Donald Trump

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15 hours ago, Section_31 said:

Absolutely.

 

It would be torrid and relentless.

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5 minutes ago, Bruce Spanner said:

I agree wholeheartedly, but those that enabled this bullshit are, or are adjacent and they are the people we need to be concerned with, not specifically the Orange Helmet.

74m of them.

 

[Bruce Spanner]

6 minutes ago, skaro said:

74m of them.

No, the advisors, tech people, briefers, sponsors, legitimisers, co-conspirators, vested interests, media’s alignments, nudge department’s and any other cunt under the sun who allowed this joke to run roughshod over democratic process for the last four years.

 

Everybody, including the people who have been mind raped to accept this fucking nonsense, are culpable to a greater or lesser degree.
 

No excuses.

 

 

 

[s(k)aturation]

11 minutes ago, Bruce Spanner said:

any other cunt under the sun who allowed this joke to run roughshod over democratic process for the last four years.

Everybody, including the people who have been mind raped to accept this fucking nonsense, are culpable. 
No excuses.

 

I wasn't making any excuses.

But you think the 70+m voters - two elections running - aren't an issue?

They've all been manipulated and mind raped?

These 140m+ votes have been an undemocratic phenomenon?

 

I don't think so... on the contrary, this is the undesirable side of democracy at work.

When lots and lots and lots of people vote for a dickhead.

That's the problem going forward.

You can't just stop a person running for office, and being popular, just because they're a cunt.

And whatever is done to eliminate Trump (and it's pretty much done already) the real worry is if someone properly evil - actually smart, intelligent, ingratiating, truly insidiously and ingeniously manipulative - gains popularity.

Because democracy will not stop a person like that.

 

 

[TheHowieLama]

10 minutes ago, Bruce Spanner said:

 

No excuses.

 

 

 

Most of those folks are just collecting a check. They hjave no power.

He was the monkey in front of the organ grinder. There were a few key folks. McConnell/Graham took it in the ass for four years (and would have for four more) knowing they at the end of the day are more powerful and will still be around. Bill Barr has been waiting for 30 years to get a chance to exploit and expand Executive power. He just needed a fella who cared even less than he did about the balance of powers. To put three Supreme Court Justices up - that is Reagan era shit.

[Bruce Spanner]

7 minutes ago, skaro said:

 

(1) I wasn't making any.

(2) But you think the 70+m voters - two elections running - aren't an issue?

They've all been manipulated and mind raped?

(3) These 140m+ votes have been an undemocratic phenomenon?

 

I don't think so... on the contrary, this is the undesirable side of democracy at work.

When lots and lots and lots of people vote for a dickhead.

That's the problem going forward.

You can't just stop a person running for office, and being popular, just because they're a cunt.

And whatever is done to eliminate Trump (and it's pretty much done already) the real worry is if someone evil - but actually smart, intelligent and truly insidiously and ingeniously manipulative - gains popularity.

(4) Because democracy will not necessarily stop a person like that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1) Not you, them..

 

2) No, a percentage of these are a massive issue, like the small band of emboldened cunts in the UK aligned with Brexit. I’m not, overly, concerned with the majority, though Botha needs to be understood. I’m more concerned about the small, very vocal, minority who have been weaponised, they’re the problem and they’ve been, and are being, used for whatever political ends this leads to.

 

3) it’s 70+m why double it? It makes no difference.

 

4) The next ‘Trump’ if they’re competent will walk this bullshit and that’s a very real concern.

[Bruce Spanner]

7 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Most of those folks are just collecting a check. They hjave no power.

He was the monkey in front of the organ grinder. There were a few key folks. McConnell/Graham took it in the ass for four years (and would have for four more) knowing they at the end of the day are more powerful and will still be around. Bill Barr has been waiting for 30 years to get a chance to exploit and expand Executive power. He just needed a fella who cared even less than he did about the balance of powers. To put three Supreme Court Justices up - that is Reagan era shit.

