I think this is spot on. We’ve only just gotten to the point where enough evidence has seeped through the population’s collective conscious that we can even broach a conversation about it. I’m often struck by how few people have even considered if they themselves were influenced by Russian propaganda.
I’d add a third contributor to your list about “Evil Hillary” and the refusal to have serious adult thoughts about greater threats to democracy: Alt-right news, including most notably Fox “News” – which nowadays out-Breitbarts Breitbart.
My mom would say the above, because Democrats are evil because of abortion. Based on other things she says, I’d guess that abortion is a handy fig leaf, but it has nothing to do with facebook.
Are you kidding? You honestly don’t know about this incident?
He was in Phoenix on a day that was 115 degrees, He just “happens” to have his Clinton Foundation private jet park next to Loretta Lynch (who was in Phoenix to address a law enforcement conference) despite being the husband of the subject of a major investigation by Lynch’s DOJ and entered her plane. He would have gotten away with it had a local news team not been tipped as to what was happening, presumably by tarmac crew.
I think your moms mentality always has existed. It’s baked into the process.
But a big footprint societal shift, like using social media all the time, brings more extreme thoughts to more moderate people who feel their opinions are just as good as anyone elses, no matter the context.
Some peoples individuation as people now involves discovering how corrupt Hillary always was, and raging about it, because they just discovered the actual truth of it all, and no one else knows except all their facebook friends. They are living the dream.
Or, for that matter, any of the multitude of other things that he’s asserted without any evidence whatsoever except, presumably, that they said it on Fox News.
Well or, if you believe that they’re both crooks, why vote for the stupid one?
Or why vote for either of them? Gary Johnson was a very popular Republican governor and seemed reasonably smart of his interviews (despite the news media ignoring him except to make fun of anything he did that was strange). Evan McMullin came across as pretty reasonable in everything I saw of him. And you could always write in, “John Kasich”, if that’s what you wanted.
Technically, private airports are quite small and not too terribly common. So if you’re in Phoenix at the same time as some other wealthy/important person, the odds are pretty good that you’re going to be parked next to them. If there’s say 10 planes on the tarmac, then whatever plane you’re in is liable to have a plane on either side and either a plane behind or in back that you could call “next to”. That’s 40% of the total number of planes at the airport that you’re “next to”.
Usually, you don’t stay on the plane, you go indoors and, if you’re not leaving, then you mill while the pilot refills gas and does inspections, etc. If you’re milling, and you’re a politician, then I would expect you to start gladhanding whoever all is in the airport since that’s just your personality.
If Clinton and Lynch were trying to meet, then you’d expect to see a phonecall previous to their meeting at the airport, so that they could be in the same place at the same time. It’s unlikely that the companies that runs the airplanes would give out information on where their clients were going to be. You would need to check phone records to determine whether this was a chance meeting or not.
And that’s going to be in the March/April Michael Horowitz report. And if he says that the Clintons are dirty, then we should care.
So far, there have been what 6 or 7 different investigations of the Clintons? All of those were lead by Republicans, using Republican-leaning investigators, and they came up empty (except for Monica Lewinsky). I’m not really hopeful that Horowitz will find anything. Either the Clintons are clean, and just irk the Republican party for some reason, or they’re just really good at crime. Too good.
Trump is now being investigated by a Republican Congress and a Republican former FBI director, who was appointed by the Republican deputy Attorney General chosen by Trump’s personal pick of a Republican Attorney General. And they have already found two money launderers, one of whom is so amazingly criminal that he has fake passports from different countries and a cache of burner phones. Trump has a real and well-documented history of connections with all sorts of Russian and other mafia figures. You can set the time criteria on Google to exclude his Presidential run, if you want to remove partisan reporting and do your own checking on that fact. His businesses have been successfully prosecuted for fraud and money laundering. His National Security Advisor was a cutout for Turkey and others, and appears to have given legitimate consideration to kidnapping an American resident.
They may well both be criminals. But the one that was being investigated by her mortal enemies 6 or 7 times was proven clean. The one that’s being investigated by his buds has so far already resulted in some indictments for major crimes, and it’s pretty likely that more are forthcoming.
Personally, I don’t care. If evidence comes to the fore against the Clintons, then they should go to jail, and I’ll be quite happy with that. It does seem likely that they took money from the Chinese, knowingly, back in the 90s. (And that Trump will be prosecuted for the crime that was written in response to that.) But, I’m not very hopeful that Horowitz will find anything.
Mueller’s going to find a lot of stuff. At best Donald isn’t criminal, but he’s such a dumbass that he just has a few dozen criminals around him because he’s an easy sucker for them to move money around. And if you look at the numbers, you’re not really going to be able to make that distinction. I’m pretty hopeful.
That’s some very simplistic reasoning, if I get you. No I probably don’t.
