Trump General Discusion II

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Jeff Sessions as AG. Cool cool cool.


I still think this is one giant troll job. He's HAS to be picking the most controversial folks on purpose. He's passed on the ones like Christie, who people would probably roll their eyes at, in favor of people who have publicly humiliated themselves with embarrassing views or displays of lack of knowledge.
 
If my count is correct, there have been 4 official appointments. One is a white supremacist, another is a known racist, and yet another is a pro-Putin Islamophobe.

Everything is fine.
 
Put the pro-Putin thing aside. Even if that's the wrong view and they're ignorant with their views/poising us for potential failure, foreign policy of such a sort is dramatically different from being an inherently hateful person with power to act on such hate.
 
Put the pro-Putin thing aside. Even if that's the wrong view and they're ignorant with their views/poising us for potential failure, foreign policy of such a sort is dramatically different from being an inherently hateful person with power to act on such hate.

I think accomodation with Russia on some issues, like Syria, is not necessarily a mistake. Being pro-Putin, as in the person (which seems to be the case here), is a problem, considering the internal (and external) agenda he implements.
 
I think accomodation with Russia on some issues, like Syria, is not necessarily a mistake. Being pro-Putin, as in the person (which seems to be the case here), is a problem, considering the internal (and external) agenda he implements.


I suppose. I didn't really word my post all that well, but my intention was just to say that ignorance of Putin isn't as reprehensible as legitimately being a white supremacist, being a known racist, the levels of homophobia coming from folks like Sessions, etc.

Equally, one could equate a support of Putin to the support of the ever-so-quoted Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Being pro-shitty-people isn't past any of our politicians, regardless of which side look.
 


This doesn't shock me at all.

Early on when Trump was clearly borrowing Hitler rhetoric, the right would throw their hands up and say "oh everything devolved into comparing something to Hitler on the internet!"

But the reality is, in a literal sense, he was likely purposely actually using Hitler's methodology, from a studied perspective. That doesn't mean he wants to commit genocide. But it's foolish to think Trump doesn't know exactly what he was doing on the campaign trail. And it doesn't surprise me that he admires someone like Putin and wants to be just like him.
 
I suppose. I didn't really word my post all that well, but my intention was just to say that ignorance of Putin isn't as reprehensible as legitimately being a white supremacist, being a known racist, the levels of homophobia coming from folks like Sessions, etc.

Equally, one could equate a support of Putin to the support of the ever-so-quoted Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Being pro-shitty-people isn't past any of our politicians, regardless of which side look.

Agreed on both counts. US politicians are generally quite hypocritical about not supporting authoritarian or human rights abusing regimes abroad. Ethiopia, Uganda and Saudi Arabia are good examples.
 
This doesn't shock me at all.

Early on when Trump was clearly borrowing Hitler rhetoric, the right would throw their hands up and say "oh everything devolved into comparing something to Hitler on the internet!"

But the reality is, in a literal sense, he was likely purposely actually using Hitler's methodology, from a studied perspective. That doesn't mean he wants to commit genocide. But it's foolish to think Trump doesn't know exactly what he was doing on the campaign trail. And it doesn't surprise me that he admires someone like Putin and wants to be just like him.

Yeah, his rhetoric is remarkably similar to most fascist leaders we have seen in the past. Hard to think it is a coincidence. And given the advisers he's surrounded himself with, you can see how this is so dangerous. Now imagine this man and his team in the face of a national crisis?
 
Early on when Trump was clearly borrowing Hitler rhetoric, the right would throw their hands up and say "oh everything devolved into comparing something to Hitler on the internet!"
...
That doesn't mean he wants to commit genocide.

It's a bit frustrating how people immediately leap to the industrialised killing of 1941-45 as soon as a Nazi comparison is made, as if the Nazis did literally nothing other than emerge from nowhere in 1939, invade a bunch of places, and build some nasty gas chambers. Genocide - or world war - are almost never the point of any genuine and valid Nazi comparison. Anybody making an honest comparison between today's politics and Nazi Germany is most likely referring to 1933-1935, the period of increasing discrimination through legislation, propaganda, and low-level street violence, and maybe taking it up to 1938 as persecution became more intense.