Yes, but free will and choice has to be factored in or you’ll allow any crank to do as they will because they ‘believe it’

 

Its not possible, or permissible, to have this as a precedent.

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10 minutes ago, Bruce Spanner said:

1) Not you, them..

 

2) No, a percentage of these are a massive issue, like the small band of emboldened cunts in the UK aligned with Brexit. I’m not, overly, concerned with the majority, though Botha needs to be understood. I’m more concerned about the small, very vocal, minority who have been weaponised, they’re the problem and they’ve been, and are being, used for whatever political ends this leads to.

 

3) it’s 70+m why double it? It makes no difference.

 

4) The next ‘Trump’ if they’re competent will walk this bullshit and that’s a very real concern.

2) I'm not concerned about the other week at the Capitol.  Yes, some were armed - but try that again in a few weeks, properly policed and defended, and it would be crushed in an instant.

These current misfits could never in the wildest dreams achieve a coup.*

3) I aggregated the votes over two elections.

4) How do you stop this - without some form of political censorship, regulation or, indeed, authoritarianism?

*misfits, under a well-organised leader who can actually bring the system down from within, are much more of a worry than last week's "Stars Wars Cantina" entourage.

 

 

[Rick Sanchez C-137]

In a very real sense it doesn't matter if he's a fascist or not. If he's willing to stoke the flames, prey on their ignorance, validate it, and fire up racial tensions to serve himself, the outcomes are the same. The fact that it was opportunistic won't be a comfort to those beaten, killed, abused or deported.

 

Also, in a way, it's more disgusting if he doesn't actually believe the rhetoric he spouts. At least true fascists have the 'excuse' of being indoctrinated into an ideology. Brainwashed, in a way. If he's not a fascist he'll be able to appreciate the darkness behind the shite he regurgitates, and still not care.

 

A stone cold sociopath/narcissist.

[Bruce Spanner]

7 minutes ago, skaro said:

 

3) I aggregated the votes over two elections.

4) How do you stop this - without some form of political censorship, regulation or, indeed, authoritarianism?

 

3) So 70m then.

 

4) I don’t know, but the lens is very much on social media and how they’re significant in this. I think there’ll be some form of censorship and removal of anonymity, I’m not sure how positive this is, but we need a radical rethink as something has gone very, very fucking wrong.

 

Caveat: I’m not sure all of this is confined to US boarders and isn’t part of a larger geopolitical game of brinkmanship.

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12 minutes ago, Bruce Spanner said:

3) So 70m then.

 

4) I don’t know, but the lens is very much on social media and how they’re significant in this. I think there’ll be some form of censorship and removal of anonymity, I’m not sure how positive this is, but we need a radical rethink as something has gone very, very fucking wrong.

 

Caveat: I’m not sure all of this is confirmed to US boarders and isn’t part of a larger geopolitical game if brinkmanship.

 

3) yes ok, 70m then.

4) People like Trump shouldn't get near the candidacy for an election... trouble is, he has, because enough people of influence believed the "status quo", prior to that, was worth dismantling. One part of what has gone "very, very fucking" wrong is the disaffection and disillusionment with centrist two-party duopolies, that live in their own world and serve their own interests, not those of the people. This ain't a left/right issue. The problem and the power, I think, was created and lies in the elitist middle.

 

 

 

[TheHowieLama]

21 minutes ago, Bruce Spanner said:

Yes, but free will and choice has to be factored in or you’ll allow any crank to do as they will because they ‘believe it’

 

Its not possible, or permissible, to have this as a president.

Bad news pal

[TheHowieLama]

19 minutes ago, Rick Sanchez C-137 said:

 

A stone cold sociopath/narcissist.

Nah man - too deep. A salesman working on commission.

[Bruce Spanner]

9 minutes ago, skaro said:

 

3) yes ok, 70m then.

