Trumpism: Page 17 - The Arsenal discussion community: One More in the Tolly

Trumpism

Qwiss

Coombs wrote:
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.

I don't think opposing neo-liberal frauds like Merkel means you have to be one of those boring idiots who uses the "they're all the same anyway" line as an excuse for ignorance and apathy.

Coombs

Opposition to the people themselves is pointless. The right ideas are the right ideas, better to support them (the ideas) and push for political action on them, while criticizing the wrong ideas.

Coombs

Burnwinter wrote:
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.

Capital is no longer about production, though, disrupting it won't affect a goddamn thing.

jones

Coombs wrote:
Opposition to the people themselves is pointless. The right ideas are the right ideas, better to support them (the ideas) and push for political action on them, while criticizing the wrong ideas.

No, paying lip service to the right ideas is pointless. If you want the right ideas pushed you need to criticise and get rid of assholes who claim they'll push them when it's obvious they'll be doing the opposite. After they've been replaced by people who look more likely to push said ideas we can start talking about supporting the ideas.

As the German saying goes, kein Applaus für Scheiße.

Coombs

jones wrote:
Coombs wrote:
Opposition to the people themselves is pointless. The right ideas are the right ideas, better to support them (the ideas) and push for political action on them, while criticizing the wrong ideas.

No, paying lip service to the right ideas is pointless. If you want the right ideas pushed you need to criticise and get rid of assholes who claim they'll push them when it's obvious they'll be doing the opposite. After they've been replaced by people who look more likely to push said ideas we can start talking about supporting the ideas.

As the German saying goes, kein Applaus für Scheiße.

Well then we'll likely never be supporting anything.

Qwiss

jones wrote:
Coombs wrote:
Opposition to the people themselves is pointless. The right ideas are the right ideas, better to support them (the ideas) and push for political action on them, while criticizing the wrong ideas.

No, paying lip service to the right ideas is pointless. If you want the right ideas pushed you need to criticise and get rid of assholes who claim they'll push them when it's obvious they'll be doing the opposite. After they've been replaced by people who look more likely to push said ideas we can start talking about supporting the ideas.

As the German saying goes, kein Applaus für Scheiße.

Exactly. Politicians who talk equality and increase inequality are a part of the problem not the solution.

jones

Coombs wrote:
jones wrote:
No, paying lip service to the right ideas is pointless. If you want the right ideas pushed you need to criticise and get rid of assholes who claim they'll push them when it's obvious they'll be doing the opposite. After they've been replaced by people who look more likely to push said ideas we can start talking about supporting the ideas.

As the German saying goes, kein Applaus für Scheiße.

Well then we'll likely never be supporting anything.

Most likely. We still have fucking nothing to support.

Coombs

Qwiss! wrote:
jones wrote:
No, paying lip service to the right ideas is pointless. If you want the right ideas pushed you need to criticise and get rid of assholes who claim they'll push them when it's obvious they'll be doing the opposite. After they've been replaced by people who look more likely to push said ideas we can start talking about supporting the ideas.

As the German saying goes, kein Applaus für Scheiße.

Exactly. Politicians who talk equality and increase inequality are a part of the problem not the solution.

People are the problem, not politicians as such. People are also the solution.

Burnwinter

Coombs wrote:
Capital is no longer about production, though, disrupting it won't affect a goddamn thing.

There's a huge soft underbelly there of make-work especially in the developed world. Someone like me, a software consultant, can't meaningfully withdraw labour. On the other hand, profit remains the driving force behind the merry-go-round for now.

arsedocmd

So I hear Ted Cruz has passed out from incessant wanking with the Neil Gorsuch pick

Bold Tone

Burnwinter wrote:
Iraq has announced a symmetric ban for US citizens:

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

[font=Arial]Kuwait issues Trump-like visa bans for five Muslim-majority countries[/font]

https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2017/2/1/kuwait-issues-trump-like-visa-bans-for-five-muslim-majority-countries

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/a-welcome-setback-for-donald-trump

arsedocmd

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kellyann-conway-bowling-green-massacre_us_58940d66e4b09bd304baa78a

And then she literally threatens people with 'descending base on them' while invoking class and grace. Fucking mafia.

y va marquer

Trump, Bannon (the real president), Kelly Anne, Pence, Spicer - I look forward to the day that they find themselves on the scrap heap.

Comparisons of political leaders are of limited usefulness, because no two are exactly alike — they bring to mind Tolstoy’s line about unhappy families, each is unhappy in its own way. Milošević was whip smart, disciplined, and he wasn’t a narcissist in the way of Trump. He didn’t have a lot of public meetings, his face wasn’t plastered on Serbian media, and he spent most evenings at home with his wife, a hard-line professor named Mira Marković who was also his principal confidante. And no matter what Trump does, I don’t believe the United States is heading for the kind of violence that Milošević knowingly steered Yugoslavia toward.

