Current Affairs Donald Trump POS: Judgement cometh and that right soon

[roydo]

@The Esk @Bruce Wayne @Dylan @Groucho @roydo

What are the rules on threadcrapping, Mods? It stopped being funny a long time ago and it certainly adds nothing at all to the debate.

I wouldnt know what is threadcrapping, (nice one that btw), in this thread anyrate Clint.

But for those that do, knock it off please. Ta.

 

[TheFinnFan]

@The Esk @Bruce Wayne @Dylan @Groucho @roydo

What are the rules on threadcrapping, Mods? It stopped being funny a long time ago and it certainly adds nothing at all to the debate.

Excuse me? Have you read her books. Excellent stuff...several best sellers. Currently reading Adios America.

 

[Groucho]

@The Esk @Bruce Wayne @Dylan @Groucho @roydo

What are the rules on threadcrapping, Mods? It stopped being funny a long time ago and it certainly adds nothing at all to the debate.

I wouldnt know what is threadcrapping, (nice one that btw), in this thread anyrate Clint.

But for those that do, knock it off please. Ta.

Well like Roids says, we'd like no WUM/spam/crap.

Persistent offenders are dealt with BUT, this is the problem with political threads and that.

 

[Clint Planet]

Excuse me? Have you read her books. Excellent stuff...several best sellers. Currently reading Adios America.

To be honest, mate, you add very little to the debate on this thread. You don't address serious points made, you just shout unedifying non-sequiters from the bar. I'm all for finding out what makes "the other side" tick but you're little more than a troll on this thread. You can do better than this.

 

[TheFinnFan]

To be honest, mate, you add very little to the debate on this thread. You don't address serious points made, you just shout unedifying non-sequiters from the bar. I'm all for finding out what makes "the other side" tick but you're little more than a troll on this thread. You can do better than this.

I quess I have to start put up some cnn links to get your approval.
....as if I wanted it.

I think I have put more info about Trump in this thread than you actually.

 

[dholliday]

@The Esk @Bruce Wayne @Dylan @Groucho @roydo

What are the rules on threadcrapping, Mods? It stopped being funny a long time ago and it certainly adds nothing at all to the debate.

Ann Coulter, Louise Mensch, Katie Hopkins.

shag, marry, kill?

 

[dholliday]

I'm all for finding out what makes "the other side" tick

ok, less of the lark from me now....i'd agree with this 100% - it's vital, and possibly the most important thing we all have to attempt these next 5 or 10 years. Less tribalism, less drawing lines and taking sides, less identity politics. More inclusiveness, more empathy and more thoughtful nuance.

Big big challenge...for both sides.


Otherwise if we keep going down this drawing-lines crap, we may end up with serious societal issues: at best more recession, at worst civil war.


Simon Jenkins is hit-n-miss but sometimes he's so bang on with my thinking, especially his last two:

populism – the term no longer means anything - Politicians and philosophers, proceed with extreme caution. The political words we all learned in childhood – left, right, liberal, conservative – are turning to dust

Poor David Cameron was defeated, he says, by “populism”. It was not by people who disagreed with him or by his political enemies or those he had offended. It was an evil called populism. What on earth did he mean?

The answer is near meaningless. Populism has become a euphemism for exploiting the people’s will, supposedly by facile, short-term solutions to complex problems. For a politician to protest against such exploitation is rich. It is woven into the history of politics.

Cameron lost office because he was trapped into a referendum by pledges he had made to his own party. He then mishandled the honouring of that pledge. He should have done a Harold Wilson and stood aloof, promising only to abide by whatever result the public delivered. That he chose not to do so is honourable, but hardly makes him a victim of populism.

The reality is that the political words we learned in our childhood are turning to dust. Left and right are losing all meaning, as are liberalism and conservatism, globalism and nationalism. My morality is your self-interest.

The “people” by whom Cameron felt defeated were not the downtrodden masses of the traditional left or some retro-political horde of rightwing males. The nearest the pundits have come to a populist constituency are the “left behinders” – those who claim all parties, the entire so-called establishment, have ignored their hopes and fears.


These left-behinders see favoured groups – some rich, some less so – using or abusing liberalism as a front for ripping them off. The state is no longer a “welfare” one. It is a lucrative racket for those lucky enough to be on the right side of it. They are victims of negative discrimination.

To this extent, populism is a healthy dose of disruptive rebellion. It challenges all groups and interests who are doing well out of the state. But that is not so much radical as reactive. It is a howl of pain in a darkened room.

