Hard News: The next four years
456 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 … 9 10 11 12 13 … 19 Newer→ Last
-
WH, in reply to
Did you watch the Super Bowl?
-
Ian Dalziel, in reply to
...the Super Bowl?
I just like to add that the superb owl is a symbol of transition...
-
Ian Dalziel, in reply to
I’m all ears.
Children of the corn?
-
Kumara Republic, in reply to
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/05/donald-trump-lies-belief-totalitarianism
Interesting article, but worth remembering that Nick Cohen clings to the increasingly outmoded 'radical middle'. He still justifies the 2nd Gulf War with little concept of blowback, instead continuing to bang on about 'self-hating Westerners' and other 'regressive Leftists'. And like other radical middle types, he seems to downplay the economic distress factor that's partly behind Brexitrump.
That said, Cohen has a point about Brexitrump "compulsive believers". Going by past history, it has often taken ruinous world events to de-program compulsive believers - Hiroshima and Berlin in 1945, Chernobyl in 1986, and so forth. The Great Recession could have been a chance to implement a 'New New Deal' of sorts, instead there was a Weimar-type leadership void that illiberal (but not yet Fascist) strongmen have been too happy to fill.
-
WH, in reply to
It’s been an interesting 12 months in sport actually.
The Cavs broke the 52-year Cleveland sports curse. The Cubs broke the 108-year Curse of the Billy Goat. Leicester City won the Premier League against bookmaker odds of 5000:1. The All Blacks lost to Ireland for the first time in 111 years. The Herald’s take on it all is here.
For those with a sceptical cast of mind, this video shows a Rayon Sports’ striker removing juju from the opposition goal shortly before equalising in the 52nd minute.
The use of juju in Rwandan football has now been outlawed.
-
Rich Lock, in reply to
So when, for example, Trump talks about ...[snip]... for an abortion and get one then and there, as a basic human right in the 21st century.
Your argument veers dangerously close to the sort of argument that bloviating windbags like Piers Morgan here in the UK throw up all the time: 'why are you protesting [bad thing X], when [bad thing Y] is also happening?'
He recently attempted to take down reporter/activist Owen Jones by sarcastically asking him why he was so keen on protesting Trump's visit to the UK, but didn't protest visits by other oppressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia. In response, Owen Jones pointed out that he had in fact organised a protest against the Saudi visit.
The exchange is here, for reference (scroll down to the text below the video).
The first point would be that you can do both - protest and work against [bad thing X] and [bad thing Y].
The second point is that this comes up in comment sections all the time (along with it's sibling 'why-are-you-writing-about-[frivolous fun thing]-when-[lots of bad things]-exist?'
I'm always rather tempted to ask if I missed a memo from some sort of global summit where every bad thing ever was catalogued and ranked, and that all True Followers of The Way are hereby instructed to make their way throught the list systematically and without deviation. While imagining that the person asking has stripped their life to the bare bones, spending every waking hour in their monastic cell fighting the good fight, only pausing to choke down a bowl of gruel or take a short nap on their spartan cot when fatigue and hunger force them to.
-
mark taslov, in reply to
Your argument veers dangerously close to the sort of argument that bloviating windbags like Piers Morgan here in the UK throw up all the time: ‘why are you protesting [bad thing X], when [bad thing Y] is also happening?’
It may well do, but again one might argue that making the distinction is crucial, because I don’t lack answers as to why anyone would protest Trump, I’ve spent more than enough time over the last year debating people who wish to see their country “made great again”, who want to “build a wall” who want to “make America white again”, who’ve called me a chick with a dick for my trouble, I’m not sure what kind of rebuttal you may have experienced in your travels but for me PAS is a sanctuary from all that, somewhere to explore things in more depth and I’m not the absolutist you’re attempting to paint into a corner.
I’m not in that box Rich.
With all due respect, I’m mindful of parallels and equivalence and how protesting these issues in our own regions need not be mutually exclusive of protest elsewhere. I mentioned excessive Godwins, not because I don’t see parallels, but rather that the one oft-trotted reference has lost its potency and is insufficient when there may remain as many parallels as one may care to educate oneself about. The more parallels, the more equivalencies, the more awareness and the more vigilance the better IMHO.
Life doesn’t grind to a halt because the US has a new president, and posting on these boards doesn’t erase others posts. I believe we are capable of far more nuanced communication; that we can discuss Trump and Brexit and Calexit and Bannon, the Alt-Right, white supremacy and white supremacists, intersex and abortion rights, misogyny and religion, foreign policy and domestic policy in as many countries under as many administrations, all within the same context.
It might be worth keeping in mind that it is you yourself that took issue with my comparison between a white supremacist and the white supremacy of structural discrimination in New Zealand, In linking to the author of The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It I imagine you’d be familiar with his work and have a reasonable idea as to how these forces transcend borders. As such, binary dichotomies of this nature hold less interest for me than intersectional analysis:
Does that not cause you any concern at all?
Because we’ve heard it all before:
-
Mark, the reason I keep replying to you rather than ignoring you is because I think you are arguing in good faith and are receptive to arguments. So I'm not trying to paint you into a corner or trap you in some sort of gotcha!
But having said that, I really don't understand the point you're trying to make. We kicked off this conversation because you appeared to be conflating structural inequality with White Supremacist ideology, a position you now appear to be defending while at the same time wanting to discuss 'nuanced communication'.
