Jump to content
Please support this forum by joining the SH Patreon ×
Sturgeon's House

Post Election Thread: Democracy Dies In Darkness And You Can Help


T___A

Recommended Posts

17 minutes ago, Walter_Sobchak said:

 

No, they were not.  And given the pattern of those relations, it was entirely predictable that Trump's approach was going to fail.  And in the process, he has made the US look weak for making concessions to NK and getting nothing in return.  

 

Meanwhile, he is now screaming at Iran in ALL CAPS.  

 

Do you really believe we gave NK concessions and got nothing in return?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Ramlaen said:

 

Do you really believe we gave NK concessions and got nothing in return?

 

It's not about what I "believe", it's fact.  We cancelled war games with South Korea.  That was a concession.  North Korea has yet to do a single thing they promised to, and have either been no-shows or cancelled follow-up meetings to hammer out details of their end of the bargain.  And now, they are demanding a peace agreement of some sort before further talks about denuclearization.  It's exactly what all the analysts and experts who have been studying North Korea for years predicted they would do.  But hey, Trump is a very stable genius, so why listen to the experts?

 

http://www.journalgazette.net/news/20180723/north-korea-balks-at-trump

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

46 minutes ago, Walter_Sobchak said:

 

It's not about what I "believe", it's fact.  We cancelled war games with South Korea.  That was a concession.  North Korea has yet to do a single thing they promised to, and have either been no-shows or cancelled follow-up meetings to hammer out details of their end of the bargain.  And now, they are demanding a peace agreement of some sort before further talks about denuclearization.  It's exactly what all the analysts and experts who have been studying North Korea for years predicted they would do.  But hey, Trump is a very stable genius, so why listen to the experts?

 

http://www.journalgazette.net/news/20180723/north-korea-balks-at-trump

 

 

You know that South Korea was not only okay with cancelling the joint exercise, but cancelled their own as well? Is that a sign of weakness on South Korea's part?

 

As for North Korea not doing anything they have promised to do, we will see if that is actually true in a couple days.

 

And the sanctions are still in full effect.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So remember that James Wolfe guy, the SSCI staffer who got arrested for leaking classified material to the media? 

 

Here was an interesting page from Wolfe's indictment, note that Carter Page  was Male-1 and Reporter #2 was Ali Watkins, and Watkins later had her records seized.

 

oV5boZ4.jpg

 

Note that Wolfe had the 'Classified Document' in his possession on March 17, 2017, and he texted Watkins 82 times before having a long phone call with her.

 

Now lets look at the last page of the initial Carter Page FISA warrant.

 

fN8KPNh.jpg

 

The original warrant appears to be 83 pages long, 82 if you don't count the final 'blank' page. Notice the clerk stamp on several pages on March 17, 2017.

 

It is very likely that James Wolfe took photos of every page of the FISA warrant and sent them to Ali Watkins. Which were later seized.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

32 minutes ago, Toxn said:

Don't worry Walter; assuming American civil war 2 doesn't kick off in the next few years, you can look forward to having all these arguments in reverse once the Democrats field their own Trump equivalent. 

 

An good DNC candidate? What heresy is this!? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Lord_James said:

 

An good DNC candidate? What heresy is this!? 

Oh he/she won't necessarily be any good (whether Trump is any form of 'good' is someone else's argument). It will just be a Trump equivalent - ie not a traditionally respectable member of the political establishment.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, Toxn said:

Oh he/she won't necessarily be any good (whether Trump is any form of 'good' is someone else's argument). It will just be a Trump equivalent - ie not a traditionally respectable member of the political establishment.

 

I wonder if the DNC will even be around by then...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

 

I wonder if the DNC will even be around by then...

I'm sad to say that, from the outside at least, it seems like both parties just have too much of a death grip on the country to properly die. I think that there's a really good chance that neither of them will in any way resemble their 2016 incarnations within a few years, though.

 

As someone inside the system, what's your take?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

33 minutes ago, Toxn said:

I'm sad to say that, from the outside at least, it seems like both parties just have too much of a death grip on the country to properly die. I think that there's a really good chance that neither of them will in any way resemble their 2016 incarnations within a few years, though.

