What stupid shit has Trump done today?

[J Ed]

have you decided what these are? I mean you've neatly split off 'white working class causes' from the issues facing the working class as a whole so lets hear them.

IMO You can only really think about the concept of white working-class issues, as opposed to working-class issues, if you are so committed to neoliberal ideology that you conceptualise the people entirely as segmented consumers in the same way that they are targeted by say advertising companies, rather than as workers who also have X, Y and/or Z identity. It seems to be a world that sees only social issues as being the only issues which are legible within the political terrain, everything else is out of bounds of politics and is not worth talking about and when someone disagrees with that then they are perceived as detracting from the only politics which is possible and they are doing so because they are secretly motivated by racism, sexism or whatever else. In a sense I think that this is where so much of the hostility towards even the mildest of social democratic reforms, in reality probably it's more accurate to call it souped up welfare liberalism, comes from. The idea that any working-class grievance could be legitimate, or any actual change to the way in which neoliberalism functions, has become common sensical for the political and media class and the ever decreasing number of people who still buy what they are selling.

Add to that toxic mix a situation in which wages have declined since the 70s, cost of living has increased and the fact that life has simply become unliveable for millions of people, and a candidate on the other side who is actually willing to acknowledge those realities but also mobilise voters on the basis of nativist animus... the worldview outlined above is going to lose every single time.

 

[RD2003]

This in the last week we've had proof of a meeting with Russian Govt actors, that the Trump administration and family have been found out to repeatedly lie about. Our only evidence that collusion didn't occur is on the word of repeated liars.

And has been pointed out before, on the thread, that's at the very least proof of conspiracy. *


The idea that we're still debating "if" Russia interfered in this election is utterly absurd.



*Your delusional attempt to defend Putin has at least brought us back on topic, so cheers for that.

In a world where one power group always but always interferes with the processes set in motion by another power group, why does it matter so much if Russia interfered with the US elections (especially as nobody is prepared or capable of saying exactly what 'the Russians' did)?

Anybody would think that 'the US' never interfered anywhere ever. If anything all that significant did actually happen, it's refreshing to see them on the receiving end. The US is increasingly becoming just another state (albeit with biggest miltary) in an international situation they are beginning to realise they cant control. Welcome to the real world.

 

[coley]

You maybe surprised to learn that this thread is about the current President of the USA and the social, economic and political context of American politics, which has never been "left wing," and sadly, despite the wishing and hoping of many here (including me actually) is never, ever gonna be.

In fairness some would argue that the Dems are the US equivalent of the European idea of 'left wing' a lazy assumption given some of the more obvious right wing positions adopted by the Dems in recent years.
Our own Tory party would be considered very socialist and 'left wing' or even scummy commie pinkos by a very large proportion of American voters
Note, my own opinion, drawn after reading some of the comments on Briefart and Faux news outlets.

 

[RD2003]

How very retro - like parts of Eastern Europe in the 80's or parts of Latin America in the 70's.

Maybe it's the future, and not only for the US.

 

[DotCommunist]

... On a thread called 'What Stupid Shit Has Trump Done Today?'

It's like having a thread called 'What's For Tea Tonight?' where a small group of posters continually disrupted the thread by insisting on only posting about the history of boiled dinner through the ages.

the two most prolific posters on this thread lead the post count by over a hundred each. So its actually like two people constantly posting recipes and links to recipes and calling anyone who speaks out of turn a wrecker and a racist isn't it jonny? You're just below me in the posts made on this thread, so within the 'handful'. Nice try tho

 

[RD2003]

Surely you can see why people of colour may be a tad reluctant to join a group hug with white majority working class causes if they've been thrown under a bus before and knowing they'll probably be told to shush if they raise the issue of racism in the movement or even suggest an intersectional analysis of race, class, gender, etc. oppression?

See also Feminism.

Working class issues used to be just that regardless of race and culture etc etc. Racism existed and was fought, including by white working class activists.

Then issues were hijacked by the smug identity politics brigade. Well-funded job opportunities opened up. Careers flourished. Economic inequality continued, and continues, to grow.

 

[coley]

Wait, he told lies about the Boy Scouts? The more I hear about this guy, the less I like him.