I'm perfectly happy to discuss intersectionality or whatever, but the ideological gulf between a set of people that includes John Key, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, or George Bush as examples, and literal neo-fascists is huge. I cannot overstate this. They're different leagues. The beliefs of the first group veer between 'doesn't see that there's an issue', and 'perfectly happy to line my pockets and align the system towards doing so', while the outer ends of the second set start at 'people with darker skin than us are less than human', and end up at 'let's literally exterminate them'. If you keep putting them in the same box, then any discussion we have is going to keep stalling on this point.
-
mark taslov, in reply to
I imagine being someone in Iraq who has lost her mother, her husband, her son and her daughter in a US bombing. I count death tolls. Death upon death upon death upon death. Some profess to have this or that ideology but the result, the outcomes, the actual impact on human beings like you and I’s lives is the same. Unarmed and black, we might get shot by cops. Pakistani, we might be sliced in two by a drone. Syrian, we might choke to death on chemicals, Yemeni, we might get disintegrated by a 500lb laser-guided US-made bomb at a funeral. Things are very bad and they have been for a long time.
“I do not admit… that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia… by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race… has come in and taken its place.”
I distinguish between being a white supremacist and a warmonger (ideologically driven or otherwise), and it’s the latter capacity in Bannon that scares me most – that and as a propagandist.
I guess having heard a number of first hand accounts of the genocides that took place in a largely monocultural China, I’m acutely aware that genocide is genocide – if it’s not race, there’s always some “subversive community” to target and exterminate – and every life matters.
I don’t mind stalling, I appreciate the good faith with which you engage Rich.
-
I often feel that PAS is a a kind of League of Notions...
-
-
-
mark taslov, in reply to
-
Whitehouse.org is back - it was on holiday while Obama was president.
-
Donny-Do-Right hasn't quite mastered a separation from his and his family's business concerns it seems...
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/world/89220464/donald-trump-criticises-nordstrom-after-store-reportedly-curbs-deal-with-ivanka-trump"It's never great to have these questions about dual allegiance," said Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan watchdog group.
"But certainly we've never seen before a president using the power of the presidency to pressure businesses for the obvious benefit of his family."- I was also majorly surprised to hear on Morning Report that he tweeted this during a CIA briefing!! I'd have thought those would be held 'in camera' with devices excluded.
Nor has he fully realised that he is but one leg of a three-legged government
http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/89220384/donald-trump-calls-courts-so-political-as-travel-ban-faces-scrutiny"I don't ever want to call a court biased," Trump told hundreds of police chiefs and sheriffs from major cities at a meeting in a Washington hotel. "So I won't call it biased. And we haven't had a decision yet. But courts seem to be so political. And it would be so great for our justice system if they would be able to read the statement and do what's right."
-
Rich Lock, in reply to
I was also majorly surprised to hear on Morning Report that he tweeted this during a CIA briefing!! I'd have thought those would be held 'in camera' with devices excluded.
The tweet was sent from an iPhone. Cheetolini usually uses an unsecured Android device.
Draw your own conclusions.
-
nzlemming, in reply to
The tweet was sent from an iPhone. Cheetolini usually uses an unsecured Android device.
Yes, it's usually his staff who use the iPhone. That said, he's also said that he dictates his tweets and someone else sends them, so who the fuck knows?
-
-
mark taslov, in reply to
Paul Anka's 'My Way'
Which shares motifs with Charles Dumont and Michel Vaucaire's 'Non, je ne regrette rien'
-
Unbelievable. Republicans just voted down a bill that would "affirm that the Nazi regime targeted the Jewish people in its perpetration of the Holocaust" and condemn Trump's Holocaust Day statement. Talk about tribal politics. Won't sit too well with AIPAC...
-
WH,
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote:
in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
South Korea. China. The Philippines. Cuba. Ghana. Germany.
Mary Lincoln, Nancy Reagan and a very odd phone call reportedly placed by Donald Trump.
Although this piece about John Key seems to be some kind of joke, the topic has come up more than you might think.
-
mark taslov, in reply to
Applied to politics, the people who think that “interesting times” are interesting, probably aren’t thinking of the people for whom even minor extra difficulties could be enough to sink them.
I did mean it in the Chinese proverb sense :-)
One hope I have in this “post truth” era, is that people might begin to more deeply question some of the "truths" we habitually and culturally perpetuate:
Despite being widely attributed as a Chinese curse, there is no equivalent expression in Chinese.[2] The nearest related Chinese expression is “寧為太平犬，莫做亂離人” (nìng wéi tàipíng quǎn, mò zuò luàn lí rén), which is usually translated as “Better to be a dog in a peaceful time, than to be a human in a chaotic (warring) period."
Trump’s more or less unpresidented spurning of the protocols of US patriotism:
"There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers,” Trump said. “Well, you think our country is so innocent?"
immediately reminded me of Katharine’s prediction on page 5:
I have an uneasy feeling he might be a Pres that decides to deliver an ugly truth about certain things. He seems to have made a point of painting a very dismal picture of the more recent Washington establishment – I could see him using the office now to prove it to the people.
-
A propos of nothing much in this thread except He Who Must Not Be Named being called one, can I recommend to you this delightful article about the linguistics of shitgibbon as an insult? It's worth thinking about, considering how many times portmanteau terms are nominated as WOTY.
Edit: See https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/the-rise-of-the-shitgibbon/ as well. Apparently, it's known as flyting.
-
WH,
I went looking for this (which is pretty good I reckon) and came across this.
-
andin, in reply to
Yep and there's all manner of madness like...
Bannon now seems to be trying to bring about the Fourth Turning,
Bannon is convinced he see's method in the madness, Nah.
He's just projecting his madness into everything making it full blown methodical insanity.
Post your response…
This topic is closed.