 

As someone inside the system, what's your take?

 

Quite honestly, my crystal ball became clouded as soon as Trump won the 2016 election, and it has clarified little since.  So many truisms and accepted rules of conduct have been shattered, and so much of the old equilibrium has been vaporized, that I can't really clearly make out what is going on.

 

Previously, it was a truism that a US president dared not incur too much media wrath.  They might weather the storm here and there, but media input was a valuable feedback system to gauge public opinion.  That's how you got things like Obama "evolving" on gay marriage, and Dubya complaining that the news treated him like a dog.

 

Trump thrives on media hate.  He seems to develop this pregnant glow whenever he is a particular target of scrutiny and derision.  His supporters love it too.  A lot of Trump's appeal is that he isn't "professional," or "respectable" because to a lot of Republican voters, a veneer of professional respectability was the mark of a sellout.  Going on a sudden, all-caps rant on Twitter threatening the entire country of Iran does speak to a certain... personal confidence.  Trump clearly does not receive his personal affirmation from the news media.  This speaks of a fundamental shift in power.  In this era of de-centralized internet news, the traditional, centralized information brokers are a lot less formidable than they used to be.

 

The old political system cared a lot about news media.  Trump has shown that, at least as far as the power structure is concerned, the old arrangement is now obsolete.  The old political system cared a lot about a system of patronage, advisers and endorsements.  Trump's campaign has shown that most of that is obsolete as well, and that information technology can allow a politician to bypass them, and even target demographics that were previously uneconomic.  The old system had absurd internal inconsistencies, and Trump has already taken advantage of some of them.  The pro-immigration party was also the pro-union party?  The party of people who slept with Ayn Rand was also the party of evangelicals?  None of it made a great deal of sense, and Trump's new dispensation is significantly more streamlined.


If the existing political parties survive Trump's era of madness, fire and blood, it will be because they fundamentally restructure themselves.  The old system was omnipresent and formidable, but it was also full of parasites and dead weight.  These parasites and deadweight tried to make themselves indispensable, but now it is clear for all to see that they can be dispensed with, and so they will be.  After Trump is gone, things won't snap back to the way they were pre-Trump.  They can't; water doesn't flow uphill.  There will be some new equilibrium, and future generations will regard the Obama Administration the same way we regard that layer of sedimentary rock right before the Permian changed into the Triassic.

 

But I don't know what that future equilibrium will look like.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 minutes ago, Collimatrix said:

 

Quite honestly, my crystal ball became clouded as soon as Trump won the 2016 election, and it has clarified little since.  So many truisms and accepted rules of conduct have been shattered, and so much of the old equilibrium has been vaporized, that I can't really clearly make out what is going on.

 

Previously, it was a truism that a US president dared not incur too much media wrath.  They might weather the storm here and there, but media input was a valuable feedback system to gauge public opinion.  That's how you got things like Obama "evolving" on gay marriage, and Dubya complaining that the news treated him like a dog.

 

Trump thrives on media hate.  He seems to develop this pregnant glow whenever he is a particular target of scrutiny and derision.  His supporters love it too.  A lot of Trump's appeal is that he isn't "professional," or "respectable" because to a lot of Republican voters, a veneer of professional respectability was the mark of a sellout.  Going on a sudden, all-caps rant on Twitter threatening the entire country of Iran does speak to a certain... personal confidence.  Trump clearly does not receive his personal affirmation from the news media.  This speaks of a fundamental shift in power.  In this era of de-centralized internet news, the traditional, centralized information brokers are a lot less formidable than they used to be.

 

The old political system cared a lot about news media.  Trump has shown that, at least as far as the power structure is concerned, the old arrangement is now obsolete.  The old political system cared a lot about a system of patronage, advisers and endorsements.  Trump's campaign has shown that most of that is obsolete as well, and that information technology can allow a politician to bypass them, and even target demographics that were previously uneconomic.  The old system had absurd internal inconsistencies, and Trump has already taken advantage of some of them.  The pro-immigration party was also the pro-union party?  The party of people who slept with Ayn Rand was also the party of evangelicals?  None of it made a great deal of sense, and Trump's new dispensation is significantly more streamlined.


