Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[Old Man]

Though it is hardly worth it, the silver lining to the demolition derby that our politics have become is that people are starting to pay attention. Comey's testimony brought in as many viewers as Game 1 of the NBA finals. The question is, will they turn up at the polls?

[aylwin13]

And will the other choices be any better than what we have now?

[Old Man]

How could they not be?

 

Meanwhile, Russian cyberattacks on U.S. electoral system incredibly widespread and are not stopping

[Pariah]

 

 

It seems likely, statistically speaking.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Though it is hardly worth it, the silver lining to the demolition derby that our politics have become is that people are starting to pay attention. Comey's testimony brought in as many viewers as Game 1 of the NBA finals. The question is, will they turn up at the polls?

Given how deeply entrenched the Russians are in the election system, does it matter?

[megaplayboy]

Washington Post: Bobby Three Sticks is investigating Donnie Baby Hands for possible obstruction of justice.  

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/special-counsel-is-investigating-trump-for-possible-obstruction-of-justice/2017/06/14/9ce02506-5131-11e7-b064-828ba60fbb98_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.274610f8501f

[Pattern Ghost]

Well, he is until he's fired.

[st barbara]

 I was very disappointed to hear that Trump has rolled back the  minor changes that president Obama had made in relation to Cuba. I thought that they were good moves; with Russia no longer supporting Cuba as much it looked like the perfect time for the U S to step in and re establish. Sadly not to be now.

[BoloOfEarth]

It seems to me like Trump just wants to undo anything and everything Obama did during his administration.  It makes me wonder if he's planning to retrieve Bin Laden's corpse from the bottom of the ocean and try to reanimate it, just out of reactionary spite.

[Nolgroth]

It seems to me like Trump just wants to undo anything and everything Obama did during his administration.  It makes me wonder if he's planning to retrieve Bin Laden's corpse from the bottom of the ocean and try to reanimate it, just out of reactionary spite.

 

I hear they are adding Necromancy to the list of offenses so this may have already been done. Does anybody else notice how pale the White House staffers look now?

 

[Old Man]

It seems to me like Trump just wants to undo anything and everything Obama did during his administration.

 

That's literally what he ran on, so...

[Old Man]

Watergate was a slow, suspenseful buildup to the orgasmic release of the tapes.  Kremlingate is like a neverending flash flood where things happen so fast it's almost impossible to keep up.  Today we had Pence lawyering up,* the Senate overwhelmingly voting to sanction Russia, news that Mueller is officially investigating Trump for obstruction and Kushner for money laundering, news that Theresa May may have been covering up a Russian assassination spree in her country, and rumors that Five Eyes has an incriminating tape of Trump (though perhaps not the hooker tape).

 

And that's just Kremlingate.  Meanwhile the Senate GOP continues to hammer out a new Republicare bill in complete secrecy and Trump hits 60 percent disapproval in record time.

 

I need a vacation.

 

 

* This seems wise regardless of any culpability on Pence's part.  The blast radius on Kremlingate could be vast.

 

edit: To be more clear, Christ Himself would be an idiot to not retain an attorney if he were working in this administration.  Honestly I'm surprised there was anyone left in the White House who hadn't gotten some representation, guilty or not. 

[Heroic Halfwit]

Recently reported down here in Georgia the republican candidate in the runoff for Secretary Price's seat and her neighbors were sent profanity leaden threatening letters with an as yet unknown white powdery substance.

 

Hell, I don't like Karen Handle® or John Ossoff (D), but seriously.  Scalise gets shot by a former Bernie Sanders supporter (no I'm not making any allegations that Bernie had anything to do with it;  I actually admire Sanders for a lot of things, other than his views on economics).  "Protesters" hitting people with bike locks, burning property, "suspects" setting up ambushes for police officers (once allegedly in protest to something that allegedly happened several hundred miles away to someone unrelated to the suspect).

