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Sturgeon's House

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

T___A

By T___A
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Collimatrix
Collimatrix

This is just too funny not to share:

EnsignExpendable
EnsignExpendable
Toxn
Toxn

Forwarding "We will fight until the last American" as the new NATO motto.

Khand-e Newbie

Khand-e

Posted
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3 minutes ago, Belesarius said:

http://www.businessinsider.com/online-petition-trump-banned-britain-over-muslim-ban-parliament-2017-1

 

This is apparently up to 1.6 million signatures.

 

Normally I wouldn't give a shit about politics in this thread, but the irony of a country who literally voted to exit the EU primarily over Muslim refugees now voting to block someone to enter the country over....blocking Muslim refugees in his own country is simply exquisite.

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Collimatrix Advanced Member

Collimatrix

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Posted

I would like to compare Donald Trump to the Nazis.

Donald Trump really reminds me of the Nazis because a disproportionate amount of his success is his opponents' ineptitude.  Take this article, for instance.  Or this article.  Or any other anti-Trump article you are likely to have read recently.

They're all onanistic.  They are all completely masturbatory.  They entire raison d'etre of these pieces is for people who dislike Trump to theatrically express outrage at what an deplorable person Trump is.  The immediate emotional payoff comes from feeling like part of a larger anti-Trump community.  Sure, there may be some token mention of maintaining "resistance" to the man, but this mention is basically in there to flesh out the piece so it doesn't just hit you in the face with the money shot at the beginning.  It's like the scene where the plumber asks the bored housewife exactly how he can fix her pipes.  It's totally perfunctory, and plenty of people just skip it to get to the good stuff.

None of these pieces are a serious analysis of the man or his weaknesses.  If Trump were actually a clinical narcissist, I would expect that to be the sort of weakness that his opponents could reasonably use against him; anyone who actually has a pathological need for narcissistic supply should be fairly easy to manipulate.  Is there anyone pulling Trump's strings?  If you seriously believe he's controlled by Putin, you deserve every bad thing that will happen to you as a direct result of your empty-headed credulity.  It's empty talk; the man clearly has a gigantic ego, but not one that's so easily bruised nor one that he defends so zealously that seriously impairs his reasoning.  Did he get into a dick-measuring contest with the news media about how big his inauguration day crowd was?  Absolutely, and he won.  Not in the sense that he convinced anyone worth convincing that his crowds were bigger than Obama's, but in the sense that he threw a stick and the media went chasing it, in the sense that the soi-disant speakers of truth to power went on an absolutely pointless tangent at his suggestion, he absolutely won.  Similar things have happened often enough I am convinced that this is a deliberate strategy by Trump.  God forbid he actually plans something truly awful and disastrous, because CNN will be completely obsessed with investigating whether his tie is genuine Italian silk or some equally pointless and obvious diversion.

Seriously; the guy is a successful businessman and supposed professionals are trying to tell me that he's a barely-functional basket case?  Yes, he went bankrupt doing high-risk real estate development work twice, but he's still a gazillionaire, so he's clearly good at something (self-promotion).  It doesn't pass the smell test.  This isn't political discourse, this isn't resistance.  It's goddamn LARPing.

Trump has plenty of weaknesses that a potential enemy bloc could exploit.  You know, if he had actual opponents instead of people who are completely occupied by furiously masturbating to the idea of rising to the level of actual opponents of Trump.

Trump is dependent on the cooperation of a lot of people who despise him because he publicly humiliated them.  The entire Republican establishment would trample their grandmothers to be the first to stab Trump in the back if they thought there were anything to gain from it.  The fact that they have all practically volunteered for dhimmitude shows what they think of the opposition.  Not that I normally trust the opinions of establishment Republicans, but these people are career opportunists.  They like a strong horse.  They are utterly spineless degenerates, so if they're all for Trump it's because Trump defeated all of their champions in single combat and not a one of them wants to be next.  But if there were a serious bloc that could challenge him, they would not take much convincing to defect.

Much has been made of how Trump doesn't suffer from the usual politician's budget of political capital.  That is, Trump has actually gained from his flurry of initial executive orders because it shows his backers, who are mostly political outsiders, that he means business, rather than alarming special interests and backers as would more typically be the case.  But taken from another angle, this is actually a weakness.  Trump needs to appear to be in constant motion to convince his base that he means business.  This means that Trump is dependent upon the cooperation of the Federal bureaucracy, the majority of which Trump cannot directly fire.  He can make their lives miserable, but in the absence of any sympathetic, organized power bloc opposing Trump the average civil servant will grit their teeth and do as they are told to make the day go by faster.

I'm sure there are other examples.  Trump has plenty of weaknesses.  The fact that they are not being seriously analyzed shows how fundamentally un-serious Trump's opponents are at this point.