Clinton threw away her popular vote because of the idiotic electoral college system the US insists on retaining - and which is not, by the way, a Russian invention.

Time to end the disastrous American experiment.

OK, if they put all that tea back in the boxes and put the boxes back where they belong, then we might consider letting them rejoining the UK, or better still giving them our place in the EU, a suitable punishment for their behaviour at Yorktown

 

[coley]

This statement seems pretty normal ... right up to the last paragraph:



Trump statement on sanctions: My company worth 'many billions'

It's like the speechwriters wrote the rest; but Trump insisted on adding his own little rider at the end.

Sounds like TTT wrote it in its entirety with very small modifications added,classic buffoonery.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Nice try tho

Nice try at what?

The US had an election. There is now a new Administration, and it's getting up to all sorts of things.

And a thread was created - this thread - to talk about those things.

But a small handful of people want to rehash and analyze the election held in November of last year, constantly and in minute detail.

That's fair enough: but why don't they start a thread devoted to that separate topic?

It seems rather straightforward. The suggestion isn't nefarious nor unreasonable.

 

[DotCommunist]

Nice try at what?

The US had an election. There is now a new Administration, and it's getting up to all sorts of things.

And a thread was created - this thread - to talk about those things.

But a small handful of people want to rehash and analyze the election held in November of last year, constantly and in minute detail.

That's fair enough: but why don't they start a thread devoted to that separate topic?

It seems rather straightforward. The suggestion isn't nefarious nor unreasonable.

nope. Some people want to discuss how we got here and why as well as the day to day ins and outs. The try is to portray them as thread wreckers intent on...something? This is all context. If you simply want discussion free link posting then theres always the 'alt right ridicule thread'

if not then I'm afraid the wider situation will be discussed regardless. Trump does not exist in a vacuum and nor do his actions. So they will be discussed, as all politics threads tend to do. Sorry.

 

[J Ed]

I found a t-shirt and baseball cap for the thread

 

[Yossarian]

YES BUT IF YOU EXAMINE THE HISTORY OF BOILED DINNERS YOU WILL BE FORCED TO AGREE THAT TONIGHT'S TEA MUST UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES REPEAT THE AWFUL HORRORS OF PREVIOUS EVENING MEALS

argle bargle blart blurt

"I'm just saying that lamb chops would have been a successful meal. People like lamb chops, they would have eaten them. I said so at the time and I'm going to keep saying 'I told you so' because it looks like you're thinking about cooking that goddamn egg casserole again."

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

nope. Some people want to discuss how we got here and why as well as the day to day ins and outs.

'The Trump Presidency' thread was closed, as I recall, because a small group of people were unhappy about the 'current events'-type posts that included a lot of links to... current events.

So, this new thread was created for current events type posts and links.

But the same unhappy few have followed, and are once again complaining about current events posts and links. It's like they're never happy unless they are controlling the agenda.

So: let them go, start their own thread, and control the agenda there just as much as they'd like.

Or: they can stay here, but they can put a sock in the whining and complaining.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

The civil rights division of President Trump’s Justice Department is preparing to shift its resources toward “investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants,” the New York Times’s Charlie Savage reported Tuesday.

Any shift in priorities hasn’t been finalized or announced yet, so it’s unclear where this policy will end up or how specifically it will be implemented. Still, in conversations and debates over just who gets the biggest leg up in university admissions, the tale of how senior White House adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner got into Harvard is an instructive one.

As Trump takes aim at affirmative action, let’s remember how Jared Kushner got into Harvard

 

[J Ed]

Another thought: I love the idea that the discussion of the decline of the once social democratic and now centre-left neoliberalism and the ground that it has lost to nativist neoliberalism is a topic which is particular to the American 2016 primaries or 2016 general election. It's a very key political narrative and reality in almost all major Western countries, the handful of exceptions being Spain and Portugal I suppose.

Ignoring that context within the day to day politics of the US reduces everything to basically reality TV, or perhaps Wrestling with kayfabe, with a cast of goodies and baddies.

 

[Smangus]

We need a "What stupid shit has Urban done today" thread.

Bet it would be really long

 

[CRI]

'The Trump Presidency' thread was closed, as I recall, because a small group of people were unhappy about the 'current events'-type posts that included a lot of links to... current events.

