Trumpism: Page 16 - The Arsenal discussion community: One More in the Tolly

Trumpism

Qwiss

y va marquer wrote:
See you waited for days to get the little dig in qwiss. That kind of petty stuff bugs me

It bugs me when people try to have an honest discussion with you and you try to undermine their arguments by misrepresenting their position.

Bold Tone

Qwiss! wrote:

[size=small][font=Helmet, Freesans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]The episode has made the White House look amateurish and ill-prepared, however, and Republicans in Congress are getting nervous.[/font][/size]
[size=small][font=Helmet, Freesans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38790629
[/font][/size]

[size=small][font=Helmet, Freesans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]Unfortunately, we cannot claim superiority.[/font][/size]
[size=small][font=Helmet, Freesans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/17/uk-security-agencies-unlawfully-collected-data-for-decade
[/font][/size]

jones

y va marquer wrote:
jones wrote:
Nowhere did I say there's no one else involved. Plenty others are at fault, some even more than Merkel.

My point is she deserves no credit for taking in a number of the people (for her own selfish reasons to boot) for whose displacement she was responsible for in the first place.

You said:
"She was responsible for creating the flood of refugees in the first place " that sounds pretty much like you were laying the blame squarely with her alone, seeing as you did not mention any others responsible.

That's because we were talking about Merkel and her asshole pet Seibert's press release.

flobaba

Claudius wrote:
Qwiss! wrote:

a lot can change in a year, Qs... like the opportunity to be pres if the orange ogre flames out

Right, so You think Pence would come out with this kind of statement which directly opposes Trump unilaterally? They're all in cahoots, playing the people for suckers.

y va marquer

Qwiss! wrote:
y va marquer wrote:
See you waited for days to get the little dig in qwiss. That kind of petty stuff bugs me

It bugs me when people try to have an honest discussion with you and you try to undermine their arguments by misrepresenting their position.

I did not misrepresent what jones said - it was not clear to me that he was not holding Merkel solely responsible.

You're implying that I consistently undermine people in a dishonest way - I do not.

You have a personal issue with me because of one post last week.

Tony Montana

y va marquer wrote:
Qwiss! wrote:
It bugs me when people try to have an honest discussion with you and you try to undermine their arguments by misrepresenting their position.

I did not misrepresent what jones said - it was not clear to me that he was not holding Merkel solely responsible.

You're implying that I consistently undermine people in a dishonest way - I do not.

You have a personal issue with me because of one post last week.

What Was The post?

Burnwinter

We need to be careful of politicians like Merkel or Trudeau who do a relatively circumscribed amount of good while boosting their own profiles.

For example, Canada under Trudeau has a sharply curtailed cap on refugee resettlements so his widely circulated gesture re Trump's ban should be put to the question.

Coombs

This is true, Burns, but the world is a bloody powderkeg (same as it ever was), and rhetoric is important. Get behind the rhetoric and then work to hold them to task. That's the long process. It doesn't always work, often fails, but when did we ever really win anything on the streets, other than by revolution? If every decent statement comes with the caveat "yea, show me what s/he has ever done for refugees", then we're in for a world of hurt.

Burnwinter

Coombs wrote:
This is true, Burns, but the world is a bloody powderkeg (same as it ever was), and rhetoric is important. Get behind the rhetoric and then work to hold them to task. That's the long process. It doesn't always work, often fails, but when did we ever really win anything on the streets, other than by revolution? If every decent statement comes with the caveat "yea, show me what s/he has ever done for refugees", then we're in for a world of hurt.

During the labour movement when workers' strikes were an effective political tool—and were used to obtain pretty much every collective good citizens have enjoyed in the industrialised world, from the eight hour day to accessible health care and education.

Burnwinter

Iraq has announced a symmetric ban for US citizens:

http://www.baghdadinvest.com/breaking-americans-banned-iraq-retaliation-measures/

jones

Burnwinter wrote:
Coombs wrote:
This is true, Burns, but the world is a bloody powderkeg (same as it ever was), and rhetoric is important. Get behind the rhetoric and then work to hold them to task. That's the long process. It doesn't always work, often fails, but when did we ever really win anything on the streets, other than by revolution? If every decent statement comes with the caveat "yea, show me what s/he has ever done for refugees", then we're in for a world of hurt.