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Legiondude Newbie

Legiondude

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1 hour ago, ShamefurDispray said:

These rogue accounts are a fucking meme especially the ones pretending to be NASA or some shit.

I might as well be rogue CIA and shitpost about Trump to get likes and no one can tell the fucking difference.

Not sure I'd be more concerned in the hypothetical scenarios that either the CIA takes to shitposting on Twitter or that the CIA is actually trying to draw attention to themselves

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Donward Newbie

Donward

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Reading the reactions to Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch. All things being equal, the #NEVERTRUMP movement is now probably officially dead outside of Washington D.C. I'm betting millions of Conservatives and Republicans who didn't vote for him in 2016 will now be doing so in 2020. And if this happens, it will be a landslide.

That doesn't mean, of course, that the likes of McCain, Lindsay Graham, and their ilk won't backstab Trump the moment they sense weakness.

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Collimatrix Advanced Member

Collimatrix

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Posted
9 hours ago, Sturgeon said:

Those tweets sound like the Trump his enemies really want to exist, but they don't feel like the Trump that appears to actually exist.

 

11 hours ago, ShamefurDispray said:

These rogue accounts are a fucking meme especially the ones pretending to be NASA or some shit.

I might as well be rogue CIA and shitpost about Trump to get likes and no one can tell the fucking difference.

 

I'm with Sturgeon on this one.  I was excited about the possibility of juicy inside gossip from the White House, so I started reading the twitter account a while back.  If someone were leaking information from the inside, the social cachet for revealing that they had been the one doing so would be great, so it seemed plausible that someone would try.

But there are too many serious inconsistencies for this to be a credible leak.  For one thing, the account is several days old.  Were there any leaks from inside the Obama Administration that lasted that long?  I can't think of any.  The idea that the Secret Service would be pulling their hair out trying, but failing to find this guy is incredible.  I tell you though, Hillary would have solved a leak like this by now.

For another thing, the account has not, so far as I can tell, actually broken any news.  You would think that if this person actually had insider information, they would at least occasionally have the scoop on noteworthy decisions.  That would be a pretty easy way to prove bona fides.  But they have not.  Their announcement of Trump choosing Gorsuch, for instance, was several hours behind Breitbart's announcement of the same thing.  Or take a look at this:

 

 

 

 

It's unfalsifiable whether anything RoguePOTUSStaff said happened at all.  In fact, the opposite of what they predicted would happen happened, and they tried to spin it like it was some kind of near miss.  I've seen cold readers who did a better job than that.

The image they're painting of Trump is incoherent, and suspiciously similar to the caricature of Trump that failed to predict his behavior before the election.  This person wants me to believe that Trump is simultaneously a ranting authoritarian tyrant in private, but also a dithering imbecile who's easily manipulated?  Can you think of anyone meeting that description who isn't the villain of a Saturday morning cartoon?  They expect me to believe that Pence tries, and occasionally succeeds at pressuring Trump on LGBT issues.  Have these people seen Pence and Trump's body language in public?  It's not quite to the same degree as Putin and Medvedev, but it's very clear that there's a #1 and a #2.  They also want me to believe that there was something to the obviously fake Russian kompromat, and that Trump is unsuccessfully trying to hide from his subordinates.  Sure.

It pisses me off to see this.  I'm angry that I didn't think of it first.  Clearly there's money to be made in telling people fairy tales about Trump.  They don't need to be particularly clever or plausible fairy tales.  There's a large potential market of people who want to believe.

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Walter_Sobchak Newbie

Walter_Sobchak

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On 1/31/2017 at 4:41 AM, Collimatrix said:

I would like to compare Donald Trump to the Nazis.

Donald Trump really reminds me of the Nazis because a disproportionate amount of his success is his opponents' ineptitude.  Take this article, for instance.  Or this article.  Or any other anti-Trump article you are likely to have read recently.

They're all onanistic.  They are all completely masturbatory.  They entire raison d'etre of these pieces is for people who dislike Trump to theatrically express outrage at what an deplorable person Trump is.  The immediate emotional payoff comes from feeling like part of a larger anti-Trump community.  Sure, there may be some token mention of maintaining "resistance" to the man, but this mention is basically in there to flesh out the piece so it doesn't just hit you in the face with the money shot at the beginning.  It's like the scene where the plumber asks the bored housewife exactly how he can fix her pipes.  It's totally perfunctory, and plenty of people just skip it to get to the good stuff.