If the existing political parties survive Trump's era of madness, fire and blood, it will be because they fundamentally restructure themselves.  The old system was omnipresent and formidable, but it was also full of parasites and dead weight.  These parasites and deadweight tried to make themselves indispensable, but now it is clear for all to see that they can be dispensed with, and so they will be.  After Trump is gone, things won't snap back to the way they were pre-Trump.  They can't; water doesn't flow uphill.  There will be some new equilibrium, and future generations will regard the Obama Administration the same way we regard that layer of sedimentary rock right before the Permian changed into the Triassic.

 

But I don't know what that future equilibrium will look like.

By pure coincidence, I just bumped into this story.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Trump has a shortage of competent allies, so he frequently has to go shopping for warm bodies where he can find them.  It doesn't help that his catchphrase is "you're fired."  Sometimes this works astonishingly well, but not everyone can be Mattis.  Sometimes they are Anthony Scaramouchi and they aren't here to suck their own dick.  It's been pointed out here before that Betsy Devos has a similarly dubious background.

 

I think this is inevitable.  The current party system may or may not be dying.  At the very least, it's very sick.  The central Democratic machine is in a bad, bad way right now.  Essentially, Obama stole all the DNC's money.  And then Hillary Clinton stole it all again.  And they're undergoing continuous personnel turnover.  More peripheral Democratic organs are probably more or less intact, but they have to contend with the fact that nationally they no longer have a winning coalition.  The Republicans are currently suffering from a revolt.  For reasons they are only now beginning to understand, a strange, rich, carrot-man attacked their party two years ago, killed it and is now wearing its skin.  They're still figuring out what, if anything, to do about this fact.  Probably they won't do anything.  Doing things wouldn't be very professional or respectable.

 

An entire ecosystem is crashing and burning.  And when the highly organized ecosystem comes tumbling down, what sort of organisms do well? 

 

Rats and roaches.

 

At least, in the short term.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

40 minutes ago, Collimatrix said:

Trump has a shortage of competent allies, so he frequently has to go shopping for warm bodies where he can find them.  It doesn't help that his catchphrase is "you're fired."  Sometimes this works astonishingly well, but not everyone can be Mattis.  Sometimes they are Anthony Scaramouchi and they aren't here to suck their own dick.  It's been pointed out here before that Betsy Devos has a similarly dubious background.

 

I think this is inevitable.  The current party system may or may not be dying.  At the very least, it's very sick.  The central Democratic machine is in a bad, bad way right now.  Essentially, Obama stole all the DNC's money.  And then Hillary Clinton stole it all again.  And they're undergoing continuous personnel turnover.  More peripheral Democratic organs are probably more or less intact, but they have to contend with the fact that nationally they no longer have a winning coalition.  The Republicans are currently suffering from a revolt.  For reasons they are only now beginning to understand, a strange, rich, carrot-man attacked their party two years ago, killed it and is now wearing its skin.  They're still figuring out what, if anything, to do about this fact.  Probably they won't do anything.  Doing things wouldn't be very professional or respectable.

 

An entire ecosystem is crashing and burning.  And when the highly organized ecosystem comes tumbling down, what sort of organisms do well? 

 

Rats and roaches.

 

At least, in the short term.

Thanks for the detail.

 

Given that the guy writing a jokey article about 'hilarious' levels of corruption was able to pull out a whole bunch of recent examples, from both sides of the isle, I think it's not controversial to say that the system is a bit creaky.

 

Given the sheer size of all the moving parts, however, I often have trouble separating out the inevitable instances of graft in a system overseeing 325 million people from the significant stuff.

 

We, for instance, have always had plenty of corruption. But it's only in the last few years that we've had a serious corruption problem, and I don't think that it would be easy for foreign observers to differentiate the former and latter state of affairs.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...