    voters / Trump supporters. I my self was getting pissed off by daily and hourly poles, if I was contacted I wouldn’t have participated.

  179. Origin says:

    Very thoughtful post! It is more than I can address at the moment, both from matters of time restraint, but mostly, I want to think it over more.
    Privilege is a state of being that can not easily be tasted, known or understood by the privileged one. The knowledge of its effect on the under one is rarely even perceived by the one who holds the privilege. A significant element of the American experience is the way privilege has played out in our society. In the American south, white privilege has left some bitter harvests and still infects. Call it “Racist”, bigotry, or nationalism, it does really exist here and some feel now licensed to act it out.
    Your wrote, “I hear the scaremongering too, “dark nationalism” and all. The “White Nationalists” and the ultra-nationalists and the Neo-Nazis aren’t out in force at present, in your country or mine, for all the ominous warnings in these posts. The truth is that they will only gain in numbers and become a force if they are let.” Your sentence omitted its most important word that should have preceded the period: out. It is the “they” you reference that are the problem. The statements made are not fearmongering. In fact, there are a lot of “theys” publically expressing their poison here. The warnings are made with the intent of trying to get broad support to reestablish the cultural grease of political correctness that is correct and to put the genie released by Trump gently back into the bottle before more harm is done.
    It is not enough that Trump say he will check on it and that “they” should not do it, naughty boys. He needs to act against their acts until “they” come back at him as he actually puts them in their proper place away from our government.
    Here in the South, we understand the hidden meaning of a weak slap and it is not deterrence, but license. Just like in Germany, Nazi expressions are not acceptable. A resurgence of white-nationalism is not acceptable here. The last time we had a resurgence of white-nationalism, it did not end well for the region.

  180. jerseycityjoan says:

    Valissa,
    The anger is just building up — and it is reaching far up within our middle class, as your own family’s experience shows.
    I am sure glad that your brother — who should have been rewarded, not punished for keeping up high standards — managed to come out staying even financially.
    I see things getting worse for most Americans. That will finally push our large silent and passive majority into finally taking defensive action against those exploiting us.
    But God knows what’s we’re going to have to do to return a rough justice to America for all. I think we’ll probably seem more social unrest in the US than we’ve ever experienced on a long term basis soon.

  181. Kooshy says:

    This blog is not aired on public airways with an FCC licence, we all need to thank the host to keep up this forum, if it was not for Internet and him we didn’t have a chance of reading yours, Tyler, babak’ or anybody else’s, views. IMO, Tyler is right currently there doesn’t exist a free press.

  182. AK says:

    Your characterization of the MSM cohort as self-interested entities promoting their own particular views is spot on. Your assertion of their right to do so carries one fatal caveat – they themselves claim to be other than what you assert they are. They claim to be the arbiters and purveyors of fact and objectivity. Does “The Paper of Record” ring a bell? The problem with this is that you can’t claim to be the one thing and simultaneously operate in a completely diametrically opposite paradigm. If MSM outlets wish to operate primarily as interest and viewpoint promoters, dialogue dictators and opinion makers, they should at least come out openly as such. They fact that they decry “fake news” and still operate in the fashion they do is just one of many, many forms of hypocrisy on the part of the Left and its messaging arms that have been laid bare in this election cycle. This is the root of the credibility crisis in the MSM today. People, no matter what their level of formal education, have a pretty uncanny ability to spot bald faced hypocrisy and react with according scorn and disapproval. Will Trump exhibit the same sort of character? Only time will tell. But in this day and age, and for the past few decades, it has been the Left that has dealt deeply and broadly in this scummy milieu. That, as much as anything else, can go towards explaining where we are as a fractious body politic today.

  183. Ishmael Zechariah says:

    Origin,
    Is Hillary crooked or not? For clarification: “crooked” synonyms: dishonest, unscrupulous, unprincipled, untrustworthy, corrupt, corruptible, venal, criminal, illegal, unlawful, nefarious, fraudulent, shady, dodgy, …. This is a simple question-please provide a simple answer.
    Ishmael Zechariah

  184. Origin says:

    “Pseudo intellectual language” or “BS” or “propaganda”. “reporting”, “advocacy”, “opinion”, role of the “Fourth Estate”. They are just words some writer or speaker uses to accomplish something political for good or ill. If one call a passel of words “propaganda” the speaker is just saying that the passel is put together to promote some political view-point. Sort of like saying a hammer is “huge” if you want to brag about how strong your arm is.
    Think simple–words are words and some words are adjective or adverbs that describe something for some purpose. What is important is to try to discern the meaning and purpose the writer is seeking to address. Is the discourse truthful? Informative? Deceitful? Helpful?
    I am not particularly advocating propaganda, I am encouraging the quest for discernment of reality. I do like passels of words that promote what I value and I am guessing you like passels of words that promote whatever values you hold. That is OK.

  185. Origin says:

    There is no simple answer.

  186. Babak Makkinejad says:

    I was not making a specific statement about Iran or Persia. I meant the entire region from Indus River to the Atlas Mountains, from the Caspian Basin to the Red Sea; there has never been a better government that the Islamic Republic of Iran (not including Turkey).
    I am claiming this categorically and I am standing by it.

  187. Sam Peralta says:

    Is it OK for BLM to attack and snatch the microphone from a national leader? Is it OK for a a few folks to dress in costume with swastikas and march saying Seig Heil?
    Does the PC police consider kook OK but not faggot?
    Who arbitrates?

  188. Babak Makkinejad says:

    There are many issues that must be settled – to some degree – among the minds of men: The Boundaries of Liberty and the Boundaries of Islamic Law, Charity vs. Market Economy, Ancient Iran vs. Islam, etc.
    Unfortunately, per the Makkinejad Theses, one could not hope for any help in the resolution of all these schisms from outside of the Seljuk World.

  189. kao_hsien_chih says:

    South Koreans have been taking to the streets demanding the resignation of EVERY president they ever had, by the thousands, every damn time. Every South Korean president, again, every one of them, has been deeply reviled by huge numbers of people, even if by different crowds each time. Koreans are a deeply divided people, like it or not. They will not find a single leader whom they can agree on as acceptable for all That Roh made mistakes, there is no question, and it was a grave mistake on the part of his political enemies to pounce on them as they did. Roh’s successors are doing the same thing now, pouncing on relatively small mistakes, in the larger scheme of things, by the current administration as if it’s the ultimate and unpardonable sin. The real sin of the current administration, of course, is that President Park is the daughter of General Park, himself a deeply divisive figure, for good reasons and bad, even more than any actual deeds (corruption in high places? influence peddling? which Korean politician hadn’t been involved in them?) South Koreans need a Gerald Ford moment: some leader brave enough to let the bygones be bygones. Instead, they keep dredging up everything bad that’s happened long in the past and make them capital crimes. That’s why they are stuck in the political rut they’d been stuck for centuries by now. They never forget a grudge, for generations.
    That’s also something that I deeply fear might befall my country, US of A. That’s the nonsense that my family left behind decades ago. I worry that the same rot is spreading, whenever I see the talk of “deplorables” and “not my president” on one hand and dangerous and divisive rhetoric from the other. I honestly hope President Trump pardons the Clintons and actually takes up the olive branch offered by the Sandersites, and vice versa. We shall see how that goes.

  190. Sam Peralta says:

    It seems you are blowing the whistle on your BS.

  191. kao_hsien_chih says:

    That is likely a possible reason (and somewhat the same thing was going on in South Korea when Roh was being elected: South Korean “deplorables” deeply mistrusted the media, who were conducting the polls, as the representatives of the status quo). But, on the whole, the bigger problem, I think, is that polls were not so bad, given the limits of methodology, but people were drawing far too much of an interpretation from them than they should have, and were surprised that their less than fully justified expectations were born out.

  192. Edward Amame says:

    jerseycityjoan
    Not sure why you keep suggesting that the housing situations for middle class citizens in places like NYC and Boston is “because we have more people.” It’s not about the immigrants. The fact is that America’s affluent young are moving to where the action is, and that is not to rust-belt America.

