Trump to win?

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

You think cheap psychology is going to make your weak case the slightest bit stronger?

usually not cheap. ;-)
but for you, free!

You think calling me angry and frustrated is an argument?

actually i think of it more as an explanation for your willingness to overlook the risks of what you advocate.

.
Again, we have Trump to thank for providing the necessary clarity, even if in spite of himself.

the analysis was clear long before the rise of trump. we have been discussing here, at itulip, for years. perhaps others needed his clarification.

In their desperate alliance to defend the status quo, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative have been unmasked as standing in opposition to the interests of 99% of all Americans. Their alliance is based on mutually shared assumptions of their own personal (net) worth as goodthinkers, sophisticated and advanced, and destined to rule. As it turned out, liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans were really just all part of the same neoliberal tribe and like you and Santa, consider barbarians all those who do not share those assumptions.

i agree with your critique and in fact am among the "barbarians," as you define them.

This neoliberal union has deployed its PR wing in the media to set up a “Cosmopolitans vs. Nationalists” frame vs. a “Racist/Sexist vs. Identity Politics” frame. Conservatives have defined the battle they want to fight, and the liberals have defined the battle they want to fight, and both battles support and conceal the neoliberal assumptions Democrats and Republicans share, and that the left (the emergent third pole represented by Sanders) does not share. And now that Trump has signaled his willingness to fight that fight and win, neoliberals and neoconservatives are well and truly scared, wondering how they put themselves in such a mess. I think that's an easy one to figure out.

i think you are conflating what is easy with what is not. as i said, i agree with your analysis of our political economy, but what i - at least - am scared of is not the upsetting of that system, but the means and messenger in this particular instance. my worry is not for that corrupt system, but for what this particular candidate will construct in its stead.

as i analogized above - weimar was decadent and needed to be changed for the good of all germans and, it turned out, every other person too. but hitler was not a good solution for that problem. i know america is not weimar, and trump not hitler, but that's why it's called "an analogy" instead of "an equation." the situations are similar, not congruent.

Being members of a tribe, it does not occur to the stateless, rootless, global-citizens of New York, Washington and Silicon Valley that people might prefer their own customs and sovereignty to merely (the hope of) getting rich.

as a rootless cosmopolitan by birth, but not practice, i can nonetheless appreciate [if from afar] the comforts of shared sub-culture.

i myself have never been motivated by the desire to get rich - otherwise i would have become an orthopedic surgeon instead of a psychiatrist. at the time i chose the latter career it was the second lowest paid of all medical specialities. [i don't know the current data.] perhaps getting rich is the motivation of others.

in fact, were trump elected and able to implement his stated policies i would likely be better off financially. my concern is the type of world we leave to my children and grandchildren, and the children and grandchildren of everyone else as well.

Having no loyalty to place, no affinity for their people, they are unable to see the love of one’s people, land, and traditions as anything but bizarre and potentially dangerous. So they denounce it as racist and xenophobic.

although i have no love for bill kristol, i am nonetheless concerned that breitbart headlined him as a "renegade jew" as if that was perhaps the most important thing about it, and what their readers would be most stirred up about. do you not consider that a telling detail?

It does not occur to them that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders New York liberals who love ethnic restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or DC liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of the District's majority-minority schools. They can’t see that their vision of history’s arc bending inexorably away from tribe and creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like something familiar from eras past: A powerful caste’s self-serving explanation for why it alone deserves to rule the world and take the largest share of its bounty for themselves.

as i said, i share your critique. multiculturalism is a far more complicated and risky thing that its advocates have acknowledged. the u.s. handles it much better than most, but it is an issue here too. a multiculturalism that i could respect would not deny the importance of tribe and creed - the "melting pot" image is demonstrably overstated. perhaps "stew" would be a better metaphor.

You stand here terrified of the future

as i said, i would likely be better off under trump. it is not for myself that i am afraid.

like SF, credulously accepting almost every slander, every lie served up to you by the media, so long as they comport with your prejudices against your countrymen, who are daily being ground into dust by a neoliberal regime you once claimed to detest. But now that an opening exists to really fight them, to open up a third force so desperately needed to oppose their destructive ideology, God no please, it's just too risky for my portfolio.

again, it is not for my portfolio that i fear. it and i would do better with trump.

Forgive me for having the balls to call out that cowardly shit for what it is, particularly when millions of Americans are literally being put to death at the hands of neoliberal policies embraced by the GOP and the Democrats. Forgive yourselves for your lack of imagination and moral cowardice.

i still think that, as in vietnam, you are willing to destroy the world in order to "save" it.

as for the "alt-right," it labels an amalgam, as all such labels do. nonetheless, when people at trump rallies cry out - apropos of obama - "hang the nigger" it says something about at least some of its membership.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

Neoliberal supporters of Hillary and the GOP are breathless in their condemnation of Trump campaign lead Steve Bannon for what they consider his encouragement of the so called "alt-right."