None of these pieces are a serious analysis of the man or his weaknesses.  If Trump were actually a clinical narcissist, I would expect that to be the sort of weakness that his opponents could reasonably use against him; anyone who actually has a pathological need for narcissistic supply should be fairly easy to manipulate.  Is there anyone pulling Trump's strings?  If you seriously believe he's controlled by Putin, you deserve every bad thing that will happen to you as a direct result of your empty-headed credulity.  It's empty talk; the man clearly has a gigantic ego, but not one that's so easily bruised nor one that he defends so zealously that seriously impairs his reasoning.  Did he get into a dick-measuring contest with the news media about how big his inauguration day crowd was?  Absolutely, and he won.  Not in the sense that he convinced anyone worth convincing that his crowds were bigger than Obama's, but in the sense that he threw a stick and the media went chasing it, in the sense that the soi-disant speakers of truth to power went on an absolutely pointless tangent at his suggestion, he absolutely won.  Similar things have happened often enough I am convinced that this is a deliberate strategy by Trump.  God forbid he actually plans something truly awful and disastrous, because CNN will be completely obsessed with investigating whether his tie is genuine Italian silk or some equally pointless and obvious diversion.

Seriously; the guy is a successful businessman and supposed professionals are trying to tell me that he's a barely-functional basket case?  Yes, he went bankrupt doing high-risk real estate development work twice, but he's still a gazillionaire, so he's clearly good at something (self-promotion).  It doesn't pass the smell test.  This isn't political discourse, this isn't resistance.  It's goddamn LARPing.

Trump has plenty of weaknesses that a potential enemy bloc could exploit.  You know, if he had actual opponents instead of people who are completely occupied by furiously masturbating to the idea of rising to the level of actual opponents of Trump.

Trump is dependent on the cooperation of a lot of people who despise him because he publicly humiliated them.  The entire Republican establishment would trample their grandmothers to be the first to stab Trump in the back if they thought there were anything to gain from it.  The fact that they have all practically volunteered for dhimmitude shows what they think of the opposition.  Not that I normally trust the opinions of establishment Republicans, but these people are career opportunists.  They like a strong horse.  They are utterly spineless degenerates, so if they're all for Trump it's because Trump defeated all of their champions in single combat and not a one of them wants to be next.  But if there were a serious bloc that could challenge him, they would not take much convincing to defect.

Much has been made of how Trump doesn't suffer from the usual politician's budget of political capital.  That is, Trump has actually gained from his flurry of initial executive orders because it shows his backers, who are mostly political outsiders, that he means business, rather than alarming special interests and backers as would more typically be the case.  But taken from another angle, this is actually a weakness.  Trump needs to appear to be in constant motion to convince his base that he means business.  This means that Trump is dependent upon the cooperation of the Federal bureaucracy, the majority of which Trump cannot directly fire.  He can make their lives miserable, but in the absence of any sympathetic, organized power bloc opposing Trump the average civil servant will grit their teeth and do as they are told to make the day go by faster.

I'm sure there are other examples.  Trump has plenty of weaknesses.  The fact that they are not being seriously analyzed shows how fundamentally un-serious Trump's opponents are at this point.

Who exactly do you mean by his "opponents?"  The Democrats?  Other Republicans?  The half of the population that hates this mans guts?  It's hard to buy your argument that his opponents are not serious when you don't define who they are.  I would put forward that they are not a homogeneous group.  

 

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Donward Newbie

Donward

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Walter will be happy to know that 2 GOP Senators are opposed to the nomination of Betsy Devos as Education Secretary.

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/317379-gop-senator-to-vote-no-on-betsy-devos

So if one more Republican withdraws their support, her nomination is toast. Out of all of Trump's nominees, Devos is my least favorite and it is amusing that she is the one being chosen by the Establishment to torpedo. 

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T___A Newbie

T___A

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On 1/31/2017 at 2:41 AM, Collimatrix said:

This means that Trump is dependent upon the cooperation of the Federal bureaucracy, the majority of which Trump cannot directly fire.  He can make their lives miserable, but in the absence of any sympathetic, organized power bloc opposing Trump the average civil servant will grit their teeth and do as they are told to make the day go by faster.

It occurs to me that any would be dictator would need to liquidate the bureaucracy and institute a new one for a new order to be formed.

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Collimatrix Advanced Member

Collimatrix

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16 hours ago, Walter_Sobchak said:

Who exactly do you mean by his "opponents?"  The Democrats?  Other Republicans?  The half of the population that hates this mans guts?  It's hard to buy your argument that his opponents are not serious when you don't define who they are.  I would put forward that they are not a homogeneous group.  

 

I would put forward that Trump has no real opposition at the moment.  There are several large, uncoordinated groups that don't like him or his agenda, and are doing nothing about him.  There's nothing like the "party of no" obstructionist Republicans under Obama.  There are a bunch of people kvetching about how dreadful Trump is... and letting him do what he wants to do.  It doesn't matter that they don't share an ideological stance.  They all dislike Trump.  That should be enough to form the basis for some sort of alliance, but so far nothing.

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