  193. Dr. Puck says:

    I would enjoy finding out about any credible analysis of what is meant by describing special interests working their ‘magic’ in DC to be a Swamp, and, then, what it means to want to drain this swamp.
    Valissa wrote: “Drain the swamp by imposing a 5-year ban on executive officials becoming lobbyist after they leave the administration.”
    Would it not be many many times more effective to ban lobbyists from working in the executive in the first place? Is this not really one of the sources of the problem? We already know that lobbyists will craft legislation on their own dime and then slip it onto the desk of congresspersons.
    If someone is actually serious about draining the so-called swamp, a careful analysis of how special interests cause legislation to be steered away from the common good and toward the, ummm, ‘special good’ would need to be developed and acted upon.
    Also, I think it is not a matter of rocket science-like evaluation to understand that there is a fairly substantial connection between the free speech of wealthy donors given as donations and their legislative expectations.
    It would be a matter of generating superb nuance on such matters to go the extra mile and separate out how the two parties, working in different ways on behalf of different monied special interests, use the regulatory and legal realms to also benefit the wealthy donor classes and their most special interests of them all!
    My own fairly uninformed opinion is that it looks a lot like pay-to-play up and down the whole process of how it happens that special interests come to be well served by congress, executive, judicial systems. And,
    I’m all for draining those co-dependent systems completely.
    My prediction: Trump will be filling the executive branch with wealthy donors, lobbyists, and assorted mandarins of the rightward plutocratic class. We’ll see.

  194. Dubhaltach says:

    In reply to Peter Reichar 23 November 2016 at 01:44 AM
    In other words you made it up without making it clear that it was your inventive mind at work. How exactly did that help the debate?

  195. Tyler says:

    Origin,
    I see you take your sophistry early and often.

  196. Ishmael Zechariah says:

    Origin,
    Thanks. You answered my question. For those of us who still believe in truth, honor and duty, these are sad times indeed.
    Ishmael Zechariah

  197. Tyler says:

    PA,
    This is patently not true, but you do indeed:
    Lie
    Double down
    Project
    With every post you make. I can see as your autistic screeching intensifies that I did indeed nail you as a perpetual undergrad that hasn’t left the higher ed bubble. What are you doing over there? Teaching English to Taiwanese students, that old expat standby cause you couldn’t cut it in the glorious United States?
    You’re not as unique as you think you are, and you’re obviously even more off balance than you were before, and on top of it you’re openly sharing your paranoid delusion of “off site collusion”. Goodness me.
    It might actually kill you when God Emperor Trump: “Der Trumpster is going to step into office and give everyone a job, build a national healthcare service, make peace with the whole world, eliminate all taxes and build a 100-mile-long 20′ wall. Wahoo! And cut taxes while he’s doing it!”
    Your words though, not mine, as we have here the lie, the doubling down, and the projection. Progslaves gonna progslave.
    Again, in the words of your President-Elect: Sad!

  198. MRW says:

    I am using the standard dictionary meaning of the word “mandate.”
    “a mandate” is only achieved by receiving an overwhelimngly large majority of the popular vote is your colloquial understanding, not the established definition. See Webster’s or Mirriam’s.
    Simply winning a large portion of the Electoral College only means that you won a large portion of the EC. It does not imply anything else beyond that.
    You are unclear what winning the Electoral vote establishes, and how the Constitution requires a majority of Electoral votes in order to be president.
    See “Article Two of the United States Constitution.”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_States_Constitution

  199. Bobo says:

    You had me till the conspiracy stuff and frankly you still have me. My hat is off Wow.
    Trump has put the shine on a lot of faces this Thanksgiving Day as there is hope. Jobs, Jobs and Good Jobs is what keeps this country moving and the people happy, bellies full and thoughts of revolt back in that little corner. As TTG points out the ego gives Trump the edge in making this a good four years as the man cannot settle for failure. That cue ball from Louisiana said it years ago “it’s the economy, stupid” so why Hillary did not hear this is beyond my mind and those whose hearts are broken. It will take time to heal but heal they will as we all are Americans.
    Now some anecdotes I heard from a reliable source recently. “Trump would would show up at the construction site occasionally and pluck down $500 and yell Coffee and Donuts for all and move on to return later that day and scream hey let’s get moving here I gotta open the doors on so and so date, I bought the C’s & D’s so Get Movin” that was to a tough Union crowd. “In the early 80’s he had phone systems put into his condos with 30 buttons on the phones, the lines went out through the main board but each of them buttons had a name above them-Deli, Cleaners, Pharmacy, Doctor, etc and Trump got piece of all that business, the man was ahead of his time.”anyone that worked for Trump was a hard worker and the sharpest around plus they kept their mouths shuts, didn’t matter what they were Color, Sex or Depravity did not matter they were workers”. There were more but I liked those?
    V you need to participate more as you will have us all at your beckon call.

  200. Tyler says:

    Paul,
    Yeah, my reflex to call BS on your ridiculous virtue signalling nonsense when I see it. There is indeed a metaphor, but I’m sure its lost on you.
    If you really didn’t have a problem with my first paragraph, you wouldn’t be waking up in a cold sweat regarding Nazis under the bed, but actually worried about things like the Trump supporter getting dragged out of his car by feral blacks for supposedly supporting Trump, or the Trump supporter having their car burned out, or any number of things.
    But you didn’t. You saw an opportunity to let everyone know you were indeed against those evil Nazis that voted for Trump, and wanted everyone to know how moral and pure you are.
    Get over yourself, champ. You sound like you WANT the RWDS at this point so you can live out some masochistic saint fantasy.

  201. Fred says:

    Origin,
    “the press is not licensed subject to revocation”
    The broadcast media is licensed and regulated by the FCC. You should really study up on the law.

  202. Fred says:

    IZ,
    You must keep in mind that Origin’s a lawyer. As the poet Carl Sandberg put it: “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell” That’s what the left has been doing since 3am on November 9th.

  203. Tyler says:

    Nancy,
    Borg Grandma’s “lead” consists nearly entirely of provisional ballots from California and about one million ballots from Cook County (i.e. Chicago).
    So no, the dearly departed and illegal aliens voting do not mean your Orange Messiah does not have a mandate.

  204. Valissa says:

    Dr. Puck… I merely shared Trump’s video and some info from it. I never stated my own opinion about what Trump said.
    “it looks a lot like pay-to-play up and down the whole process of how it happens that special interests come to be well served by congress, executive, judicial systems”
    Well, duh! I think we all know this is how the world works… pretty much everywhere in some form or another. “Draining the swamp” is just another common political slogan as far as I’m concerned. People like to hear it, though, true or not. I’m more interested in seeing how the “ecosystem” of the swamp adjusts to Trump in power.
    Somehow I think lobbyists will continue to thrive and prosper. Maybe they’ll just change their titles to something else. After all, how would all those politicians raise enough money to win their elections without lobbyists (whether they are officially labeled that or not).
    None of that is the real issue, IMO. The question is, can Trump do a ‘Putin’ and convince US oligarchs to be more a bit more loyal to their own country? What kind of tax incentives will he offer to bring jobs back to America? Can his big ego and desire to prove himself have positive side effects for the “little people” that voted for him? Who knows, but at last the possibility is there, which was not with Clinton… who would have been more of the same old politics.
    If he can get his fellow elites on board with bringing more jobs to the US (by hook or by crook), then I can deal with all the other standard political BS games the oligarchs play. I’m a realist not an idealist.
    He is interesting to observe now that he’s not campaigning anymore. Now he’s working on selling himself as “presidential” in his new videos. I am curious as to how he will play the money and power game once he’s president, and what techniques of persuasion he uses to accomplish his goals. Also looking forward to seeing who he riles up next, as well as who he makes nice with, to get what he wants.

  205. Tyler says:

    Bobo,
    Concur with your sentiment, including V sticking around.
    Unfortunately, so many are so far in the bubble here good luck penetrating it.

  206. MRW says:

    Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, Cato, or Brutus were not “just” bloggers in print form. That’s like saying a colonel or a general is just a grunt with more years under his belt. Dismissive.
    The British do not have a press like ours. David Habakkuk can weigh in with the correct info, but the Brits have something like The War Secrets or War Powers Act, or some such, that can shut the press down. The government takes dominion. I believe it’s the same in Canada. (It’s on the tip of my tongue.)
    No can do here, except voluntarily. Our government derives its power from the “just consent of the governed,” not at the pleasure or discretion of an aristocratic class or an elected government. Our people, the governed, have a right to speak freely, and to criticize the government. It is specifically guaranteed in the First Amendment. The government does not grant this right. It is already granted, it already exists, no matter what the government says or does. It is a fundamental principle, and the professional press is to represent the governed, the people, not the other arms of the government, or the party that put them there.
    (Btw, you conflate the internet with the government in your thinking about all this.)
    Furthermore, pamphleteering preceded newspapers in the US (18th C) by about 50 years. (Benjamin Franklin was already publishing his pamphlets in the 1720s.) It was this ‘press’ form known throughout the colonies that the new Constitution was intent on protecting. And author anonymity. (Newspapers were still a sideline for printers while the Federalist papers were being written.)
    The Fourth Estate is not a nickname. Read your Burke.
    Also, consider that the members of the professional media organizations are also individuals who have their own political preferences and will work for their positions to win.
    No. That is no more the action of a professional media organization than a gay doctor thinks he has the professional right to nail his half-naked gay patient in the examining room.