4) People like Trump shouldn't get near the candidacy for an election... trouble is, he has, because enough people of influence believed the "status quo", prior to that, was worth dismantling. One part of what has gone "very, very fucking" wrong is the disaffection and disillusionment with centrist two-party duopolies, that live in their own world and serve their own interests, not those of the people. This ain't a left/right issue.  The problem, I think, was created and lies in the elitist middle.

 

 

 

So we’re in broad agreements on most things then, the bolded though is where we find difference as I believe that ‘the political class’ have engaged and weaponised the ‘Everyman’ for political ends and now we’re in a precarious situation as the genie is out of the bottle as you have to accept formally fringe views as relevant when they are anything but.

 

Centrism works as it appeals to all, in some way, and should, by definition, work for all, if only marginally. I don’t want it, you, I suppose, don’t want it, the far right and left don’t want it, but most would as it’s just continuity.  

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18 minutes ago, Bruce Spanner said:

So we’re in broad agreements on most things then, the emboldened though is where we find difference as I believe that ‘the political class’ have engaged and weaponised the ‘Everyman’ for political ends and now we’re in a precarious situation as the genie is out of the bottle as you have to accept formally fringe views as relevant.

 

Centrism works as it appeals to all and should, by definition, work for all, if only marginally. I don’t want it, you, I suppose don’t want it, the far right and left don’t want it, but most would as it’s just continuity.  

 

I'm fine with centrism in theory.  As you say, it should work for all.

And yes, broad agreement, Bruce.

But I think "the political class" (centrists) - up until your Brexits and your Trumps - didn't actually give a shit about "everyman", but only the blancmange middle class, themselves and power.

It's taken a loon like Trump - hardly the political class - to identify and highlight the self-serving indifference of "centrism" and weaponise the "Everyman".

 

That's why what Biden does now is so important.

If he merely gets things "back to normal" - which I think is all he's capable of and all the standard two-party duopolist is interested in - that will just set it all up for the disaffected, disillusioned "Trump" cycle to repeat itself.

 

The outlook is not good, whichever way I look at it.

 

 

[TheHowieLama]

2 minutes ago, skaro said:

 

It's taken a loon like Trump - hardly the political class - to identify the self-serving indifference of "centrism" and weaponise the "Everyman"

 

TBH I think he did blow up the system - just not the way he planned to. 

"Every Man" lost two presidential elections by vote - chucked in the House in 2018 and lost in Georgia of all fuckin places two weeks ago. 

"Gerry Man" is what has kept them afloat and now they are forced to have some conversations about election transparency and individuals right to vote. Those are a couple of things they have avoided forever.

[s(k)aturation]

7 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

TBH I think he did blow up the system - just not the way he planned to. 

"Every Man" lost two presidential elections by vote - chucked in the House in 2018 and lost in Georgia of all fuckin places two weeks ago. 

"Gerry Man" is what has kept them afloat and now they are forced to have some conversations about election transparency and individuals right to vote. Those are a couple of things they have avoided forever.

 

I don't reckon he planned anything.  

He just did it, crookedly, randomly and with bluster.

The story of his career.

And he ain't Every Man.  Nor were those oddities that stormed the Capitol, for that matter.

 

 

[TheHowieLama]

14 minutes ago, skaro said:

 

I don't reckon he planned anything.  

He just did it, crookedly, randomly and with bluster.

The story of his career.

And he ain't Every Man.  Nor were those oddities that stormed the Capitol, for that matter.

 

 

Yeah, should say - not the way "they" planned.

 

He was elected by folks who wanted a re-set at Federal level - portrayed quite effectively as "Every Man", empowered by the same tactic (Barr DoJ) and tolerated by the big boys (Senate). 

 

[s(k)aturation]

2 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Yeah, should say - not the way "they" planned.

 

He was elected by folks who wanted a re-set at Federal level - portrayed quite effectively as "Every Man", empowered by the same tactic (Barr DoJ) and tolerated by the big boys (Senate). 

 

Quite a miracle, when you think about it.