When I sniff fascism in the air I vote strategic over idealistic. The lesser of two evils basically. I have to admit I’ve sniffed it a lot over the years and I keep being surprised at how far we can go.
If we’re talking about strategic voting, then we’re talking about cynicism. So let’s look at two cynical strategies.
There’s your strategy (strategy #1) where we say that most people are too stupid to evaluate candidates for practical value, and so they’re just going to vote with their party. The President will come from one of the parties, so a rational, non-stupid voter really only has a choice between the two options available. You can only choose bad.
But now let’s take the basic premise that most people are stupid. Why are they voting for the parties? They’re not thinking, they’re stupid. What is impelling them to make some form of choice so that they land on voting for a party, a race, an economic principal, or whatever else?
The best explanation, in the cynical view, would be that there are thought leaders among society. Most people don’t know and don’t care about politics, they just listen to the smartest person they know and vote with them, assuming that that person has done the work of thinking.
So if the smart person is using strategy #1, then we end up with bad governance, because he’s trying to pick people that he thinks stupid people will vote for, based on stupid principals. That just creates a race to the bottom.
If everyone in the country that people trust as wise and reliable says, “Don’t vote for either of these two crooks.”, that will have a large impact on the election.
It’s when the wise and reliable people in society all get behind the parties, regardless of how crappy the options are that the parties throw at us that we get Donald Trump as president.
Strategy #2, if we could get all of the thought leaders of the nation to get on board, of just picking good candidates, is the better strategy. And while it might not succeed, strategy #1 is exactly a race to the bottom. Strategy #2 might still result in that, but there’s a non-zero chance of it avoiding that result. Personally, I’d rather strive for the non-zero chance of a wise outcome rather than embrace it and accept that we’re all screwed.
I’m not sure which side you view as Fascist, but let’s say that the Fascists killed a lot of people. Okay that’s true.
Communism killed a lot of people.
Anarchy has killed a lot of people.
Monarchism, say under Napoleon or Genghis Khan, killed a lot of people.
If you want to avoid bad outcomes, well bad outcomes are the result of extremist options championed by charismatic leaders that gain the backing of the general public. That is to say, it’s the result of allowing stupidity to run rampant. It has nothing to do with the extremist position itself. Singapore, Japan, and modern day China are basically Fascist countries and that’s fine. The Scandinavian countries are gradually tip-toeing their way to Communism and they’re still alright. I gather that there was some extended period of history in Spain where large regions were effectively running without any form of government above them, and everything was peaceful (I don’t recall enough about this to be able to hunt down a reference). And there were Monarchs who were quite good for society.
Stupid is harmful, not politics. Narcissists and psychopaths are dangerous, not Fascists.
Driving society towards leaders who are helpful to the world is of more value than turning them from the narcissistic psychopath to the psychopath.
I’ve been consistently impressed with how immensely controlled he is at not just avoiding answering anything of interest, but to separate from his brain everything that is known in the public sphere and spinning a tale in answer that is lightly related to the question asked that uses that public sphere knowledge while completely deflecting from the actual question.
So all I’ve gotten from this is that there was a document dump (possibly from the FBI) in late November or December, and it’s likely that the Nunes/House Republican madness is a result of whatever is in that, possibly because it’s starting to implicate the President directly.
Trump’s whole presentation has been fascist. It’s the reason he ran, and it’s the reason he won the votes necessary. That is what I vote against. Please use less words in your response if you want me to follow along. Do you really need them to say what you mean about this?
You want to debate the harm of fascism vs another form of govt? Not with me. I’ll deal with other types of govt when they are winning elections in my country.
To the extent that one can figure out what the Fascists believed outside of “kill lots of people” (which, I believe, was really just a German thing), it seems to be single party rule over a nationalistic, xenophobic, and collectivist populace. The party decides by sort of a “gut instinct” what the proper/wholesome way of life is for the good people of the homogenous society, and so long as you do a good job of acting in that way and making the country look good, you’re free to do business and live your life as you want. If the country needs you to do something, then you, your business, your family, your club, whatever it might be, will work in the nations honor diligently at its direction.
Fascists aren’t dangerous? Where are you going with that?
Are you now going to retrofiit every historical example of fascist crimes against humanity to be the actual work of the mentally ill and not politically motivated?
Trump reads Mein Kampf before going to bed. He was trolling racial codes as his political entree. He likes the idea of getting poor people to vote for things to make him powerful, having to do with resentments, which he aggravates for his own gain.
He is troubled about and mostly unable to make public statements that are anti racist or fascist, when that is the default setting for any president we want to have. We know who he’s talking to and we know why. He is most certainly speaking to a fascist base who recognized each other in his candidacy. The only ones who are having a hard time keeping up with this are the media. And Sage Rat.