But scratch the surface and it turns out the source is none other the Soros-financed SPLC, whose very existence is based on terrifying liberals with spurious tales of an ever-impending, just around the corner, any day now, race war. And its founder Morris Dees has grown wealthy stoking liberal feelings of collective guilt as a means to open wallets. The SPLC has turned "mau-mauing" to a lucrative business. When the Democratic or Republican parties need to smear someone like Ron Paul and now Steve Bannon, they turn to Morris Dees.

So what is this alt-right business we're all required to fear and hate now that little Morris has his marching orders on who to smear next? The SPLC "Extremist Profile" says this.

The Alternative Right, commonly known as the Alt-Right, is a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that “white identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilization. Characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes, Alt-Righters eschew “establishment” conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethno-nationalism as a fundamental value.

One might be prone to take this at face value if only the pearl-clutchers in the media and other oh-so-serious and "responsible" politicians would show a similar moral outrage at the tribalism and identitarian politics that dominate the Democratic party and modern liberalism. If the SPLC and the Democratic Party were as serious about defending humanism, liberalism and universalism, as they are about fellating Wall Street and the banks, we might never heard of a shibboleth called the alternative right.

But there's no money in arguing for common humanity in the face of identity politics, so they traded class politics for ass politics and cashed in, going about the business of setting Americans against each other for the benefit of a tiny neoliberal elite sitting atop the Democratic and Republican parties. So long as the 99% fight each other, elites carry on without concern. And instead of working for free speech in the face of regressive liberals, the Democrats use the SPLC to run censorship and smear campaigns against those they consider enemies. Instead of working for universal American values, they revel in a confusing, contradictory farrago of liberal moral relativism that keeps traditional left class politics in line and frees Democrat and GOP neoliberals/neoconservatives to run rapine across the country and the world.

Much better to turn a blind eye to the rise of tribal, identitarian liberalism financed by likes of George Soros and egged on by the Democratic Party and their public relations unit in the media, while joining forces with neoconservatives to wave the bloody shirt of racism at the merest hint of it among their political enemies. More than anything else, it is their hypocrisy and double standard that provided an opening for Donald Trump and introduces the alt-right to the level of national politics. I may not share many affinities with people identifying themselves with this cohort, but their enemies are mine and I'm happy for the opportunity to make common cause to defeat the hideous monster birthed from the unholy union of the Democrat and GOP elites. In fact, it's my pleasure.

A specter is haunting the dinner parties, fundraisers and think-tanks of the Establishment: the specter of the “alternative right.” Young, creative and eager to commit secular heresies, they have become public enemy number one to beltway conservatives — more hated, even, than Democrats or loopy progressives.

The alternative right, more commonly known as the alt-right, is an amorphous movement. Some — mostly Establishment types — insist it’s little more than a vehicle for the worst dregs of human society: anti-Semites, white supremacists, and other members of the Stormfront set. They’re wrong.

An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right

In times of change, outsiders recognize their common interests and take common cause as the only means available for them to move their fight forward. And this is precisely what Steve Bannon is counting to break the Democrat/GOP neoliberal alliance in favor of Trump. The Clinton Republicans at Mr. Bloomberg's shop think he's America's most dangerous political operative. The more I learn, the more I tend to agree. Along with Trump, there is no greater threat to the neoliberal stranglehold people like Bloomberg and Soros hold on our politics. They should be afraid and by their unhinged flailing about, it's clear they're terrified.

While attacking the favored candidates in both parties at once may seem odd, Bannon says he’s motivated by the same populist disgust with Washington that’s animating candidates from Trump to Bernie Sanders. Like both, Bannon is having a bigger influence than anyone could have reasonably expected. But in the Year of the Outsider, it's perhaps fitting that a figure like Bannon, whom nobody saw coming, would roil the national political debate.

This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

you're so angry and nasty woodsman. you don't know much about me, yet you presume to judge my level of empathy and humility, what and whom i respect, my attitude toward risk, and so much else. speaking of humility- i suggest some intellectual humility to not presume to know what you don't know.

you're very angry, i understand that. you're so frustrated and so in a hurry for history to get on with it. i don't know your age, but perhaps you're afraid you will never live to see the day that this preposterous and ever-more corrupt system will meet its end. in your anger and your impatience you get into bed with likes of bannon. you're better than that.

history will proceed in its own sweet way in its own sweet time. we can add a little push here or there. the forces we are engaged with are so much greater than our individual lives and our individual powers. we do what we can. i, at least, don't want to destroy the world in order to save it.