  207. Balint Somkuti, Phd says:

    Yes, I am a military historian, and analyst. I would like to think of myself as a theoretician too.
    I have seen enough staff courses and other excercises to assure you that V4 and most medium/small sized countries practice only defensive maneuvers. In my opinion -as selfcontradicting as it seems- but soldiers are more peacelike (I would say even pacifist) than most outsiders knowing what and how they will sacrifice if there is a real war.
    Therefore lacking the tool for an offensive and aggressive politics I dont think there is a real chance for the next round of France vs. Germany or Axis vs. Allies. (Thank God!). That’s why I say we have learned from our past.
    As of European Union or to be more precise Union in Europe this new-right, nouvelle droit etc. is only a reaction to the pronounced neoliberal superstate which is shaping in Brussels. Neither the personnal identitiy based, completely human nature incompatible gender/immigrant craziness, nor the multinational company based superstate, and the slavery it brings is well recieved except by a minimal minority, which sees itself as the ruler of it all. I usually call them janissaries because they are recruited from all colors and classes to serve this monster, just like the original yeni ceri did.
    IMHO all states in the EU has seen the advantages of the union. But a REAL and thourough reform is not needed is unavoidable. Or we face the War of European Secession. Most likely will not be a shooting war, more likely it will be of blockades, customs and other economical maneuvering but still bringing the damage of a real war.

  208. Balint Somkuti, Phd says:

    “Finally, racism, sexism, and religious discrimination are deplorable hindrances to the development of a peaceable polity and must always be discouraged and resisted.”
    Just some example. In my country chivalry, and politeness are still held in high regard. Ladies are let forward at doors, their hands kissed as a polite greeting, etc.
    For you it is sexism. For us a habit worth defending.
    In our language the word ‘néger’ coming from latin negro, negra means simply black. Nothing else. ‘Doing the néger – négerkedni’ means doing the hard work instead somebody else etc. e.g. ghostwriter is: néger (író).
    We will not change it just because you say it is racism.
    Being the most atheistic country after Czechia in Europe if someone is religious he/she is not treated like a bigot caveman or worse see the chritian nun who was fired because she asked if she could pray for a dying person. This religious freedom?
    Com’ on!
    I appreciate your bravery, but accept the fact that your grand plan has FAILED. Utterly and completely

  209. MRW says:

    re: 22 November 2016 at 01:28 PM
    Waaay too much high drama, Origin. Shirt-clutching reaction to overblown boogeymen. You need some milk and cookies to soothe all this rhetoric.
    I watched the coverage of people going home for Thanksgiving on trains out of Manhattan today and counted mentions of the word “safe.” Dogs and cops. Electric fences. Security gates. You’d think we were all living in Palestine.
    And the juxtaposition of scenes from the bombing of WWII London came to mind. People went to work everyday. They spent their nights sleeping in the abandoned subway bunkers hugging their kids and sharing tea. Maybe they had time to bring a pillow. Calmly. Without the ginned-up angst that our infotainment caste conjure up to boost ratings and fill 22 minutes every half-hour, while real bombs pulverized the streets above, and then they got up calmly in the morning, took the kids to school, and went to work.
    ”KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON” read the signs.
    Here we’re beset with a new voting-age generation whose reaction to the recent election is all out of proportion to the stimulus, the classic definition of mental illness. The majority of them didn’t even bother to vote. And the majority of them are too dumb to realize that we barely escaped what Hillary could have done because as prez she would have had the power to escalate the ME to a powderkeg, inflame Ukraine with Victoria Nuland and Biden’s neo-Nazi friends, poke the Asian dragon, and start WWIII with Russia.
    Instead we’re told by people like you, Origin, that we should be afraid of groups like the alt-right White Nationalists who descended on DC last weekend? All 200 of them?
    You need to dial it down, Origin, or you’re going to give yourself a heart attack. Maybe turkey will help. It has tryptophan. Happy Thanksgiving.

  210. jld says:

    Hmmmmm…
    What kind of threat is that?
    Trying to polish your credentials as a future (or present…) Kommissar?

  211. In reply to “Origin”
    If “… are let.” is too clumsy then ” …are allowed to.” would do better. The sense being that the extremists will only become bothersome if the moderates neglect to do proper politics.
    Though I’m wary now of the word extremists. It’s getting to mean “anyone who didn’t vote the way I did.” Accompanied in your country by the terms “hillbilly” or “yokel” on the one side and “progressive” or snowflake” on the other. In mine it’s “knuckledragging racists” used of those who voted Brexit on the one side and “That lot. You just can’t talk to them.” on the other.
    At least those are the terms I’ve seen used and such stereotyping, even if it’s only by inference, certainly has an effect. Just before the Brexit vote a pro-EU MP was murdered in the street. It was a most vicious attack and there was little doubt of its intention. The killer was variously described at the time as disturbed or as associated with a far right group. Immediately after the event the husband of the murdered woman put out a public statement vowing to fight against the hate that killed his wife.
    Mrs Clinton also put out a statement. “It is critical that the United States and Britain .. stand together against hatred and violence. That is how we must honor Jo Cox – by rejecting bigotry in all its forms and instead embracing, as she always did, everything that binds us together to fight against the hate that killed Jo.”
    I’m not sure how these unexceptionable statements, and the many other similar statements that were made at the time, led to the impression in the minds of the British public that supporting Brexit was linked to extremism and bigotry but that’s certainly what happened. In fact just afterwards I received a call from a friend abroad asking me to cancel his proxy vote for Brexit. Stereotyping by association works.
    Also in the comment you refer to I wrote more acerbically than I should have done about progressives making too much of minor incidents or of tweets. That was wrong and I’m sorry I didn’t check it over and excise it before I pressed the post button. In any case one reason for visiting this site is to see how people on the spot – insiders if you like – evaluate events that I only see reported from afar or misreported. Foolish of me to object, then, when they are kind enough to post that evaluation.
    English Outsider

  212. LeaNder says:

    Thanks, Dr. Somkuti, to move from my informal setting to a more formal, thank you. 😉
    I may have misjudged the Visigrád Group. Strictly it would fit perfectly in the Europe of regions.

  213. Balint Somkuti, Phd says:

    It seems to me that you are clearly against nationstates. Yet the 4 countries of V4 join forces to preserve their national identity and will continue to do so.
    Except the ever present extremists we all agree that we need Europe. But not that frightening one which currently rules the minds of eurocrats.
    Yes we need an european army, to protect european interests. Like protecting the borders, stabilizing neighboring regions and stuff.

  214. turcopolier says:

    PA
    I will try again on the subject of the period just before Iraq invaded Kuwait. As Iraq became more and more angered over Kuwaiti and Saudi demands for repayment of “loans” made during the Iran-Iraq War, the US foreign policy establishment (the Borg) convinced itself that Saddam was bluffing and that Iraq would not invade Kuwait. There were a few hold-outs against that (including me) but just a handful. The core of the consensus that formed was in the State Department and NSC staff (one community really). These people shared the belief that war was largely a thing of the past and that armed forces were useful only for diplomatic signaling, evacuations, and the like. The end of the Cold War accentuated that exquisite piece of group think. GHW Bush was under political pressure to reduce US Government expenses and the possibility of reducing US armed forces structure was an obvious place to look for savings. In fact half of the US units brought down from Germany for Desert Storm were scheduled for de-activation BEFORE the Iraq-Kuwait crisis began and were in fact de-activated after the war. At the same time both the US Borg and the Bush Administration were being told by the Arab states; Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the little Gulfies and Kuwait that Arab countries do not fight each other and that Iraq would not actually invade. In that context the Bush Administration did not want to be committed to defending against what it thought was a hollow threat from Iraq. A firm commitment to Kuwait’s defense might well mean that it would be necessary to commit forces (a lot of forces) ad the Bush Administration did not want to do that. consequently Glaspie received no instructions to convey firmness of resolve to Saddam. An ambassador in the modern era is a messenger, not a decider. When Saddam summoned her to listen to the message that he thought she must have for him, there was no message she could deliver. He obviously concluded that the US would not interfere in whatever he decided to do. He might have gotten away with his grab for Kuwait if Thatcher had not pumped Bush up after the fact of the occupation of Kuwait. pl

  215. turcopolier says:

    PA
    “Looking at the transcripts” What transcripts? pl

  216. Dr. Puck says:

    I’m most interested to see how Trump adjusts to the swamp.
    I am a realist of a bit different sort, so, for example, I don’t completely discount the real connection between slogans and how people attach to themselves in an aspirational way to the objectives a slogan references.
    My survey of Trump supporters counts their hopes like this: (1) bring good paying jobs back, (2) deport immigrants here illegally, (3) drain the swamp, (4) renegotiate better trade deals, (5) protect medicare and social security. From my own viewpoint, and not having supported Trump, I wold add my hope that he doesn’t craft a trade war and a much worse recession out of the bump in inflation a trade war could evoke.
    It seems doable if unrealistic that Trump might guide the republic in the direction you suppose is one possibility.
    However, if he builds a better swamp, stuffs his own pockets full of new cash, and, soon gives up on making the USA more like Putin’s Russia, there will be hell to pay in that the combination of social justice for the working class and oligarchy for the billionaires does not sit together promisingly.