So, this new thread was created for current events type posts and links.

But the same unhappy few have followed, and are once again complaining about current events posts and links. It's like they're never happy unless they are controlling the agenda.

So: let them go, start their own thread, and control the agenda there just as much as they'd like.

Or: they can stay here, but they can put a sock in the whining and complaining.

Amen.

 

[CrabbedOne]

On NBCNews Trump Says U.S.‘Losing’ Afghan War in Tense Meeting With Generals

...
Trump Compares Afghanistan to a Famous New York Restaurant

The president's advisers went into the mid-July meeting hoping he would sign off on an Afghanistan strategy after months of delays, officials said. One official said the president's team has coalesced around a strategy, though it had presented him with other options as well such as complete withdrawal.

Trump, however, appeared to have been significantly influenced by a meeting he'd recently had with a group of veterans of the Afghanistan war, and he was unhappy with the options presented to him.

Trump vented to his national security team that the veterans told him forces from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have not been helpful, and he lamented that China is making money off of Afghanistan's estimated $1 trillion in rare minerals while American troops are fighting the war, officials said. Trump expressed frustration that his advisers tasked with figuring out how the U.S. can help American businesses get rights to those minerals were moving too slowly, one official said.

China purchased mineral rights in Afghanistan a decade ago, an investment the U.S. supported at the time. Beijing has since had teams mining copper outside of Kabul.

The focus on the minerals was reminiscent of Trump's comments early into his presidency when he lamented that the U.S. didn't take Iraq's oil when the majority of forces departed the country in 2011.

To underscore his view that the veterans who fought in the war may be better positioned to advise him on an Afghanistan strategy, Trump compared the policy review process to the renovation of a famed New York restaurant in the 1980s, officials said.

Trump told his advisers that the restaurant, Manhattan's elite '21' Club, had shut its doors for a year and hired an expensive consultant to craft a plan for a renovation. After a year, Trump said, the consultant's only suggestion was that the restaurant needed a bigger kitchen.

Officials said Trump kept stressing the idea that lousy advice cost the owner a year of lost business and that talking to the restaurant's waiters instead might have yielded a better result. He also said the tendency is to assume if someone isn't a three-star general he doesn't know what he's talking about, and that in his own experience in business talking to low-ranking workers has gotten him better outcomes.

The '21' Club, which has been one of Trump's favorite New York spots, closed for two months in 1987 while it underwent a full renovation and reopened to great fanfare.

One senior administration official said the president mentioned the restaurant in an attempt to convey to his advisers that sometimes the best advice comes from those working day-to-day in a place, rather than those who are farther removed.

"The clear message if you heard the story was: high-priced consultants or high-priced anybody, expensive supposedly-big-brained people, but who are physically far from the source of the problem, often give you much worse advice than the supposedly low-ranking guys who are right there," the official said.
...

Geopolitics for Trump can be boiled down to a series of business ventures.

You can see where he was going with that last bit but the generals might remind Trump of the time he tried to make it big in the Atlantic City Casinos winging it without expert advice until his very able bankruptcy lawyers stepped in that is.

 

[DotCommunist]

'The Trump Presidency' thread was closed, as I recall, because a small group of people were unhappy about the 'current events'-type posts that included a lot of links to... current events.

So, this new thread was created for current events type posts and links.

But the same unhappy few have followed, and are once again complaining about current events posts and links. It's like they're never happy unless they are controlling the agenda.

So: let them go, start their own thread, and control the agenda there just as much as they'd like.

Or: they can stay here, but they can put a sock in the whining and complaining.

you realise you just harped on about agenda control while attempting to do so? if you don't like discussion of wider context then you are free to not engage in it, rather than try to police the thread against those who do wish to discuss on a discussion board. So, post up a mooch gif and make the thread great again.

 

[TomUS]

I found a t-shirt and baseball cap for the thread

Cool. Where can I get one?

 

[TomUS]

OK, if they put all that tea back in the boxes and put the boxes back where they belong, then we might consider letting them rejoining the UK

Then May could move into the WH and Branson could move into Trump tower.

