No I'm just taking breaks from working to ****post. I didn't and don't feel like unraveling that thread of discussion. But like, yeah, black nationalist groups suck and pretty much all hate watching groups consider them hate groups, and I guess they would be considered left wing. I was more annoyed that instead of trying to point the discussion into a useful direction, he just picks a meaning for "worse" and harps on that.

Well, you accused me of "equivocation" after I'd gone at great lengths to give an account of the asymmetries of left-wing and right-wing violence, and made it really easy for you to understand. I even rewrote a post so you wouldn't have to read the whole thing. So...

Yeah, ****posting indeed. Certified.

Well don't equivocate and you won't have to be upset

lol

I already told you I pretty much agreed with all of your posts, IDK what bug you have up your butt about it.

Let's change directions for a moment:
Is Donald Trump a smart person? Does he have someone really smart working for him? He's very good at diverting attention. I wonder if this is accidental, intentional, or just his instinct. As soon as he started tweeting about the NFL, no one was harping on about DACA anymore. As soon as he started talking about DACA, people stopped talking about Russia. I've come to the conclusion that while he is vulgar and bombastic, he's not likely an idiot. He obviously understands how our news system works and is exploiting it for his advantage. He's done so since he announced his candidacy, though there have been some bumps along the way.

My apologies if this topic has come up in the last 80 pages, but I haven't read them.

And you were the one who was nitpicking about "phrasing" while calling me a pedant. Your hypocrisy is... wow.

And we could've had an interesting discussion if you didn't let your ego get in the way and instead expanded on what you meant when you said that right-wing extremists are worse than left-wing ones.

No

Yes



If your presidency is one outrageous thing after another, then every thing is going to distract from the last. I never understood the "Russia distraction" idea, to me it seems that his campaign and presidency had new outrages like biweekly so you could always pair some dumbass thing he did to some new outrage trivially.

I totally agree. He's demonstrated real acuity with some things, mostly having to do with shaping the conversation around him. It takes an extraordinary person to become president, even though he's a terrible president and the skills that made him president don't make him good at being president. Still, I'm kind of stunned that Donald Trump's opponents continually underestimate him.

Nah, that's more been about jabbing you back for that time you got a hardon and went off comparing me to Tucker Carlson.

I already said why right-wing extremism is worse. It's more pernicious, as in, it's been consistent through the decades, is more violent and has a higher body count. When I looked up data on this, I found that 2016 had a spike in left-wing murders, so there's a shift in the wrong direction, sure. But since the civil rights era, left-wing extremists mostly damage property and right-wing extremists damage people.

Let's not forget about **** like Arpaio, who's hard to classify as anything but far right, and the infiltration of right-wing hate groups into the police, people like Bannon in Trump's cabinet (who now is gone, but his presence ever is bad). Left-wing extremists do some bad stuff at protests but then go home and do nothing. In short, right-wing extremists are actively subverting the political apparatus. So yes it's worse.

Man that was like two months ago that must've really gotten to you.

Yeah, it keeps me up at night.

The point was that you took words I was saying and drew a spurious connection to Tucker Carlson, so I tried the same back.

Probably!



Well that's awfully magnanimous of you.

I think it was a stroke of genius having Pence as vice president. All of the people who are opposed to president Trump will be even more opposed to president Pence. And unlike Donald Trump, he's not vulgar, bombastic, or prone to outrageous things. You would have a hard time impeaching a guy like Pence even though he stands for the things Donald Trump claims to stand for. I think Prince is a "True Believer " while Donald Trump was just pandering and being as contrary to his opponent (HRC) as possible.

I would place at least 90% of the success of Trump's campaign on circumstance and not skill. Trump couldn't have arranged the populist sentiments that enabled him to break through the RNC primary. All he had to do was come up with whatever nonsense sounded better to rural white people than whatever Jeb Bush was saying.

Yeah, but nobody else was able to leverage those circumstances to become president. The thing that he did was fashion himself so that he fit the circumstances perfectly. And, as we've said in the past, he didn't create the populist sentiments, nor were they already there before he announced his candidacy. Rather, they existed in some kind of inchoate form, and he refined them and gave them a more definite shape. That took acuity and skill, to recognize which way the wind was blowing, and to have the ability to harness the swell of populist sentiments through his words and his actions.

He beat Jeb despite having significantly fewer resources (in terms of campaign funding). If it were that easy, Jeb would've done it.