 

I know it's a lunatic fringe minority, but sometimes I wonder how small that minority really is.  Personally, I wish more people could act like reasonable grade schoolers and keep a civil tongue in their heads and their hands to themselves, but apparently in this era that's too much to ask.  

 

It's harshing my Zen.  

 

Call me a reactionary, but I thought the world was a far better place when I was in college and law school and we debated capitalism, communism, Affirmative Action, the right to privacy, assisted suicide, and went out for beers.  What happened to college campuses?  When I was in school we had Gerry Adams speak for Pete's sake.  

 

What kind of monster thinks that it's okay to send death threats (I hope it's only death threats and not Anthrax or something) to someone for the crime of living near someone else running for office?

[Lord Liaden]

I'm 59, one of the older frequenters of these forums, although hardly old by today's standards. In my youth I saw race riots, assaults by police on protesters, terrorist kidnappings. I watched the Watergate hearings on television. I can just barely remember JFK's assassination and funeral. Political and social incivility has never been absent, and until human nature changes it never will be. It does seem to have an ebb and flow over time, but mostly it's a matter of the names and topics changing. That's why we always need to be on guard against it, to stand up and call it out when we see it. That's the only way to resist it overwhelming us.

[DasBroot]

Six months is seeming like six years.  We all knew that things wouldn't settle down once he took office but this is ridiculous.

 

As ridiculous as it is, though, I don't want investigators to do anything less than their best in this case just because of public fatigue and national embarrassment. 

 

I also don't want them to do 'more' than their best - no show boaters, no half allegations, no circumstantial double talk.  There's already been too much hyperbole on this matter from all sides.

[Lord Liaden]

To me that was one of the most refreshing things about Mr. Comey's testimony. After months of people talking histrionics out of both sides of their mouths, watching and listening to someone calm, rational, open, articulate and thorough was like a cold drink on a hot day.

[BoloOfEarth]

So, I was reading this article and came across this (bolding added):

 

 

 

Trump's tweet comes as NBC News has learned that staffers on his 2016 campaign have been asked to preserve documents, text messages and electronic devices, and Michael Cohen, the president's lawyer, has hired a private attorney and Michael Caputo, a former communications adviser on the campaign, has been contacted by the FBI.

 

Wait, so his lawyer is getting a lawyer?!  That seem kinda... surreal, doesn't it?

[Nolgroth]

Wait, so his lawyer is getting a lawyer?! That seem kinda... surreal, doesn't it?

Not really. Many different types of lawyers around. He may be seeking the services of somebody with more knowledge/training/experience in this area of the law. Then there is also the old saw about representing yourself.

[st barbara]

I'm 59, one of the older frequenters of these forums, although hardly old by today's standards. In my youth I saw race riots, assaults by police on protesters, terrorist kidnappings. I watched the Watergate hearings on television. I can just barely remember JFK's assassination and funeral. Political and social incivility has never been absent, and until human nature changes it never will be. It does seem to have an ebb and flow over time, but mostly it's a matter of the names and topics changing. That's why we always need to be on guard against it, to stand up and call it out when we see it. That's the only way to resist it overwhelming us.

Young wipper snapper ! I remember the Kennedy assassination. I particularly remember how shocked I was at the time wondering how the U S A, of all places. could assassinate its president in the 1960's. Only tinpot republics in Central America and Africa did things like that !

[st barbara]

So, I was reading this article and came across this (bolding added):

 

 

 

 

Wait, so his lawyer is getting a lawyer?!  That seem kinda... surreal, doesn't it?

So the lawyers are getting lawyers ? Who pays for all this, the lawyers who hire the lawyers or the people who hired the lawyers who hired the lawyers ?

[Old Man]

Um... Well... How shall I put this... Do you pay taxes?