I don't think anybody seriously thinks Trump - or Brexiteers, or Marine Le Pen, or whoever - is plotting for something akin to the extreme barbarity perpetrated by the Nazis from 1938. But Nazi Germany is a useful case study for understanding how regimes radicalise and how democracies deteriorate - sometimes rapidly - into authoritarianism. It is not hard to draw parallels: the consequences of economic crisis, the use (and normalisation) of extremist language, the construction of a threatening "other" responsible for a nation's ills, the rhetorical techniques and propaganda, and the use of legislative avenues to exclude that "other" from various facets of the economy and society.

Separate from any specific event, I do think the rhetoric surrounding Muslims has become dangerous and toxic throughout the West. It's not hard to fan the flames of Islamophobic fear.
 
for fuck's sakes. i give up. let's just freely call Donald Trump a full-blown fascist from now on and not worry about the consequences. have fun when you elect a real fascist, america.
 
All the talk about banning/vetting Muslims reminds me more of the Japanese internment camps of the early 1940s. I shudder to think of what might happen to Muslims in this country if the Trump administration does follow through on any of their threats regarding them. They may not be in "camps", per se, but I could definitely see them being forcibly isolated in some other fashion.

Jumping topics for a moment, just saw this article about the state of our economy, and how it'll impact Trump in the future:

Donald Trump will inherit a robust economy

After several years of dismal performance, a key indicator of small-business health has jumped to new highs. The Index of Main Street Entrepreneurship, calculated by the nonprofit Kauffman Foundation, recently hit the highest level since 1997, when the organization began taking measurements. The biggest improvement in 2016 was a rise in the new business survival rate, with nearly half of all new businesses making it to their fifth year.

There are many other signs of a strong economy getting stronger, which highlights an obvious irony: Donald Trump got elected president this year by continually accentuating problems faced by many Americans who feel they’re falling behind. Yet he’ll inherit an economy that is far healthier than the one President Obama started with eight years ago, in the midst of a grueling recession.

Employers have created about 5.4 million new jobs during the last two years, and they’re on course to create nearly 4 million more during the next two years, according to economists at the University of Michigan. Unemployment-insurance claims filed by people losing their jobs are well below levels from before the recession that began in 2007. Construction of new houses and retail sales look strong. Wages are rising as well, with the Federal Reserve now likely to hike interest rates at its next meeting in December. That would be a sign the Fed finally feels the economy is healthy enough to tighten monetary policy.

So why did Trump’s appeal to the “forgotten men and women” of America get so much traction, if the economy’s doing great? Two reasons. First, a lot of people who are doing fine voted for Trump. Not because they need help climbing out of a hole, but because they agree with him that the US political system is broken and dominated by crony capitalists.

The second reason is that the overall economy is getting back to normal with less participation from people who are unsuited to a digitized, global economy—and are, in fact, falling far behind. Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has highlighted the problem of 9 million “missing men” who don’t have jobs and don’t want them, even though they’re at prime working age. Millions more are trying to support families on inadequate wages, with no obvious way to get ahead. Trump has oversimplified the solutions to these complex problems, but he also convinced people he heard their complaints.

I can definitely attest to the first explanation about some of those who voted for Trump. Many of my relatives, who are better off financially than my family and have been for years, voted for Trump. My aunts and uncles don't seem to truly "get" the struggles my family has been through over the years sometimes, because they've never been in our situation.

Another reason for why some Midwestern towns are still struggling economically, and perhaps why many of them went for Trump as well, that doesn't seem to get talked about as much is the fact that many of these towns are populated mostly by older people. There's not a whole lot of young people living there, because the towns don't have much of anything to offer young people to keep them around after high school.

And eventually the older population is going to reach retirement age, and without their work as well as new young blood, and a more diverse population in general, trying to help keep these towns active and progressing economically, well... Towns can't survive very long on that. Especially when there's very little variety in the types of jobs available, and jobs that don't always pay liveable wages and which can't keep up with technological changes (retail jobs, for example, are struggling in large part because of online shopping becoming such a big thing).

I'm not saying every small town has to become some big city, of course, but...there needs to be SOME ability to embrace change and progress in order for a town to survive. And a lot of people who live in small towns seem very resistant to that, to their own detriment.

I will say, though, that I definitely think it wouldn't have hurt Clinton to spend time in this area of the country touting the progress the economy has been making in recent years, as well as better show and discuss the ways in which the Democrats' economic plans would continue to prove beneficial to people. News articles saying the economy's getting better are nice, but I think Democrats should've done more to show where that progress was happening.

Mind, given the talk about people blatantly not caring about facts nowadays, maybe there really was nothing the Democrats could do to get that message to actually sink in for some people in the end. Who knows.
 
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