Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Let's hope the Donald gets the Assad to do his next eye test
The Trump presidency
- Thread starter brogdale
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Let's hope the Donald gets the Assad to do his next eye test
Spicer is actually a pro who has been around for a long time.Unfortunately his boss is a nutbucket who cant help himself -hence the ridiculous saturday post inauguration press briefing.Yesterday was just a normal press conference by comparison.
All the Trump appointments face the same dilemma -go with the boss or abide by the constitution and mostly respect the facts.(Mattis is supposed to have assured Fallon usa has total support for nato etc etc )
In truth all senior civil servants and political appointees face the same dilemma -sexed up dossier anyone.?
But Trump will fire those who let him down.So they are all walking a fine line.
All the Trump appointments face the same dilemma -go with the boss or abide by the constitution and mostly respect the facts.(Mattis is supposed to have assured Fallon usa has total support for nato etc etc )
In truth all senior civil servants and political appointees face the same dilemma -sexed up dossier anyone.?
But Trump will fire those who let him down.So they are all walking a fine line.
CrabbedOne
Walking sideways snippily
Note: Holy Hand Grenade.
Yossarian
⏭️
I'm hoping that at least one of the places required to put up a Donald Trump portrait chooses the one made entirely from gay porn images.
CrabbedOne
Walking sideways snippily
Ideally right next to the water fountain.
CrabbedOne
Walking sideways snippily
CrabbedOne
Walking sideways snippily
On Background Briefing January 23 - Trump Hands China a Massive Victory; The Subtext of the Hearing for the Head of the CIA; Could Saturday's Demonstrations Evolve Into a Tea Party of the Left?
Ian has Alfred McCoy on putting the case for the American Imperium. Defines existing US strategy as essentially being about containing Russia and China on the World Island. It's a fair summation of what passes for Grand Strategy in the Pentagon. Hence the scattering of basing and deeply entangling treaties. Expand the "core" and shrink the "gap".
This is the American Greatness of the kind the neocons relished embracing at the start of the New American Century: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." as Rove said all puffed up in the unipolar moment. Pride often comes before a fall. The offshore balancer came ashore but as a polity often unsure of why. Imperial overreach was followed by petulant sulking and then not wanting to play this game anymore in the brooding orange form of Trump.
As McCoy says unlike the bumptious British before them Americans shy away from seeing this carefully constructed web of control as an Empire. For most of them America exists to make a buck for Americans and traditionally the rest of the world is a dangerous place that can go hang. They get that DC sort of ran the show for the past 70 years but have little idea how that works just that they are best. Even US military folk serving out at its dusty edges get a bit queasy about the idea of being an empire on the offensive. While Trump's transactional vision of a miserably fallen power that can't afford all this strange expensive gubbins anymore and is being abused by the RoW does resonate.
Ironically McCoy has TTP that Trump has just dumped as essentially being about the pivot to Asia and that in turn containing his enemy of choice China. China (see CNN) is now free to surge ahead with its rival Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Because as an uncomprehending Trump sets out to tear down the apparatus of Pax Americana in the name of making a buck for Joe Public other empires will rise. The history of the world is not of sovereign nation states living under a system of law but of empires and it will likely always be so if we don't barbecue the whole thing in the process.
Ask Russians. The older ones already been through this sort of perestroika.
Ian has Alfred McCoy on putting the case for the American Imperium. Defines existing US strategy as essentially being about containing Russia and China on the World Island. It's a fair summation of what passes for Grand Strategy in the Pentagon. Hence the scattering of basing and deeply entangling treaties. Expand the "core" and shrink the "gap".
This is the American Greatness of the kind the neocons relished embracing at the start of the New American Century: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." as Rove said all puffed up in the unipolar moment. Pride often comes before a fall. The offshore balancer came ashore but as a polity often unsure of why. Imperial overreach was followed by petulant sulking and then not wanting to play this game anymore in the brooding orange form of Trump.
As McCoy says unlike the bumptious British before them Americans shy away from seeing this carefully constructed web of control as an Empire. For most of them America exists to make a buck for Americans and traditionally the rest of the world is a dangerous place that can go hang. They get that DC sort of ran the show for the past 70 years but have little idea how that works just that they are best. Even US military folk serving out at its dusty edges get a bit queasy about the idea of being an empire on the offensive. While Trump's transactional vision of a miserably fallen power that can't afford all this strange expensive gubbins anymore and is being abused by the RoW does resonate.
Ironically McCoy has TTP that Trump has just dumped as essentially being about the pivot to Asia and that in turn containing his enemy of choice China. China (see CNN) is now free to surge ahead with its rival Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Because as an uncomprehending Trump sets out to tear down the apparatus of Pax Americana in the name of making a buck for Joe Public other empires will rise. The history of the world is not of sovereign nation states living under a system of law but of empires and it will likely always be so if we don't barbecue the whole thing in the process.
Ask Russians. The older ones already been through this sort of perestroika.
CrabbedOne
Walking sideways snippily
Lord Camomile
Yipchaa!
CrabbedOne
Walking sideways snippily
Thinks: "Four more years of this!"
CrabbedOne
Walking sideways snippily
That's a great photo if you look at it in detail.
Makes a change from crayons (orange) I suppose. 
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
Hah, They Live is a excellent film and a damning indictment of the entire neoliberal order in my view. It's applied pretty much since it was made. Since well before actually.
Sirena
Don't monkey with the buzzsaw
This piece has been doing the rounds of my FB friends. The author is a right-winger (so some will dismiss this piece on that basis alone). Apologies if someone has already posted it here.....
"As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.”
What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”
This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.
The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher … is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.
And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee. Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities. He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.'
Andrew Sullivan
"As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.”
What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”
This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.
The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher … is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.
And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee. Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities. He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.'
Andrew Sullivan
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
I really should get round to reading that book wot woz wrote by that
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Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
does that make pence peter or judas?
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
Saw this and had to post it here...
CrabbedOne
Walking sideways snippily
Lord Camomile
Yipchaa!
I know what you mean. Although if she is smart* then that probably reflects worse on her, all things considered.
CrabbedOne
Walking sideways snippily
Pence does look like the institutional and slowwitted rock that will follow the crucified one after denying him three times. I'm betting on Jared as Judas he's anybodies for 30 pieces of silver. Looks like Paul Ryan is the Doubting Thomas in this which is rather appropriate.
Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
I don't think she's an idiot or a victim at all. She's well aware of what her agenda is. My guess is that she's been very quietly filling up a Swiss bank account and safe deposit box with cash and jewelry for years. And she'll have earned every bit of that stash and then some for putting up with him.
polly
Well-Known Member
I'm sure you don't mean to suggest that women who are trapped in abusive relationships are weak and stupid.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
Have we had this yet? Laurie Penny commiserating with Melania Trump the cowed victim, in typically cringeworthy fashion:
We should be kind to America's First Victim — Melania Trump
Oh surprise surprise Laurie, something reminded you of you
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
Too close to probable reality to actually be funny.
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
Nail the buggers up, it's the only language they understand.
The Octagon
Stop...Hammertime
This has been doing the rounds and amused me. She knows where and what she's doing
Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
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