This is an interesting point of view. He certainly goes with his gut in order to game the system in his favor. But I'd hesitate to call it smart. For example, would a smart person have fired James Comey? I think most people recognize how much of a blunder that was. In a lot of ways he seems to be running on emotion rather than reason. You could chalk it up to inexperience, but if he was so interested in becoming president all these years, why didn't he read up on the topic and learn about our institutions better? Actually, I bet he never expected to win, and in the days after his victory he seemed like a deer in headlights. Not necessarily stupid, but certainly unprepared and full of it.

And he *did* try to do it, and it failed. And so did Rubio. That's where all this "small hands" stuff comes from, remember? They tried to play Trump's game, and it blew up in their faces.

Wasn't it Steve Bannon who rescued the Trump campaign by wispering these populist talking points into his ear?

I think many of them knew that's what way the wind was blowing, but they don't really plan to act on any populist sentiments, and moreover it would sound tasteless to their donors so they don't ramp up the populism. Remember when Marco Rubio implied Trump had a small dick? A whole bunch of higher-ups got on his case and he apologized. Because campaigners listen and respond to the demands of their donors first, the electorate second.

I think what people actually underestimate isn't Trump, but is in the huge amount of resentful, angry Americans there are. Moreover, establishment politicians assumed that decency and discourse matter. 2016 proved that they don't. At least not laways.

Maybe it was? I've never followed very closely who supposedly had Trump's ear when. In his recent interview with Charlie Rose, Bannon heaped lots of praise on Trump for his instincts, but that might have been him speaking diplomatically about a former boss, when in fact Bannon deserves more credit than he let on.

Rubio didn't apologize to placate his donors. It wouldn't make sense: by the time he apologized, he was already out of the race.

I get the impression that once it looked like Trump really had a shot, donors and GOP elites thought they needed to try anything they could to win, even if it meant stooping to Trump's level and embracing populist rhetoric (or, at least, returning Trump's low blows with low blows and embracing the carnival-like Reality TV show atmosphere of the primary that Trump had created). That's where the "small hands" thing came from.

Ah, you're right - my mistake on the Rubio thing. I agree they tried some populist stuff, I just feel it was too little too late - moreover, the populists had already rallied behind Trump and regaining their momentum was impossible by the time they pivoted. I still think though that, Republican donors do not want to hear any populism coming from their politicians, and that's the biggest reason the other candidates didn't use it effectively.

No.

No. He used to have popular and well connected managers working for him, but they don't anymore, and at least some of them were technically working for Putin.

No, the American press is incompetent at following a story.

He has no agency either way.

Donald Trump is a loser idiot who tweets about everything and is ruled by whim and passion. The fact that people have latched on to his daily bull**** is a failure of the people, not a success of Donald Trump.

His many former business partners would disagree.

The only way Donald Trump uses American "news" is as a source of policy.

The DNC and Clinton campaign conspired with the news corporations to promote Donald Trump as a legitimate Republican candidate, to embarrass them. Clinton - someone who actually knows how the media works, and uses it - is the one who exploited the news for Donald Trump's benefit, not Donald Trump. Ref: Podesta emails.

We have discussed how and why Donald Trump is an idiot, rather than a Machiavellian business super genius. We also discussed how Donald Trump looks to different people. The short version is that Donald Trump has the manners and bearing of a lottery winner, which, to be as classist as possible, is mainly convincing to the kinds of people who mainly play the lottery.

Unlike Donald Trump, Pence actually has experience running a large organization. Also by all accounts he plays ball and would be a fairly conventional president.

Unlike, for example, Trump, who clearly thinks angry twitter is a cunning negotiating tactic to convince the other side that he is insane. Like Rex Tillerson is a used car salesman or something, and his boss is in a really bad mood but he's totally gonna go talk him into giving North Korea a great deal but it turns out to be a free undercoat and North Korea had better take it because the boss is gonna call the whole thing off any second!

Except this isn't how the political world works, international diplomacy isn't low stakes business trash talk between billionaires trading fortunes that neither of them would ever miss. It is a nuclear armed dictator being threatened with death and loss of face by the most powerful country on earth. The only reason the Cuban Missile Crisis turned out is because the Soviets were much more intelligent and reasonable than JFK was, and I really doubt you can hope for the same thing from a goddamn Kim.