During the labour movement when workers' strikes were an effective political tool—and were used to obtain pretty much every collective good citizens have enjoyed in the industrialised world, from the eight hour day to accessible health care and education.

Exactly, labour movements and union action have done infinitely more for both workers and employees than any rhetoric ever uttered by jokers like Trudeau.

Which is of course why unions nowadays have either been broken up and are empty shells, had their executives corrupted and work for the enemy or are completely powerless after legislation has shackled their rights to strike and to organise against their employers. Or in some cases - such as Germany - it's all of the above and then some

Burnwinter

It's true that Thatcherism and its neoliberal equivalents throughout the global north broke union power, but that process was rendered somewhat inevitable for a lot of sectors of production by the fact of the distribution of production across global supply chains and across national borders.

Thatcher's union-busting, or what is known as the Accord in Australia were just measures to help that process along.

Union membership stands at around 15% or so in Australia at the moment, too low, too selfish and too diffuse to represent a real political base. New instruments of solidarity (other than the picket line, which can no longer be effective for the aforementioned reasons) need to be found so we can replace the once great union movement with something that suits the time.

It's hard to stress enough how much the current crisis of Trump, Brexit et al is a consequence of the disempowerment of voters and workers in the developed world. This is the nonsense that happens when politics gets unmoored from the collective good by an absence of real mass power, no matter how much "free speech" you have.

jones

I wasn't trying to say that the demise of unions was down to Maggie and Ronnie alone, as you note it was more or less accelerating what would've happened regardless couple decades down the road. That would also be giving them too much credit, the general setup of their policies was created a good few years before either or even Nixon - you could (and you probably would) say that it's inherent in capitalism as union organisation of workers stands in the way of the ruling class accumulating capital. My post was more a passing observation on the state of unions (especially in Germany where it's looking beyond pathetic), explaining the reasons would take a lot more than a couple of paragraphs on an Arsenal forum 🙂

However I will add to your last sentence - the embellishment of "free speech" and other vacuous values like that are what contributed to the downfall of what you summarised as "the collective good". Just like with the supposed dichotomy of security vs liberty the elites in politics and production will always find a way to pit values against each other in an effort to cut down on at least one of them.

Burnwinter

Sounds like we agree on quite a lot of this 🙂

I don't really think free speech is a vacuous concept, but economic power certainly talks much louder and makes change happen.

jones

Vacuous in the sense that it basically means whatever you want it to mean. I know that freedom of press and speech is nothing that should be taken for granted, I meant it in the sense that with the universal acclaim it holds it is as prone to abuse as few other achievements of humanity.

arsedocmd

good clip, no rhetoric/bs/platitudes of the regular news clips or panels.

Coombs

Bah, what exactly is "street" about the unions? Union leaders are power-brokers like all the others, and the deals made in exchange for slave-level wage labor at "only" 8 hours per day aren't really deals at all, but capitulation to capital and self-interest.

No, rhetoric is all we ever had to actually affect political action. Demonstrations, protests...these are support mechanisms, or they should be. They should be ways to get people to actually engage in political action, rather than an alternative to it. Honestly, all non-violent direct action is itself simply rhetorical in nature, it offers nothing else.

I don't have a lot of love for Merkel or Trudeau, but they way they speak makes it at least possible to hold them to task. Giving nobody at all any credit whatsoever seems like excuse-making for taking no political action...the people who shrug their shoulders about 45 are the same people who didn't bother to vote. I'm tired of hearing that it doesn't matter who leads us, they're all the same, yadda yadda yadda...it obviously does matter.

Klaus

Trump just fired the attorney general.

Burnwinter

Coombs wrote:
Bah, what exactly is "street" about the unions? Union leaders are power-brokers like all the others, and the deals made in exchange for slave-level wage labor at "only" 8 hours per day aren't really deals at all, but capitulation to capital and self-interest.

It's about the contest for power between labour and capital—the eight hour day certainly a significant watershed for the affected workers wherever it was implemented (ie US, UK, Europe, Australia), and history shows it took a considerable struggle to achieve.

If the traditional trade unions had not organised historically, that struggle wouldn't have pushed workers' conditions forward as far.

That in and of itself certainly doesn't make unions relevant to the struggles of today. The point today is not to go on strike in hollow imitation, it's to think like a Chartist, work out what needs to be done to disrupt production and get back power and justice.

Burnwinter

Just in … https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/us/politics/trump-immigration-ban-memo.html

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