You think cheap psychology is going to make your weak case the slightest bit stronger? You think calling me angry and frustrated is an argument?

JK, I call it like I see it and the truth is terrible. You don't like hearing it, but you will be hearing much more of it over the next several weeks.

Again, we have Trump to thank for providing the necessary clarity, even if in spite of himself. In their desperate alliance to defend the status quo, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative have been unmasked as standing in opposition to the interests of 99% of all Americans. Their alliance is based on mutually shared assumptions of their own personal (net) worth as goodthinkers, sophisticated and advanced, and destined to rule. As it turned out, liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans were really just all part of the same neoliberal tribe and like you and Santa, consider barbarians all those who do not share those assumptions.

This neoliberal union has deployed its PR wing in the media to set up a “Cosmopolitans vs. Nationalists” frame vs. a “Racist/Sexist vs. Identity Politics” frame. Conservatives have defined the battle they want to fight, and the liberals have defined the battle they want to fight, and both battles support and conceal the neoliberal assumptions Democrats and Republicans share, and that the left (the emergent third pole represented by Sanders) does not share. And now that Trump has signaled his willingness to fight that fight and win, neoliberals and neoconservatives are well and truly scared, wondering how they put themselves in such a mess. I think that's an easy one to figure out.

Being members of a tribe, it does not occur to the stateless, rootless, global-citizens of New York, Washington and Silicon Valley that people might prefer their own customs and sovereignty to merely (the hope of) getting rich. Having no loyalty to place, no affinity for their people, they are unable to see the love of one’s people, land, and traditions as anything but bizarre and potentially dangerous. So they denounce it as racist and xenophobic. It does not occur to them that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders New York liberals who love ethnic restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or DC liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of the District's majority-minority schools. They can’t see that their vision of history’s arc bending inexorably away from tribe and creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like something familiar from eras past: A powerful caste’s self-serving explanation for why it alone deserves to rule the world and take the largest share of its bounty for themselves.

You stand here terrified of the future, like SF, credulously accepting almost every slander, every lie served up to you by the media, so long as they comport with your prejudices against your countrymen, who are daily being ground into dust by a neoliberal regime you once claimed to detest. But now that an opening exists to really fight them, to open up a third force so desperately needed to oppose their destructive ideology, God no please, it's just too risky for my portfolio.

Forgive me for having the balls to call out that cowardly shit for what it is, particularly when millions of Americans are literally being put to death at the hands of neoliberal policies embraced by the GOP and the Democrats. Forgive yourselves for your lack of imagination and moral cowardice.

[vt]

Re: Trump to win?

Why wouldn't Woodsman and all working men and women; black, white, brown, and yellow, be upset with the elitist political parties? They care not for them and throw them the crumbs.

I come from poor, but decent farming family from SW Virginia and Eastern North Carolina. My parents lifted themselves up and got good blue collar and public service jobs (when they didn't pay much), plus made sure I got an education.

The listen to Trump because he is the only one fighting the corruption and giving hope. It's not a race thing and shame of the high and mighty that try to make it look that way.

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

Don't be scared. You'll be all right and so will your gold. You can use it to build a nice Trumpian wall around yourself to protect you against your countrymen. Then again, you already have.

you're so angry and nasty woodsman. you don't know much about me, yet you presume to judge my level of empathy and humility, what and whom i respect, my attitude toward risk, and so much else. speaking of humility- i suggest some intellectual humility to not presume to know what you don't know.

you're very angry, i understand that. you're so frustrated and so in a hurry for history to get on with it. i don't know your age, but perhaps you're afraid you will never live to see the day that this preposterous and ever-more corrupt system will meet its end. in your anger and your impatience you get into bed with likes of bannon. you're better than that.

history will proceed in its own sweet way in its own sweet time. we can add a little push here or there. the forces we are engaged with are so much greater than our individual lives and our individual powers. we do what we can. i, at least, don't want to destroy the world in order to save it.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

they sow the wind, they reap the whirlwind.

Don't be scared. You'll be all right and so will your gold. You can use it to build a nice Trumpian wall around yourself to protect you against your countrymen. Then again, you already have.

Trump may pose certain unpredictable dangers, but the dangers posed by re-empowering the neoconservative ideologues who brought about the Iraq invasion are already known. There’s no guesswork involved — we have incontrovertible proof of their destructive potential.

In his signature muddled and oft-contradictory style, Trump has cobbled together a wholesale critique of U.S. foreign policy post-9/11, situating Hillary squarely within the status quo that has wrought chaos in the Middle East and Europe.