This administration is basically Weekend at Bernies, where Bernie is the US and Richard and Larry are nobody because Trump keeps firing everybody. It's just a corpse sitting in a chair that everybody pretends is still alive.

If you want an example of how stupid the press is, look no further than the click bait headlines prognosticating that North Korea will incite World War 3.

North Korea vs. the west while China and Russia spectate isn't a world war, you morons.

Donald Trump is smart.

Toddlers are smart.

...smart enough to get their way in the short-term without thinking through the consequences of their actions, and also to take credit for every single thing that comes their way by sheer luck or privilage.

That was a pretty damning account by Jon`C, but let me ask this more simply: can anybody who is vouching for Trump's supposed smarts point to a single test in his life which he passed only by thinking through the various options carefully, and thereby overcoming a situation in which he was at serious risk of failing?

Just breaking the rules in ways that have worked for him in the past doesn't count as smart. Dastardly, yes. But my cat can be dastardly, and his brain is pretty small.

No but we're not all speaking the same language. The people who think Trump is smart don't know the difference between bullying and cunning.

Like here's an example, the NAFTA renegotiation. One of the things the US is demanding is a "Buy American" policy that will keep Canadian and Mexican firms out of US government procurement. That's fine, whatever, but there's no tit-for-tat here. The US also, in addition to that demand, wants greater access to Canadian and Mexican government projects. There is literally no up-side to this for either Canada or Mexico, and unless the US is ready to bomb us we aren't ever going to agree to it. The situation is bad enough that our negotiators are getting ready to walk away, because they think the US is negotiating in bad faith.

The more generous (stupid) commentators are saying that Trump is deliberately trying to sabotage the renegotiation so he can get out of NAFTA. But he isn't, he doesn't need to negotiate anything to get that ball rolling, and if the renegotiation falls apart it doesn't automatically mean NAFTA is cancelled either.

What Trump is really doing here is Worst Businessman Ever's first try at psychological anchoring without actually understanding it, completely ****ing it up by asking for something so unreasonable that it isn't even a practical starting point for negotiation. And even that guess might be too charitable, because it assumes Trump is at least aware that there are other countries with their own agendas and internal politics that aren't going to fall over just because the US asked - even if the US were giving something up in return, which they are not. But by any reasonable account, Trump seems to think he is the president of the world, and that all other countries exist to serve the United States.

At this point the US is so distrusted and disliked that agreeing to any of Trumps demands would probably be a career-ending political liability for the ruling party, so I just don't see free trade continuing in North America at all unless Trump very suddenly gets a lot more generous.

(If you care, while American opinion polls show strong favorability toward Canadians, this is not reciprocated. Canadian opinion polls of the US are very bad now, possibly the worst they have been since 1812. I am not kidding when I say that folding to American demands would be political suicide. Most Canadians don't even want us flying American made fighter jets anymore. If the Russians offered we would be more likely to buy MiGs at this point.)

Wait a minute!

I don't know how rhetorical you are being here, but, uh, "free trade [not] continuing" sounds quite serious, to put it mildly.

I am not being rhetorical. While Trump farts around with NAFTA, Canada is currently negotiating a TPP that excludes the US. Our government is looking for options to replace the US as both a supplier of finished goods and a market for our resources and you are most likely going to be shut out from that market.

You guys have no idea how much you've pissed us all off.

http://bestfighter4canada.blogspot.ca

The rhetoric at this point is basically becoming "America Last".

I'm beginning to think our country is politically braindead. Nobody in the US is even talking about this. The most prominent story in the corporate media is that some old Hollywood producer is a pervert who flashed his dick to actresses over the years.

Duh.

But what's weird, as an American, is to hear other people talk about politics in their countries on matters of actual substance. Which to American eyes, is really not expected.

It looks like we're not normal, guys.

Duh.

I am not going to speculate on exactly why I think y'all hooked on trivialities, because I like almost all of the Americans I've met and I more or less consider you helpless victims of your government and corporations. But I also don't think I need to talk about why the US media isn't talking about an American monopoly and the US government conspiring to eliminate a foreign competitor, or how the rest of the world is getting sick of your bull****.

Honestly, it's a good question.

But I think it probably has a lot to do with the fact that our news media is dominated by publicly traded corporations. And yet I would presume similar such artifacts of capitalism exist in other countries as well, although the media deregulation picture might be different.