 

[TheHowieLama]

2 minutes ago, skaro said:

Quite a miracle, when you think about it.

 

Ask him about it - he will tell you how great it was.

[s(k)aturation]

14 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Ask him about it - he will tell you how great it was.

 

Do they have visiting hours at Guantanamo?

 

 

[Section_31]

6 hours ago, Bruce Spanner said:

No, the advisors, tech people, briefers, sponsors, legitimisers, co-conspirators, vested interests, media’s alignments, nudge department’s and any other cunt under the sun who allowed this joke to run roughshod over democratic process for the last four years.

 

Everybody, including the people who have been mind raped to accept this fucking nonsense, are culpable to a greater or lesser degree.
 

No excuses.

 

 

 

 

Agreed.

 

Nobody worked for Trump because they had to, they were never going go be on the dole, there were no difficult choices to be made the same was as someone might, say, work for Amazon despite have concerns over a lot of those practices.

 

They all hoped to gain something, either by being on a winning side, where the enemy was essentially the US's norms, or they wanted prestige that would serve them and gain rewards after they'd worked for him, TV gigs, University jobs etc - if this is what they hoped for, then it's exactly what they should be deprived of at all costs.

 

If you're working in that world, you're either a supporter of Trump or a supporter of the United States, you can't be both, not when he'd been classed as an actual fucking intelligence risk by their own intelligence community, or when he's shown disdain for their laws and their constitution, or when he's sown discord for his own gain which has resulted in the death of citizens and police, or when he's turned a blind eye to Russia putting bounties on the heads of American troops. 

 

Trump isn't American except in luck of birth, he's avoided military service and dodged taxes all his life, he's the antithesis of what most people would consider a good and loyal citizen, so are anyone who knowingly followed him.

[sir roger]

He will leave behind a massive amount of discord and questions that will haunt the USA for many years , but mainly , did he really get pissed on by Russian brasses ?

[Bruce Spanner]

1 minute ago, sir roger said:

He will leave behind a massive amount of discord and questions that will haunt the USA for many years , but mainly , did he really get pissed on by Russian brasses ?

 

He'll leave behind as little evidence as possible...

 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/17/historians-having-to-tape-together-records-that-trump-tore-up

[Dr Arthur De Sabre]

13 hours ago, Bruce Spanner said:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/16/if-trump-looks-like-a-fascist-and-acts-like-a-fascist-then-maybe-he-is-one

 

’Assurances that “fascism couldn’t happen here” are always appealing in Anglo-Saxon countries that think themselves immune because “it” never did. The US and UK did not experience rule by Nazism or communism in the 20th century and the ignorance our lucky histories fostered has weakened our defences in the 21st.

 

Even after all that has happened in Washington, apparently serious voices insist we cannot compare Donald Trump to any variety of fascist. Conservatives habitually say that liberals call everything they don’t like fascist, forgetting that the moral of Aesop’s fable was that the boy who cried wolf was right in the end. They used to chortle about “Trump derangement syndrome” that spreads in stages like cancer until sufferers “cannot distinguish fantasy from reality”. They have bitten their tongues now that the reality of Trumpism is deranged mobs trying to overthrow democracy.

 

Their silence was broken last week by the historian of Nazism, Richard Evans, who with the effortless ability to miss every point a professorship at Cambridge bestows, decided now was the moment to denounce his colleagues, Timothy Snyder and Sarah Churchwell. They might compare the Trump and fascist movements but “few who have described Trump as a fascist can be called real experts in the field”, he wrote in the New Statesman with an audible sniff. “Genuine specialists”, such as, and since you asked, himself, “agree that whatever else he is, Trump is not a fascist”.

Before we get to why the argument matters, I should say the New Statesman needs to expand its fact-checking department. Snyder, whose work on how democracies turn into dictatorships is essential reading, does not say that the Trump movement is “fascist”. He writes that “post-truth is pre-fascism and Trump has been our post-truth president”. Churchwell’s astonishing studies of how German Nazis and American white supremacists fed off each other are a revelation. (And I come from the old left and thought I had learned about everything that was rotten with America at my mother’s knee.) When asked, she says she too is careful and characterises the Trump movement as “neo-fascist”.