  217. Tyler says:

    Valissa,
    Ask any bakers or florists who refused to participate in gay “marriage” how nice liberals are.

  218. Tyler says:

    PA,
    This is a lot of words to tell me that I’m 100% correct in my assessment of you.
    Here’s a maxim for you: When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

  219. Tyler says:

    PA,
    Again, with the “nice argument, but watch these gymnastics!”
    Lel

  220. Tyler says:

    Origin,
    Trad Western Civ and Christianity are the best things for mankind and should be defended.
    Hint: Anyone who wrote a long screed filled with sophistry and special pleading shouldn’t be setting word limits on anyone.

  221. Babak Makkinejad says:

    In Persian language, the races are distinguished by the color adjective + the Persian word for skin – “pust”.
    So, Red-Skin – “sorkh-pust”, White-Skin – “sefid-pust” etc.
    My German friend told me that such constructions are considered really bad in Germany; that does not make Iranians racists either.

  222. Babak Makkinejad says:

    There was a candle light vigil on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor – on the “Diag” – when Trump won; with co-eds crying and all that.

  223. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Also, most English consume tabloid new – both in format and content – like the US “National Enquirer” – checking and checking and checking yet again the facts.

  224. MRW says:

    If there’s now a big hole where that old Left used to be, what’s going to fill it?
    You might be interested in this, published yesterday, “Trump adviser tells House Republicans: You’re no longer Reagan’s party”
    http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/307462-trump-adviser-tells-house-republicans-youre-no-longer-reagans-party
    We’ll see. Great post, btw.

  225. MRW says:

    Like that, Sam.

  226. kao_hsien_chih says:

    Codewords of all types are becoming widespread, along with justification that “If our side does it, it’s great. If the other side does it, it’s fascism.” I was first amused then alarmed at the way Democrats/liberals in U.S. were justifying and giving excuses for the less-than-sanguine actions taken by Obama, and earlier, by Bill Clinton (most of which were in foreign policy realm, but also in some domestic arena). Many of the same excuses were used by the Republicans for GW Bush. But, among the people who use the right “codewords,” they are completely different and one is pure, honorable, noble, and even courageous, while the other side is unmitigated evil, even though they haven’t done anything yet, just because they don’t use the right codewords.
    It’s not just an American or even Western European phenomenon. I heard about something similar taking root in Russia, both under the Soviets and after the fall of the USSR. I know for fact that this is true in places like Venezuela and South Korea (which the exchange above with PA reminded me.) To those in one bubble (not just left or the right thing, but equally applicable to both), their idol is, whether they are named Chavez, Roh, Obama, Trump, or Park, a hero of epic proportions; to those in the other bubble, they are a villain of equally epic proportions, usually without much explanation or even actual evidence. I hate that sort of cult of personality, but this seems to crop up everywhere–and the activists in each bubble act exactly the same, use identical lingo, but disagree on everything in exactly same manner, for seemingly exactly the same reasons, insisting that they are totally different–somewhat like a tragic, not very funny version of the scene from “The Life of Brian.”
    It’s not just that there is a big hole where the old Left used to be. There’s a big hole where both old Left and Right used to be. Their intellectual bases have completely collapsed. The insiders, left and right, know their lines and where their place on the stage is, and just play their roles of disagreeing with each other on the script, and do their part. But the script makes no sense to the outsiders, but, not knowing what they are supposed to do, they rely on “charmismatic” (itself an ambiguous term, I suppose) who give the appearance of knowing what they are doing. Do they really know what they are doing? Hard to tell. To use the South Korean example, both Roh, who used Trump-like tactics, complete with uncouth language and bullyboy tactics relying on angry mobs, and Park (the new one) who had nothing to offer other than a famous and controversial name, turned out to be utter failures (and their fanaatical fans blame the other for messing up–since their hero is so great). Chavez’s movement made a mess of Venezuela, but his fans don’t tire of blaming machinations by their political enemies as the root of all evil. Clinton’s fans keep blaming the rubes, the Russians, whatever they could think of, other than themselves. When Trump falls, who will they blame? Presumably not Trump or themselves. And when they can’t even talk to each other, because of “code barriers,” what’ll the world come to?

  227. MRW says:

    And crying rooms. And crayons. University-funded shrinks provided to deal with their stress and grief. Days off. Exams postponed.
    This is to be the leading generation? Boomer and Gen X progeny are a disgrace.

  228. Valissa says:

    Thanks MRW! I just put that in my archives next to this related article…
    What most struck me about this article was what Stephen Moore, Trumps economic advisor on the trail said here:
    “It turned me more into a populist,” he said, expressing frustration with the way some in the Beltway media dismissed the economic concerns of voters in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. “Having spent the last three or four months on the campaign trail, it opens your eyes to the everyday anxieties and financial stress people are facing,” Moore added. “I’m pro-immigration and pro-trade, but we better make sure as we pursue these policies we’re not creating economic undertow in these areas.”
    … Moore knows the days of Reaganite conservatism are probably over. “Reagan ran as an ideological conservative. Trump ran as an economic populist,” he said. “Trump’s victory,” Moore added, “turned it into the Trump party.”
    —————
    Trump’s GOP: The end of ‘checklist conservatism’ http://nypost.com/2016/11/21/trumps-gop-the-end-of-checklist-conservatism/
    There was a telling moment in the middle of the Republican primaries, when a reporter asked Donald Trump to comment on charges that he really wasn’t a conservative. “It’s called the Republican Party,” he answered. “Not the conservative party.” Understand that, and you’ll understand the path Trump took to victory — through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, not through the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) or K Street. It’s something nearly everyone on the left missed, from the academy to fake-news sites like the Washington Post. … He’s a proud New Yorker, at ease with modern society, with same-sex marriage, with Social Security, with the idea that our health care laws should look after the most vulnerable Americans.
    He’s not in any way a bigot, and the only blinkered folks who would think he is are people who can understand the world only through the prism of race and gender, and who moreover are eager to smear their opponents. Here’s what Trump isn’t: a right-wing ideologue, a member of the Republican Party of Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz, of checklist conservatism and of the idea that 47 percent of Americans are “takers.” That party died in 2012, a victim in part of its own heartlessness.
    —————
    The battle for what it means to be a “Republican” is on! Has the long lost moderate Republican archetype been resurrected? How will Paul Ryan deal with Trump’s new direction for the party? Is Pence savvy enough to have Trump’s back when it comes to the classes with Ryan?
    As the identity of the Republican party changes, how will this effect the identity of the Democratic Party be?
    Fascinating times.

  229. Dubhaltach says:

    In reply to Balint Somkuti, Phd 24 November 2016 at 02:56 AM

    Attemtpting to fix your unclosed html tag which is making reading everything below your comment a strain on the eyes.

  230. Babak Makkinejad says:

    IN some classes, at the same said university, students are encouraged to state their gender-specific way they wish to be known.

  231. MRW says:

    Valissa,
    g.r.e.a.t. post.

  232. Babak Makkinejad says:

    The more liberal parts of North Africa?
    Where, pray do tell me.
    Morocco? – Police snuffing any whiff of contrary opinion.
    Tunisian? – the exporter of largest number of jihadists to Syria.
    Algeria? – under military dictatorship.
    Egypt? – Murdering 2000 people in a single day.
    Eretria? – a giant concentration camp for Muslims and Christians both.
    Somalia? – Yes, a bastion of Liberalism – the “Best Damn Liberals” outside of Virginia.
    Djibouti? – wholly owned by Saudi Arabia.
    Iran does not need laudatory statements from Western states.
    But since so many in the West are wearing their hearts on their sleeves, caring about foreign people for whose tradition and culture they demonstrate scant empathy, perhaps, such people, might get it through their evidently very thick skulls that the only hope for Muslim polities lies in that experiment called “The Islamic Republic of Iran”.
    Not that I expect them to admit that they have been wrong and have been wrong for a very long time.
    But I state my opinion on this forum in this respect with the hope that perhaps someone Western who actually does care about the status and experience of actual women in a place such as Afghanistan or in Pakistan or in Yemen will get an inkling of a thing called Reality.