On Monday afternoon, he again denounced “regime change,” called for attaining “common ground with Russia,” and even lamented “Iraqi kids blown to pieces” as a result of policies spearheaded by Hillary. Things have gotten so worrisome for interventionist Republicans that Bill Kristol, the Darth Vader of neoconservatism and a decades-long critic of the Clintons, has expressed joy at the prospect that Hillary supporters will actually be more hawkish than him once the campaign is over, in light of their newfound counter-Trump histrionics.

The dangerous alliance between Hillary Clinton's Democrats and neocons: Fear of Trump is cementing a strange relationship

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

they sow the wind, they reap the whirlwind.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

woodsman, my assumption was that you were NOT into that, so my hope was to get you to look at the kind of person trump chooses to be "the ceo" of his campaign. i don't think trump is hitler, but to draw an analogy: weimar was decadent; hitler was not a good solution.

At least you seem to understand that Trump is not Hitler, false analogy notwithstanding. And America in the 21st Century is not Weimar Germany in the 1920s.

I have all the clarity on Trump and the state of American politics I need and I am entirely clear on my motives. You do not need to "educate" me about anything along those lines, thank you. Although it does seem that you and Santa could stand to learn a thing or two about your fellow Americans and maybe learn something about yourselves along the way.

Humility would be a great place to start; then maybe empathy and respect.

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

I am what I am. Hate to be the one to deliver the bad news. That racial jazz is all out of steam. People see it for the bludgeon it is and you should know better.

Shame on you.

woodsman, my assumption was that you were NOT into that, so my hope was to get you to look at the kind of person trump chooses to be "the ceo" of his campaign. i don't think trump is hitler, but to draw an analogy: weimar was decadent; hitler was not a good solution.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

just read some background on that breitbart guy trump just brought in. an exponent of the alt-right white identity movement? you into that woodsman?

I am what I am. Hate to be the one to deliver the bad news. That racial jazz is all out of steam. People see it for the bludgeon it is and you should know better.

Turns out the color modern liberals care most about is green. And if they need a little brownwash for moral cover, all the better. Shame on you.

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

just read some background on that breitbart guy trump just brought in. an exponent of the alt-right white identity movement? you into that woodsman?

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

woodsman, so bitter, so unhappy. hell hath no fury like a bernie bro scorned? i agree the system sucks. eventually it will self-destruct in one way or another, and perhaps trump will be the instrument of its destruction. but i'm very concerned about the collateral damage.

Et tu, JK?

Bitter and unhappy. You misjudge me; not at all. I'm a happy warrior and delighted to know I still have fight in me. Now could I wish for a better general, tell me what trooper couldn't?

You have a big net worth to guard, JK, and probably never had the stomach for much risk. I totally understand. But the folks I'm rooting for, most of them don't have two pennies to rub together and so I guess that makes them brave enough to take the gamble. You and Santa apparently have a lot to fear and that fear is precisely what the Democratic and Republican Party elites are counting on to keep the status quo going. So long as they have folks like you running scared, they sleep soundly.

I appreciate that not everybody can have moral courage, and the courage of their convictions least of all. And we are talking dollars and cents here, of course. It makes cowards of us all. Well, not all of us.

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

woodsman, so bitter, so unhappy. hell hath no fury like a bernie bro scorned? i agree the system sucks. eventually it will self-destruct in one way or another, and perhaps trump will be the instrument of its destruction. but i'm very concerned about the collateral damage.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

Enjoy your certitude and btw, were you quoting Yoda at the end? Made me laugh anyway.

Well, Santa. That's only fair. I laugh at every one of your posts.

Speaking of Yoda quotes, one comes immediately to mind: "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you."

[santafe2]

Re: Trump to win?

More good news for the Trump campaign:

Trump is currently polling favorably at 1-2% with African Americans. "The blacks" that love him must be a white family named Black.

And even the white family named Black isn't certain any longer unless they're voters with no college education and the pollster only asks the man of the house. Maybe bringing on Roger Ailes will help with how women view The Donald. I'm assuming Trump supporters are fine with that tone deaf move as long as it helps some of the dismal polling numbers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/us...iles.html?_r=0

And, just in case iTulip Trump supports missed it, he now supports trickle down economics, lower corporate taxes, eliminating the estate tax and pretty much everything else Grover Norquist and the US Chamber of Commerce wants to see. If you're worth $100MM or more, he's your guy, if not, I can't begin to understand the psychology of that decision.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-c...down-economics

The good news is that he lives in a separate reality and can only lose if the election is rigged.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...3a2_story.html