[Cancer]

One thing I found particularly interesting: Laurie said that the internet has always been rife with trolls. Historically, these people have focused on things like race, gender, and sexual orientation. But now they have added anti-intellectualism and science denial to their arsenal. The easiest and surest way to get trolled online today, he said, was to post something factually accurate and scientifically verifiable. This would bring out the trolls in droves, and one would be inundated with angry and nonsensical (and, most likely, profane) comments for days afterward.

Much to say for this, though it pays to remember that the 'net was originally research and university types mostly in fields that aren't usually referred to as liberal arts. I remember those days (early to mid '80s) fondly. Even then there were trolls, but you could find stuff from those individuals that wasn't trolling.

 

I also remember (much later, some 5 years ago) doing the experiment of googling for "XXXX was wrong!" for various XXXX's (Marx, Darwin, Einstein, etc.). Those three I mentioned are in decreasing order of hit count. By the time I got to Blondlot, the numbers were small enough I could look at every site in the result list.

[Michael Hopcroft]

I looked up "Jefferson was wrong" and found a book on Amazon that billed itself as "a refutation of the Enlightenment".  Not sure what to make of that (I didn't buy the book and there was no electronic version). I suspect serious crankery.

 

(I do actually have a few questions about Jefferson and Franklin's thinking in the Declaration of Independence, such as the ideas of a "self-evident truth" and an "inalienable right". But that's almost entirely an exercise in semantics, as I think the rights themselves actually exist -- it's only the standard of proof that concerns me.)

 

But the search did show me that a lot of barely-defensible ideas from the alt-right have considerable traction on the Internet. Some oif their social ideas I can barely imagine, much less comprehend how anyone would believe in them. 

[DShomshak]

I looked up "Jefferson was wrong" and found a book on Amazon that billed itself as "a refutation of the Enlightenment".  Not sure what to make of that (I didn't buy the book and there was no electronic version). I suspect serious crankery.

 

There actually is a smallish, alt-right-ish group that calls itself Neoreactionary (NRX for short) that claims to promote a

Dark Enlightenment" that rejects all the moral, philosophical and political standards of the Enlightenment. Their great sage (he said sarcastically) uses the pen name of Mencious Moldbug; I found an extensive summary, written in truly fawning tones, by a supposed "philosopher" called (IIRC) Nick Lane. I couldn't get though it all; at my age, I have less endurance for rampant nonsense.

 

Bumper-sticker version is: "People don't need a voice, they just need an exit." Qatar and the other Gulf sheikdoms extolled as models of a properly-ordered society. (It was not lost on me that the Gulf sheikdoms are slave states: Great if you're a citizen, but they run on hired labor, the majority of which has their passports taken away by the firms that import them, so the laborers have neither a voice nor an exit. The slave-in-all-but-name labor outnumbers citizens more than 5 to 1.)

 

An essay by a fellow who bills himself as NRX-curious but not an actual believer made the quite reasonable analytical point that many people do not share the view, predating the Enlightenment but associated with it, that societies are essentially arbitrary constructs designed to perform certain functions, and thus can be altered if goals and values change. A great many people indeed hold the contrary view that social orders are (or should be) fixed and sacred. The conflict between these two views is nothing new, though it's heated up of late.

 

Personally, I found Nick Lane's exposition of NRX fell into the same trap of quasi-Christian sentimentality that he claims underlies the Enlightenment. Namely, the idea that a social order should make people happy and if it doesn't should be changed to do so. Mr. Lane argues that people would actually be happier in an NRX autocracy. Well, if you really believe that certain facts of human nature and social order *are* facts, which Enlightenment democracy tries to deny, then human happiness is irrelevant. No voice; no exit; and no choice, because that's just the way things must be.

 

Oh, and they're racist. Just take my word for it, 'cause life is short and I'm already tired of describing these nutbars.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

BTW, tech tycoon Peter Thiel is probably the best known NRX guy. Usually called libertarian, but he's well known for his argument that "democracy conflicts with liberty" -- other people having rights and a voice infringes on his freedom to do whatever the hell he wants with his vast wealth.

 

Dean Shomshak