  233. Paul Escobar says:

    Tyler,
    I have this vague recollection of Mr. Lang referring to the President-Elect as an: “incipient Mussolini”
    If he did, would you accuse him of “virtue signalling” & playing “goodwhite”? Don’t think you would.
    I think you would answer (as you have in other contexts) that you don’t mind that particular outcome. You’ve decided it’s necessary & glorious or whatever.
    Fair enough. I get where you’re coming from. You seem to misunderstand where I’m coming from, so I’ll clear up one point of confusion…
    You misconstrue my calls to “vigilance” as some obstructionist tactic. With the ultimate aim of impeding President Trump’s ability to deal with the opposition’s excesses.
    If that is the case, you are wrong. I am working from the assumption that President Trump & his Republican allies have secured power. That law enforcement & border agents now have firm allies. And those in violation of the law have their days numbered.
    You think that progressives organizing & authors writing can somehow stop the correction? They’ll complain to Don Lemon when BLM are incarcerated. They’ll march down a street when illegals are deported. They’ll have little sit-in’s when Christians take back the Supreme Court.
    …and then they’ll go home. Because deep down they know. It’s worth virtue-signalling over. It’s not worth really fighting over.
    But there is something truly worth fighting over. Or at least getting the hell out of Dodge over. Trump’s right. There’s some bad hombre’s out there.
    Stay woke!,
    Paul

  234. MRW says:

    And everyone absolutely has to read the article Valissa linked to:
    http://nypost.com/2016/11/21/trumps-gop-the-end-of-checklist-conservatism/

  235. TonyL says:

    Thanks Origin for very thoughtful post.

  236. Balint Somkuti, PhD says:

    Thank you.

  237. Balint Somkuti, PhD says:

    Exactly. As Orwell noted full fledged dictatorships are characterized by creating and enforcing newspeak (among others).

  238. “I personally don’t see Britain exiting the EU, or at the very least, there is going to be a lengthy postponement leading to a bitterly fought initiative to follow through on the referendum. In either case, the referendum is going to cause a further rise in hard right-wing nationalist organization over there,..”
    A late post, and perhaps I ought to leave it because I’ve already been given my say and this little window I’m typing into is still tricky, but I’m puzzled by the second sentence. “A further rise in hard right-wing nationalist organisation”. I assume that you don’t mean UKIP, so I’m left wondering how significant these organisations are.
    There’s a pot waiting to boil over in this country, true enough, and if the politicians don’t venture out of the bubble it probably will, but that hasn’t yet translated into any specific mass movement. The extremist splinter groups in England make a lot of noise, but does this indicate mass support? Are there any figures?
    The BNP successfully tapped into popular anger and resentment and got a lot of votes. Around a million, at the peak. Then it got out that the BNP leadership was inclined to Neo-Nazism and the support just melted away. Where’s the BNP now?
    There was a recent Neo-Nazi rally or gathering in the East of the country. I watched a video that had somehow been obtained of it. You could call it a beer hall rally, though it looked more like a shed than the beer halls the NSDAP got its start in, but there didn’t seem to be a great number of people there. One source – no idea whether it was reliable – claimed 250 attended from this country and to make up the numbers they had to import a crowd of Neo-Nazis from the continent.
    Yes, there is a lively trade in Nazi memorabilia and a few MP’s and celebrities attend fancy dress parties dressed up as storm troopers but we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel if that’s to be instanced as a ground swell of support.
    If you really wanted to know how many hard core Neo-Nazis we’ve got you’d have to get the figures from Special Branch, and I doubt they’d be telling. But I don’t see any sort of an ideologically coherent movement, and more importantly I don’t see any mass support. Croatia, the old East Germany, the Baltic states maybe, in those places you’ll get clusters, but I don’t see them here. EDL and similar groups do make a showing but that’s no ideologically driven mass movement. You could find a more convincing “far right” in the local pub. They’re straightforward angry, those of them who aren’t in it just for the punch-ups. Read the stuff they put out.
    So where are they all? Just asking, really. Maybe you know more about the subject than I do. Wouldn’t be difficult. But where are the figures?
    The thought occurs to me that instead of going around hunting for swastikas that aren’t there and pinning “racist” badges on people who are nothing of the sort, we might do better simply to ask why so many people are so angry.
    English Outsider.

  239. LeaNder says:

    It seems to me that you are clearly against nationstates.
    No. Hesitant or wondering about the relation of nation states with nationalism, maybe? … Something in my genes? Germany is a rather “late nation” after all. …
    But not that frightening one which currently rules the minds of eurocrats.
    Eurocrats, Technocrats, neo-liberals? I am aware that the European Union was a Utopia or created as such. For some good reason, but initially driven by what seem to be mainly economical reasons or interests and not equally shared power buried beneath the utopia.
    Beyond that I would never object to a distrust to bringing it closer together politically, alternatively change the rules so all can agree.
    It’s not that e.g. I cannot understand the Brits that voted for Brexit. It feels that objections to one-size-fits-all are highly justified. Is there any person beyond the “technocrats”, who has the best solution? … Call me an Utopianist, if you like. Or based on my own country’s history hesitant about purely ‘national solutions’?
    Yes we need an european army, to protect european interests. Like protecting the borders, stabilizing neighboring regions and stuff.
    I am not an expert, but that seems to have been the American demand for many, many decades. …
    The Visigrad Group could leave the EU and remain in the Nato. …
    I clearly don’t understand enough of matters. Never tried to hide it. But it seems to be a bit hyped over here that e.g. Poland drives the EU-Nato-Russia Confrontation.

  240. Edward Amame says:

    Col Lang
    I really hope you are right. I’ve said this before, but we’ll know either way almost right out of the gate if Trump signs a reconciliation bill from Ryan with big new tax cuts for the wealthy, bigger defense spending, and Medicare vouchers.

  241. LeaNder says:

    Ha. Channeling Konrad Adenauer? (when he joked that he’s crossing into the wilds of Asia whenever he crossed the Rhein?
    sorry kao, more to the point. Didn’t want to drift off into attempts to explain the “Schäl sick” (dialect), or the “wrong side” of the Rhine. More complex outside the Köln/Bonn area.
    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%A4l_Sick
    But yes, that avoidance may have made me drift off even more, since it is, historically no doubt, also related to the “Hillige Kölle” (dialect). The “Holy Cologne”… 😉
    No doubt “Asia” starts on the other side of the river here in Cologne 😉

  242. turcopolier says:

    Edward Amame
    Would a cut in the corporate income tax rate be a tax break for the wealthy? pl

  243. LeaNder,
    There is a joke which many people have quoted Adenauer as making, in different versions – that Germany had been ruled for too long by drinkers of schnapps from Prussia, and of beer from Bavaria, and it was time that it was ruled by wine drinkers from the Rhineland.
    Without giving too many hostages to fortune to Babak, I am tempted to say that the implied message was that, as it were, Carolingians could drink in moderation, and/or ‘hold their drink’.

  244. Origin says:

    Some final thoughts on my post now that the traffic on it has about run its course.
    First, the post demonstrates that the progress of free speech is unpredictable.
    When I wrote the piece, I had some ideas of where it would go and some came true. I think the last post by kao_hsien_chih on 24 November 2016 at 03:17 PM is a good summary of one of the types of posts I hoped to get. However, there were many other posts expressing thoughts and insights I never would have anticipated. The unpredictability of the discourse was quite creative and informative.
    Second, the post demonstrates that the progress of free speech is predictable.
    Among the posts, some were simply predictable trolling that added little directly to the topic, but provided substantial information about the posters. A good example of this is Tyler’s posts. While providing very little direct information, they communicated the extreme level of frustration and cynicism that is within the community. Such communication is important to understanding the community.
    Third, the post demonstrates that terms such as “racism” and “racist” have many different meanings and are code words that are parsed differently by members of different groups. The same sentence has different meanings depending on who is reading it. The meanings seem to be “loaded” by the reader’s experience. For some here, my mention of “racism” or “white-nationalism” were interpreted as a liberal’s ideological excuse for things that went wrong or a pattern of attack; a haughty excuse for a Coaster Liberal to deprecate the Deplorables. A thoughtful explication of this was set forth by English Outsider:
    “English and European ears have been trained pretty well over the past few decades. Not as well trained as American ears, no doubt, because it takes a little time for American usage to become adopted here, but we’re not doing badly. We do know the code. It’s got a name. It’s called the progressive code.
    It’s the one that invariably calls anything outside a very narrow band of approved discourse “racist”. It’s the code that shoves large numbers of normal people, irrespective of their abilities or their personal circumstances, into a tight little box labelled “victim”, and encourages them live their entire lives inside that little box, simply because they have a skin that is a different colour.”