Trump’s buffoonery was present, however, in another protagonist of the Balkan carnage — Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb leader who got his start as Milošević’s puppet. Karadžić’s fabulism was more brazen than his fellow Serb’s, if only because like Trump he adored the spotlight and talked so much. Karadžić was a night owl, and one evening I attended a press conference that began after midnight in his small-town headquarters outside besieged Sarajevo. The Muslims were bombing themselves, Karadžić said. The media invented the tales of Serb mistreatment of detainees. There was no ethnic cleansing — Muslims left their homes voluntarily.

Karadžić’s performance was Trumpian in its audacious make-believe, and it conveyed a lesson that’s useful to us today. Tyrants don’t care if you believe them, they just want you to succumb to doubt. “His ideas were so grotesque,” I later wrote of Karadžić, “his version of reality so twisted, that I was tempted to conclude he was on drugs, or that I was. I knew Bosnia well, and I knew that the things Karadžić said were lies, and that these lies were being broadcast worldwide, every day, several times a day, and they were being taken seriously. I am not saying that his lies were accepted as the truth, but I sensed they were obscuring the truth, causing outsiders to stay on the sidelines, and this of course was a great triumph for Karadžić. He didn’t need to make outsiders believe his version of events; he just needed to make them doubt the truth and sit on their hands.”

The terrible experience of the Balkans offers a slit of

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/07/what-slobodan-milosevic-taught-me-about-donald-trump/

Burnwinter

Karadzic was a psycho and a war criminal who arranged for the slaughter of nearly ten thousand people.

Trump is an awful man who I can imagine signing off on that much and worse, but seems to come from a very different place.

He was born into a family that already knew everything about how to accumulate wealth and land bending the rules where necessary, and he refined what he learnt. They were pragmatically racist, pretending they were from a Swedish background to avoid the disapprobation of their Jewish customers and business partners, and systematically avoiding letting property to black tenants to accommodate the racism of the broader public.

(And maybe they were ideologically racist too, if the rumours about Fred Trump being in the KKK are correct.)

Trump is a massive piece of shit, a glutton for massing money and property like fifty shithead landlords rolled into one, but the same guy who drafted the narcissistic personality disorder description in the DSM-5 reckons that on the evidence, he's only a massive piece of shit.

y va marquer

The part that I found more relevant was the comment on the annihilation of truth:

" I knew Bosnia well, and I knew that the things Karadžić said were lies, and that these lies were being broadcast worldwide, every day, several times a day, and they were being taken seriously. I am not saying that his lies were accepted as the truth, but I sensed they were obscuring the truth, causing outsiders to stay on the sidelines, and this of course was a great triumph for Karadžić. He didn’t need to make outsiders believe his version of events; he just needed to make them doubt the truth and sit on their hands.”

As for Trump only being "a massive piece of sh**" I'd wager that the women he's assaulted over the years see it differently

Burnwinter

I'd include all manner of offences under "massive piece of shit" it goes without saying.

Don't think I excuse or exonerate Trump for a second, let alone minimising the significance of assaults against women.

I already said just above I can imagine Trump signing off on a massacre. I just don't happen to believe he's anything like Radovan Karadzic. Know your enemy, I reckon.

I liked James Butler's "Trumpologists" piece for what it's worth. I think the Bannon / Spencer / Breitbart theory of Trumpism is a bit of a comfortable displacement in some ways. Trump's campaign was wildly racist before Bannon was hooked into it.

http://www.huckmagazine.com/perspectives/opinion-perspectives/ignore-trumpologists/

Bold Tone

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/08/yemen-withdraws-permission-us-commando-operations-trumps-botched/

jones

y va marquer wrote:
https://theintercept.com/2017/02/07/what-slobodan-milosevic-taught-me-about-donald-trump/

What a horrible joke of an article, by far the worst I've read so far on the Intercept. I actually had this link sent to me this morning by a Yugoslavian friend - who I recommended the Intercept to recently - asking me if I'd repeat that recommendation.

What an asshole the author of that article is. His account of Milosevic and his historical revisionism is more than bad enough but to construe this bullshit in a way that somehow compares Milosevic or Karadzic to Trump, both for - completely different reasons - are miles away from what Trump is doing, all the while oozing arrogance claiming "the Truth" for himself banishing anyone who has other views.. that's the horseshit you expect as an editorial on the Washington Post or elsewhere.

y va marquer

That's not what I got from the article at all - for starters I took it as a subjective commentary based on the authors impressions of all 3 men (as opposed to a serious account of the history) which had as it central point that administration's telling audacious lies, clearly discernible lies work on the principle that they will "exhaust critical thinking" to the extent that they "annihilate truth.”

Think he made it clear that the comparison was not entirely useful
"Comparisons of political leaders are of limited usefulness, because no two are exactly alike"

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