 

The use of “fascism” in political debate is both a call to arms and a declaration of war. For once you say you are fighting fascism there can be no retreat. By talking of “pre-fascism” or “neo-fascism”, you acknowledge that the F-word is not a bomb you should detonate lightly; you also acknowledge the gravity of the times.

The alternatives look like the euphemisms of formerly safe societies that, like Caliban, cannot bear to see their face in the mirror. The Trump leadership cult, the attacks on any source of information the leader does not authorise, the racist conspiracy theories, the servile media that amplify the leader’s lies are not “conservative” in any understanding of the term. How about populist? If it means anything today, populism is supporting the people against the elite. But what could be more elitist than denying the result of the people’s vote with the big lie, the Joseph Goebbels lie, that Trump won the election he lost and then inciting brainwashed followers to storm democratic institutions? Followers, I should add, who included men dressed in “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts and waving Confederate flags and wannabe stormtroopers crying “sieg heil!” and “total negro death”. “Far right” and “extreme right” are no help. They are just polite ways of saying neo-fascist.

In his The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton, the pre-eminent authority on its ideology, wrote that the Ku Klux Klan in 1867 rather than Mussolini’s squadristi in 1920 could be seen as the first fascist movement. As with the Nazi party, the embittered officers of a defeated army formed the Klan. They mourned the defeat of the Confederacy and did not accept the legitimacy of the US government. They had uniforms, white robes rather than leather jackets, the fantasies of racial supremacy and deployed terror to maintain the subjugation of African Americans. Last week, police sources told the Washington Post they were shocked to see “former law enforcement and military personnel as well as senior business executives” among the Washington mob. If they had known the history of military and bourgeois support for fascism, they would have been less surprised. It isn’t always powered by “the left behind”.

 

Paxton said last week that he had “resisted for a long time applying the fascist label to Donald J Trump”, but Trump’s incitement of the invasion of the Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label”.

Republicans fear assassination if they vote to impeach Trump. Rupert Murdoch’s broadcasters are delivering barely veiled threats of violent insurrection if the Democrats pursue impeachment. “We see what’s happening around this country, how 50 state houses are being threatened on Inauguration Day,” warned one. “This is the last thing you want to do.” 

I can see three objections to calling a large section of the Republican party pre-fascist. The first can be dismissed with a flick of the fingers as it comes from a self-interested right that has to pretend it is not in the grip of a deep sickness – and not only in the United States. The second is the old soothing “it can’t happen here” exceptionalism of the Anglo-Saxon west, which has yet to learn that the US and UK are exceptional in the 21st century for all the wrong reasons. The third sounds intelligent but is the dumbest of all. You should not call Trump or any other leader a pre- or neo-fascist or any kind of fascist until he has gone the whole hog and transformed his society into a totalitarian war machine.

 

The example of the stages of cancer, so beloved by believers in Trump derangement syndrome, explains the stupidity. Imagine you are a doctor looking at pre-cancerous cells or an early-stage cancer that has not grown deeply into tissue. The door bursts open and a chorus of Fox Newspresenters and Cambridge dons cry that “real experts in the field” agree that on no account should you call it cancer until it has metastasised and spread through the whole body. A competent doctor would insist on calling a fatal disease by its real name and not leave treatment until it was too late to stop it. So should you.’

 

 

 

 

The biggest stumbling point comes early, “the Anglo-Saxon west”, obviously the saxons themselves were an early Germanic tribe, so doubtless still retain an hereditary influence in Germany should they do so in the UK.

also, how many Germanic immigrants to the US since settlers arrived from Europe? I mean Donny fucking Drumpf get fucks sake.

Sandcastle argument to start with.