    In my post, I spoke of a warning about racism, not as a liberal attack code term, but as an old habit being resurrected that has not yet been adequately interred.
    Examples abound in daily life here. Last Sunday, I was in a conversation with a “fine Christian” white southern Republican Lady (I use the term “Lady” in the classic British sense of a well-bred white aristocratic woman) who was speaking about the election and why the Democrats lost. The gist of one of her sentences after referring to Obama was, “We all ‘know’ why Trump won.” I have heard nearly the exact term, “we all know —,” ever since Obama was elected.
    The term “know” is a code statement of old habits and prejudices politely stated that the Democrats lost because the President is a black and by not using the N word, the fact that the Democrats lost because they have too many blacks and, since I am white, I should knows why, naturally, they lost. The woman’s inability to understand her own level of privilege as a white person is totally lost to her.
    Such old, deeply ingrained cultural habits have proven time and time again to be destructive in our twenty-first century polity. Trump engenders a resurgence of the old feelings and habits of privilege that seem to trump all other ideas.
    This will be my last post on this thread. I want to thank all of you, even my nemesis Tyler, for your participation in this Committee of Correspondence.
    Keep up the posting and have fun!

  245. jerseycityjoan says:

    Why?
    Because I saw prices going up in the New York City area and gentrification intensify.
    What is your definition of Middle Class? Does it include $6000 a month apartments? That was the price of a 3 bedroom within a few blocks of me in 2015 and while it was in Downtown Jersey City, it had no views or the amenities of any of the new towers because it was a remodeled small old building.
    Here where I am in Pennsylvania now, we are seeing the people fleeing high costs coming here, which is increasing our own housing costs — in an area where wages are low and resistance is high to raising them and there’s no potential for a Servant/Service class to develop.
    My question is why you think everything is wonderful for the people with household incomes of, say, $35,000 to $100,000 in the Northeast big cities. It’s wonderful if you own property that’s in demand or are making six or seven figures and are users of cheap labor.
    Let’s say I am wrong — I would only be wrong for a limited time. The US population is due to go from about 325,000,000 today to around 465,000,000 by 2065. The Pew Foundation estimates that over 85% of that population growth will come from immigrants and their descendants.
    Have you ever heard of any NYC-area mayors or any one else in government discuss how they will handle all these extra people? Of course not. They are too busy talking about providing affordable housing and their dedication to diversity. Meanwhile, black and brown neighborhoods go rich White Towers with a sprinkle of other Rich racial groups and everybody’s supposed to happy about these changes.
    What plans are being made for this extraordinary increase as a time when can see that accelerating technological advances will continue to rob us of jobs by the tens of millions?

  246. Tyler says:

    Valissa,
    Moderate Repulican was a byword for amnesty, fair trade, and cutting Medicare. In other words, they were cuckservatives.
    I would call Trump a populist Republican before I called him a moderate. He’s not interested in fighting culture war issues and, as pointed out, would leave the larger question of who wants what to the states.

  247. Tyler says:

    MRW,
    Second your thoughts, and especially this Dilbert one, as you can see many of the Fifth Columnists here engaging in their pretzel logic and resisting admitting that their worldview is wrong in any way.

  248. Tyler says:

    Origin,
    Saw privilege used unironically, stopped reading.

  249. MRW says:

    Would a cut in the corporate income tax rate be a tax break for the wealthy?
    Colonel,
    The short answer is no. But this curt answer obscures the issue.
    The federal corporate tax should be abolished. There’s no reason for it. The federal government does not need the money: it creates its own currency. Every corporation passes this tax along to its customers in higher prices.
    However.
    The problem: “The corporate tax cannot be abolished until some method is found to keep the corporate form from being used as a refuge from the individual tax and as a means of accumulating unneeded, uninvested surpluses. Some way must be devised whereby corporate earnings, which inure to individual shareholders, are adequately taxed as income of these individuals.”
    Taxes For Revenue are Obsolete, Beardsley Ruml, Chairman of the NY Federal Reserve,1946
    Cutting the corporate tax rate can become a tax break for the wealthy…if…the increased profits go to the wealthy shareholders, and are not shared with labor, as was the case post-war and thru LBJ.
    That’s why you need strong unions as existed in the Eisenhower era. (I’m not talking about the subsequent mafia-soaked unions that took advantage of the system, used them to launder money and run protection threats on company brass, or the tired, blanket Reagan anti-union message that was music to business ears when interest was 19%.) Unions can make sure that workers share fairly in the increased prosperity of the company—that’s their job—and when acting properly can ensure good working conditions, investment in plant and material, and proper R&D.
    [Starting in 1980 with a change in tax laws, upper management’s bonuses were tied to the price of the stock. Fastest way to do that? Take your public company private. Stock share goes up. Big bucks to the big guys at the end of the year. No need to invest in new markets, why risk it? No R&D. Get same bang for the bonus buck by privatizing the company and scarfing up the profits for yourself. So upper management did just that while selling the hoi polloi on the ‘magic of privatization’. The latter fell for it, and have never realized since how their lives and futures were compromised, even though wages since 1980 reflect it.]
    Those cuts in the corporate tax rate can go to higher worker wages, R&D, equity investing—and contribute to the ongoing economic growth of the country—or they can go to the shareholder (rentier) bank accounts of people (typically the 1%) who are not producing the product, pay only capital gains, and who hoard their unnecessary surpluses to the detriment of economic growth of the companies they have invested in, and the country.

  250. MRW says:

    Would a cut in the corporate income tax rate be a tax break for the wealthy?
    Colonel,
    The short answer is no. But this curt answer obscures the issue.
    The federal corporate tax should be abolished. There’s no reason for it. The federal government does not need the money: it creates its own currency. Every corporation passes this tax along to its customers in higher prices.
    However.
    The problem: “The corporate tax cannot be abolished until some method is found to keep the corporate form from being used as a refuge from the individual tax and as a means of accumulating unneeded, uninvested surpluses. Some way must be devised whereby corporate earnings, which inure to individual shareholders, are adequately taxed as income of these individuals.”
    Taxes For Revenue are Obsolete, Beardsley Ruml, Chairman of the NY Federal Reserve,1946
    Cutting the corporate tax rate can become a tax break for the wealthy…if…the increased profits go to the wealthy shareholders, and are not shared with labor, as was the case post-war and thru LBJ.
    That’s why you need strong unions as existed in the Eisenhower era. (I’m not talking about the subsequent mafia-soaked unions that took advantage of the system, used them to launder money and run protection threats on company brass, or the tired, blanket Reagan anti-union message that was music to business ears when interest was 19%.) Unions can make sure that workers share fairly in the increased prosperity of the company—that’s their job—and when acting properly can ensure good working conditions, investment in plant and material, and proper R&D.
    [Starting in 1980 with a change in tax laws, upper management’s bonuses were tied to the price of the stock. Fastest way to do that? Take your public company private. Stock share goes up. Big bucks to the big guys at the end of the year. No need to invest in new markets, why risk it? No R&D. Get same bang for the bonus buck by privatizing the company and scarfing up the profits for yourself. So upper management did just that while selling the hoi polloi on the ‘magic of privatization’. The latter fell for it, and have never realized since how their lives and futures were compromised, even though wages since 1980 reflect it.]
    Those cuts in the corporate tax rate can go to higher worker wages, R&D, equity investing—and contribute to the ongoing economic growth of the country—or they can go to the shareholder (rentier) bank accounts of people (typically the 1%) who are not producing the product, pay only capital gains, and who hoard their unnecessary surpluses to the detriment of economic growth of the companies they have invested in, and the country.