 

[DotCommunist]

so Mark Zuckerberg is planning to run for president with Hillary's ex chief strategist as his man. And Trump was very very nearly in Sharknado 3. Surreal. oh and on a less zany note he's go a massive racist in as chief scientist for the USDA

 

[8den]

In a world where one power group always but always interferes with the processes set in motion by another power group, why does it matter so much if Russia interfered with the US elections (especially as nobody is prepared or capable of saying exactly what 'the Russians' did)?

The "everything's corrupt so this one doesn't matter" line of logic as used as a defence for election rigging. Firstly plenty of people are saying exactly what Russia did. Hacked & released the DNC e-mails for a start. Hacked but did not release the RNC elections.

Anybody would think that 'the US' never interfered anywhere ever. If anything all that significant did actually happen, it's refreshing to see them on the receiving end. The US is increasingly becoming just another state (albeit with biggest miltary) in an international situation they are beginning to realise they cant control. Welcome to the real world.

Yeah the schadenfreude response. US interference is no laughing matter, but we only tend to get really concerned about a thing when it affects us. Thats human nature. Russian interference into both the USA elections and possibly the Brexit campaign, in the hope of destabilising NATO and the EU affects all of us.

 

[SpookyFrank]

I found a t-shirt and baseball cap for the thread

Saw a bloke at the pub in a Make America Great Again hat the other day. I originally thought it must be some parody version, but no it was the genuine article. Lord knows where you'd even get one here in the UK.

Mrs Frank was very much up for punching him in the face. I counselled restraint, but only on the grounds that I didn't want us to get barred from our favourite pub.

 

[RD2003]

The "everything's corrupt so this one doesn't matter" line of logic as used as a defence for election rigging. Firstly plenty of people are saying exactly what Russia did. Hacked & released the DNC e-mails for a start. Hacked but did not release the RNC elections.






Yeah the schadenfreude response. US interference is no laughing matter, but we only tend to get really concerned about a thing when it affects us. Thats human nature. Russian interference into both the USA elections and possibly the Brexit campaign, in the hope of destabilising NATO and the EU affects all of us.

NATO has been obsolete for 25 years and is now a dangerous, self-perpetuating entity. The EU is doing a great job of destabilising itself through exacerbating all the unsustainable aspects of the project.

Election rigging and hacking are not the same thing. The US election was not rigged.

 

[Tankus]

Trump said it was


By dead people plus the bad hombres

 

[8den]

NATO has been obsolete for 25 years and is now a dangerous, self-perpetuating entity.

I imagine Germany, Poland and most of the former Eastern Bloc would beg to differ.

The EU is doing a great job of destabilising itself through exacerbating all the unsustainable aspects of the project.

Which are?

Election rigging and hacking are not the same thing. The US election was not rigged.

I've used rigging as shorthand because typing "Republican voter suppression & Russian interference" every time was getting tedious.

 

[8den]

Saw a bloke at the pub in a Make America Great Again hat the other day. I originally thought it must be some parody version, but no it was the genuine article. Lord knows where you'd even get one here in the UK.

Mrs Frank was very much up for punching him in the face. I counselled restraint, but only on the grounds that I didn't want us to get barred from our favourite pub.

The day of the Glorious Twelve I was working in Belfast on the Ormeau Ave. First time in Belfast for the 12th. Walking in work, there was a guy swinging from a can of harp wearing a Hawaiin print shirt with a Donald Trump pattern, and a MAGA cap waiting for the parade to start.*



*Trump is a natural fit for Orangemen.

 

[RD2003]

I imagine Germany, Poland and most of the former Eastern Bloc would beg to differ.



Which are?



I've used rigging as shorthand because typing "Republican voter suppression & Russian interference" every time was getting tedious.

What, those countries who are helping NATO's push towards the borders of Russia? Something that Russia has never stood for and never will no matter who is in power there, and explains why the Russians are fighting back.

The indefinite expansion of the EU and its attempts to dictate to member states exactly what their elected governments are allowed to do is what's unsustainable, as is its exploitative free labour market.

So not election rigging then?

 

[J Ed]

I imagine Germany, Poland and most of the former Eastern Bloc would beg to differ.



Which are?



I've used rigging as shorthand because typing "Republican voter suppression & Russian interference" every time was getting tedious.

Sorry but the gerrymandering did not happen today, could you please keep the thread on topic as it clearly indicates that discussion can only pertain to what Trump has done today.