  251. jerseycityjoan says:

    Sorry, I typed in the wrong figures in one of my sentences above.
    Here’s the corrected version and the link to Pew:
    “The US population is due to go from about 325,000,000 today to around 441,000,000 [not 465,000,000] by 2065.”
    http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/05/future-immigration-will-change-the-face-of-america-by-2065/

  252. Edward Amame says:

    Col Lang
    I was referring to personal income taxes. The Tax Policy Center found that almost half of Trump’s tax cuts would go to households of the top 1%. Less than a quarter of the cuts would benefit the bottom 80%. It would also eliminate the federal estate tax entirely. Only the wealthiest taxpayers — less than 1% — now pay that tax.
    As for his business tax cuts, they’d benefit big corporations, and perhaps, in theory anyway, the entire economy.
    However, The Tax Policy Center says that his tax plans would reduce federal revenues by around $9 trillion over its first ten years and that “…most, if not all, of the macroeconomic benefits of his tax cuts would be washed away by higher interest rates.”
    http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/latest-trump-tax-plan-adds-trillions-national-debt-clinton-plan-trims-deficits-taxing-wealthy

  253. MRW says:

    The Tax Policy Center operates on gold standard rules. Their claim is ridiculous, as inaccurate as CBO declaring in 2000 that the tax surpluses were going to continue for 15 years, and rah-rah-rah, ain’t that great.

  254. MRW says:

    The value of your post, Origin, is that we had to re-educate you, and that conversation here is what is worthwhile.

  255. MRW says:

    Know what you mean, Tyler. The ‘White Privilege’ battlecry was created by a White female Princeton professor in 1988, and no less than dumb Black college-level students have adopted it as their latest slave mantra, not understanding that it is the epitome of saying ‘Gee, I guess it is where we have always belonged: under a White man’s thumb’. How fucking dumb.
    Not regular Black folk though. Just spent a delightful 20 minutes with an older Black gas store attendant from Cleveland here in my state who was crowing to me about Trump now dealing with Carrier. When I walked in, he was dancing by himself behind the counter to the news. He claims that two months ago, Trump got over 1,000 jobs saved (which included this guy’s friends and family) in Cleveland by calling whomever (some factory) was leaving town to go to Mexico and made them stay.
    I said, “I didn’t hear about that in the press.” He said, “No, you didn’t, did you! But it’s true. My friends kept their jobs. People in our [Black community] knew about it.”
    I said, “The press says that Blacks were firmly in the Clinton camp. You’re saying they were not?”
    He said, “Hell no! And we don’t want that much. We just want jobs. We can take it from there.” I asked him how many in the Black community thought like he did. His answer: “A lot of us.”

  256. MRW says:

    Thanks, Pacifica Advocate. The US economy is here to serve the American people. No one else. But for 30 years, they don’t understand how the real economy works, and believe (excuse my vulgarity) the bullshit propagated by CNNCBSNABABACMNNABC know-nothing so-called experts about how it does.

  257. LeaNder says:

    Valissa:I have been quite surprised at the collective lack of ability to confront the “monsters of the id” within themselves and instead project it all onto Trump as a reasonable response to how horrible they think he is.
    Valissa,
    it’s always a good thing to check to what extend you could be projecting. Absolutely no doubt.
    But curious: I read your contributions on this tread as you-being-in-some-state-of-excitement over the victory of one party? I ask, since personally I found both choices on offer utterly absurd. Not sure, if I “project” in this case as an outsider, or what precisely; but basically interested in people. Meaning. It’s moot for me to reflect on what I would have done. Or how I would have voted.
    For longer now, I watch how basic memes and ideas can quite easily cross from one side of the basic ‘political juxtaposition setup’ to the other. …. not only in politics. I guess it always mattered on the level of: ‘the games we play every day’.
    Valissa:Please note, I think there are liberals that understand this, especially at this blog, and hopefully they will be the ones to rebuild their coalition into something that’s more geared to all Americans and not centered on political correctness.
    Personally I would assume that “liberals”, they no doubt collectively may be mistaken in this, don’t basically bother about ‘political correctness’ but really about shared basic human rights. Their basis for this may well be something like: “don’t do unto others what you don’t want to be done to yourself”. Or whatever variant of the idea you like. “All men created equal”?
    As a nitwit foreign observer of the US, one of my web/reality/media inquiries around an event in the US brought to my attention by Pat and the larger SST community (maybe more one special member) sent me out for a while on the larger American web. Call it an excursion from a basically fixed basis, if you like.
    But this experience made me wonder from very early on, if Trump would/could make it for longer now by focusing among other things on challenging ‘political correctness’ (semi scare quote here) …
    *****
    OK consider this a slightly too long introduction from my more personal, babbling layers:
    Valissa:REGULATION – For each new regulation, 2 old rules must be eliminated
    Which two types of regulation would you personally want to be abolished for what type of new one in government?
    Do you work in an industry that is or was challenged on its own interior rules in this context?

  258. Fred says:

    Babak,
    That they did. Our tax dollars at work.:
    https://record.umich.edu/articles/students-now-may-designate-personal-pronouns-class-rosters
    Some wag decided “His Majesty” would his. I wonder how many will be “Trump” or “MAGA” next semester?

  259. Valissa says:

    LeaNder,
    Well it seems you have not understood what I have been trying to say in the many comments I have made this past week.
    So let me repeat for (at least) 100th time… I am non-partisan, even anti-partisan, a realist, and observer of history. I purposefully attempt to stay as neutral as I can so that my analysis has a better chance of being accurate. I am an ex-liberal because IMO liberalism has gone in a direction that makes me somewhat nauseous. They used to care about the working class (somebody gave a link to an article about this somewhere on SST recently and I can repost if you can’t find it), and they used to be antiwar. Now all they can do is scream about political correctness, despite the numerous articles earlier this year that liberals had WON the culture wars.
    The best way to encourage tolerance in others does not involved chastising people constantly. My own theory is that television and movies have done more for cultural tolerance than any political activists. Changing people’s attitudes about cultural issues is a long slow process, and should be done with respect and compassion for all. Liberals have become extremely intolerant in the US. They are the new “moral majority” (back in the ’80s it was the conservative who were the finger waging shaming “moral majority”).
    What I am excited about is not the victory of one party. I don’t care for the current form of the Republican party all that much. Below MRW and I both shared links showing that Trump is NOT a conservative and that he wants to remake the Republican party into a populist economic party and not a “conservative” party. Trump is a culturally liberal New Yorker, who has staged a corporate takeover of the Republican party and in some ways is dragging it to the “left.” I don’t know if he’ll be able to pull it off completely, but I am glad that he is trying to change it. So that is part of the “excitement.”
    The other part is watching a historic moment unfold in from of my eyes. Because if Trump is able to change the Republican party then that forces some sort of change response from the Democratic party. Hurray! Both parties could use a swift kick in the ass as far as I’m concerned. I honor Trump for that. However, that does not mean I like or agree with his style or most of what he says. Many people who voted for him did not like his style of presentation either. But I look forward to him shaking things up. I expect him to make mistakes and that will shake things up even more. I keep hoping maybe eventually people will start paying attention to issues of governance rather than petty emotional gotcha points.
    As to you last remark, I will attempt to explain to you what I already explained to Dr. Puck (perhaps you missed it in all the comments). Initially all I did was share a link and excerpted from it. So the quote you are attributing to me should either be attributed to the author of the post I linked to, or to Trump, who said it. I did not share my opinion of Trumps remarks.
    The regulation quote made me laugh, and that’s about as far as I thought about it because I am well aware of Trump’s primary audience for that quote (hint, Republicans who bitch about regulations a lot – and they are not all wrong either IMO).
    I think perhaps you suffer from the liberal disease of taking everything politicians say literally. Rhetoric is not reality. Over time, if one makes the effort, one can begin to separate out the reality that is buried within the rhetoric that politicians use.

  260. turcopolier says:

    Edward Amame
    When I was “learned” basic economics as an undergraduate a premise was that the more wealthy people were the more likely they were to use larger and larger portions of their discretionary income for other than consumption, i.e., investment. You do not believe that? pl

  261. LeaNder says:

    David, what I love about Cologne, as city, are both its inhabitants and yes on my side of the river its many churches (they did a good job post WWII), not just the Cathedral. Under the Prussians they finally added the tower. 😉
    That the Cathedral was hit by 14 bombs nevertheless while badly damaged “remained standing”, was the most important sign for the people that maybe they would maybe survive too. … There are “other miracles”, like a Maria statue. … Yes, there less prominent resistance here too.
    ******
    True, generally people associate the Rhine with Wine are they much aware of the Southern parts, other rivers or regions?. … True Bavaria is associated with beer, thanks to the successful marketing of the Oktober Fest.
    There is this historical rivalry between Cologne and Düsseldorf. By now it mainly surfaces mainly in the way of jokes. Maybe too a bit in city marketing. One of the jokes is around beer brands. Kölsch versus Alt. One light the other dark. But pretty similar really, surprisingly. Kölsch is also the word for the Cologne dialect. I misspelled holy/heilige(German)/hillije(Kölsch), I realized too late.
    Try to order the Düsseldorf brand of beer, the Alt (literally old), in one of the traditional Cologne breweries and watch carefully what happens. The waiters there are as rough as waiters in Vienna, especially concerning their beer. No “Schmäh”. Simply don’t try to do it.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener_Schm%C3%A4h
    The waiters still look like this, basically:
    http://images.miet24.de/imgresize/800-600-0/67723/1173-1220003229-0.jpg
    If you don’t want another one, be careful to not finish it. Otherwise, without you ordering, the empty glass is substituted for the next full one.

  262. MRW says:

    Bravo, Valissa. Bravo. My sentiments exactly. It’s a new day, and Trump trumped the dead-end Republican party. The Dems are just waking up to the 2018 election: if they don’t change, the remainder of them will be voted out of office as relics who still cling to lobbyists and donors who are meaningless contributors unless the Dem gets re-elected. And it looks as if the lot of them won’t get re-elected unless they change and listen to the people who voted them in there.
    The incessant news panelists on PBS, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, even now, don’t get it. They still talk about Trump with snide, New York Upper Westside derision and cutesy inside-baseball commentary they hope will cover not only their persistent ignorance, but their failure to have listened for 15 years. [Me! ME I?! Tuning into FOX these days? It’s a personal 180!] Non-New Yorker liberals don’t get it (neither do their progeny, the snowflakes they raised to go to college and who have become a disgrace to their generation, a mother****ing disgrace, altho’ their parents deserve a lot of the blame.).
    “Trump is a culturally liberal New Yorker” is 100% fact. Anyone who has lived in Manhattan for a long period of time, as I did, can tell you that. But Trump spent his days with the construction guys from Staten Island, Queens, Brooklyn (before it was fashionable like today), Bronx, and the laborers working in the hinterlands of the USA on his projects. They are not objects of derision to him. He relates to them. He likes them. It’s the rich in NYC (and what I would call loosely, the “college-educated”—even though I am more educated than they are and from Ivy League schools) who hold Trump in contempt for speaking in the voice of these workers because he thinks their voices and concerns matter.

  263. MRW says:

    Babak, re: 24 November 2016 at 05:06 PM
    Great comment.

  264. MRW says:

    Valissa,
    There is no fundamental reason that globalization cannot co-exist with nationalism, as it has for most of it’s history.
    Careful. The danger is creating a global currency under the claim that one is needed “to meet global concerns” or some such ridiculousness.
    You can see a mini-version of that travesty in the EU. Greece and Spain [Portugal, Ireland, etc] would not have experienced the horror visited upon their nations after the adoption of the EURO if they had kept their own currencies. But these countries gave their respective currencies up, and adopted a foreign currency, the EURO. They forfeited their sovereignty, and impoverished their people and their youth by doing so.

  265. MRW says:

    Balint Somkuti, Phd,
    You make it too complicated and intellectual. The listed items you cite are targets in a heated argument, hurled as such. The basic issue, however, is having a job, and being able to support your family without nightly worries or sacrificing something important to keep your job (like paying for gas to the worksite over paying for electricity or your kid’s medicine).

  266. LeaNder says:

    Well it seems you have not understood what I have been trying to say in the many comments I have made this past week.
    Yes, Valissa, more likely then not. Communication is a complex matter.
    As to you last remark, I will attempt to explain to you what I already explained to Dr. Puck (perhaps you missed it in all the comments). Initially all I did was share a link and excerpted from it. So the quote you are attributing to me should either be attributed to the author of the post I linked to, or to Trump, who said it. I did not share my opinion of Trumps remarks.
    Sorry, you are correct. Excuse if this in any way hurt you.
    I should have been more precise in that context. Maybe I misread/misinterpreted the passage that followed the statements of Trumps you copied from Zerohedge, which you also linked to. And wrongly, as you now tell me, interpreted it as support. I seem to recall having watched the video too:
    I was impressed by the tone of the delivery of his speech and by how presidential he sounded. But I am old enough and have seen enough presidents make promises they couldn’t deliver that I remain skeptical

  267. LeaNder,
    I have mixed feelings about Babak’s ‘Diocletian Line’, because I think he is right that cultural patterns do persist over time, and also that the division between the Western and Eastern Roman Empires casts a long shadow. But I do not think there is a single ‘line’.
    So, the original ‘Diocletian Line’ cuts right through the Hapsburg lands. And then, there is the enigma that is – or was – Prussia.
    I found ‘schmäh’ interesting. In a much more provincial way, there is the same ambiguity about Irish Catholic Liverpool. (If you want an example of its worst side, look at Cherie Blair.)
    As to churches. Back in the early ‘Eighties, I was wandering through Hamburg, and sat down in the ruins of a bombed out church – not so dissimilar from the one I used to walk past on my way home from work in Liverpool, or close to where I later worked near St. Pauls Cathedral (which somehow escaped essentially unscathed.)
    Looking down, I saw a Latin inscription, to Giles Gilbert Scott – one of the great British neo-gothic architects. The ‘Nikolaikirche’ was an early work of his. The spire, which is still standing, made it the tallest building in the world from 1874 to 1876. It was used as a goal and orientation marked by the Allied air forces in their raids on Hamburg.
    Later in the ‘Eighties, I spent some time visiting, and then filming in, German schools and ‘Berufschulen’, and factories. This was the result of coming across an economist called Sig Prais, born into an Orthodox Jewish family from Frankfurt, who had had the foresight to get out early.
    He was unique among economists I came across in thinking that it was necessary to, as he put it ‘get one’s boots dirty’. So he had working for him a very tall English lady, and a rather short German lady, who went around visiting factories in Germany and Britain.
    I ended up taking a rather dry academic paper they produced, and turning it into a film which made the history of the ‘fitted kitchen’ a microscosm of all kinds of developments, both in Germany and Britain.
    From Sig Prais and his co-workers I learnt an appreciation of the immense technical – and moral – strengths of the German engineering tradition.
    This started before I became seriously interested in issues to do with security policy.
    What however struck me, on my visits to Germany, was the visceral dread of war among people I met. Later, when I was making programmes about security policy for BBC Radio, we interviewed Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann of the Allensbach Institute, who said this was general. It seemed rather obviously true.
    It also taught a larger lesson. One cannot simply put the past behind one, but it is simply stupid to get lost in it. It is necessary to deal with the world as it is now, rather than being ‘spooked’ by the ghosts of yesteryear.

  268. LeaNder says:

    So, the original ‘Diocletian Line’ cuts right through the Hapsburg lands. And then, there is the enigma that is – or was – Prussia.
    Prussia is no enigma, ask people in Poles/Polish. Prussia/Austria and Russia successfully cooperated in (all? it feels, yes, more or it feels, would need to look it up) the multiple divisions up to the disappearance of their country. … giving up private mediation here.
    Back in the early ‘Eighties, I was wandering through Hamburg, and sat down in the ruins of a bombed out church
    I partly grew up next to one, at one point in my early life up to nine. Forbidden to enter the premises, but it was some type of adventure field, way back then.
    You’ll find them everywhere. Not only in Hamburg or e.g. Berlin. Forgot, we have one here in Cologne too. St. Albans. … As rather early fan of Romanesque churches. There are also some churches in France I wish would still exist, just as some here they disappeared for a different reason.
    I’ll concentrate ‘imagewise’ (should I use a hyphen?) on Mataré’s Mourning Parents.
    I found a daylight image too. But why not take one from the Wikipedia.ge page?
    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_St._Alban#/media/File:Alt_St._Alban_-_Trauerndes_Elternpaar_-_Nachtaufnahme_(9473-75).jpg

  269. LeaNder says:

    Forgot another one. St. Kolumbe or Église Sainte-Colombe de Cologne, another somewhat mythical saint.
    That’s the church with the surviving Maria statute, it is integrated into a museum now.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolumba

  270. turcopolier says:

    LeaNder
    There are many early saints in the Catholic calendar who are just legends, I.e., St Patrick, St. Michael, St. George, St. Christopher. pl

  271. Babak Makkinejad says:

    I always liked St. Catherine, who never was.

  272. Richard Ong says:

    The “general decency” of which you speak has engineered the destruction of Britain by the importation of arrogant Muslims who have no intention of assimilating. They have come to dominate and dispossess.

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