This is the time to move carefully. We need political philosophers to listen, not dictate, to deconstruct and reconstruct our language, to give us tools for a new and rightly sceptical age. Democracy depends on parties, coalitions and coherences. It depends on populism in what should be its best sense, the craving for democratic legitimacy. Words are the life rafts of that legitimacy. Just now, they are sinking.

Blame the identity apostles – they led us down this path to populism - With its over-defensive advocacy of minorities, the left has jeopardised half a century of liberalism

I have no tribe. I have no comfort blanket, no default button that enables me to join the prevailing hysteria and cry in unison, “Of course, it’s all the fault of X.” Meanwhile we everywhere see the familiar landscape clouding over. There are new partings of the ways, disoriented soldiers wandering the battlefield, licking wounds. The liberal centre cannot hold. It cries with Yeats, “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

I confess I find all this somehow exhilarating. Cliches of left and right have lost all meaning, and institutions their certainty. Even in France and Italy, European union is falling from grace. A rightwing US president wins an election by appealing to the left. In Britain, Ukip can plausibly claim to be supplanting Labour. A Tory prime minister attacks capitalism, while Labour supports Trident. Small wonder Castro gave up and died.

Conventional wisdom holds that it is the “centre left” that has lost the plot. The howls that greeted Brexit, Donald Trump and Europe’s new right are those of liberals tossed from the moral high ground they thought they owned. Worse, their evictors were not the familiar bogeys of wealth and privilege, but an oppressed underclass that had the effrontery to refer to a “liberal establishment elite”.

Paul Krugman, field-marshal of an American left, stood last week on his battered tank, the New York Times, and wailed of Trump’s voters: “I don’t fully understand this resentment.” Why don’t the poor blame the conservatives? He had to assume the answer lay in the new Great Explanation, the politics of “identity liberalism”. He is right. It is 20 years since the philosopher Richard Rorty predicted that a Trump-like “strong man” would emerge to express how “badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates”.


This prediction has now gone viral. Likewise, the historian Arthur Schlesinger warned that a rising campus intolerance, of “offence crimes” and “political correctness”, would endanger America’s national glue, its collective liberal consciousness.

The latest guru on the “what Trump means” circuit is the US political psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Conversing with Nick Clegg at an Intelligence Squared event in London last week, he was asked over and again the Krugman question: “Why did poor people vote rightwing?” The answer was simple. There is no longer a “right wing”, or a left. There are nations and there are tribes within nations, both growing ever more assertive.

To Haidt, Trump’s appeal is to groups alienated by competing groups. Identity liberalism elevated the “sacred victim”, uncriticisable ethnic minorities, women, gay people and migrants, to whom Hillary Clinton explicitly deferred in every speech. Thus to favour one group is to exclude another, in this case the so-called “left-behinders”, identified as the “pale, stale, male – and failed”.

In America, as in Europe, older, white men are the only group that liberals can abuse and exclude with impunity. It is a group clearly dominant in small towns and rust belts, gazing out at far-off cities, globalised, digitised, college-educated and “correctly” liberal. The poorest place in America with a non-Hispanic white majority, Clay County in Kentucky, voted 87% for Trump. For Clinton’s liberals, ignoring these people was a category error, one that could change the course of western politics.

Last week, the US academic Mark Lilla joined the why-Trump? circuit with an analysis of identity liberalism as “a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity”. It granted selective rights and privileges, but never duties. “Expressive, not persuasive … it distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force.”

Lilla is scathing of the “whitelash” excuse, which licenses liberals to abuse those voting for Trump and Brexit as racists, and political correctness as yet another rightwing conspiracy. To him, these voters are poor people who fear for the integrity of their communities and see globalism as a mis-selling scam. They may be wrong, but they’re not evil.


Across the Atlantic, this onset of electoral realpolitik has created a discourse. Trump may indeed be a nightmare, but what shall we do about it? In Britain, liberalism shows no such intellectual robustness, rather a denial clothed in hysteria. The attempt by the remain tribe to undo June’s Brexit vote is ludicrous, a sign not of bad losers but of stupid ones. They should fight for soft-Brexit, not no-Brexit.

For myself, I cheer as people protest that it no longer “means” anything to be left or right, liberal or conservative. If the left is so lacking in confidence it needs to launder itself as “progressive”, that is fine by me. But I just want to kick over the tables, rip up the rule books, get on with the debate. I want to re-enact the glorious revolution of 1832.

As for the future, commentators such as Haidt and Lilla seek a “post-identity” liberalism, built round a restoration of the nation state as repository of agreed values. This may mean accepting such majority concerns as the pace of immigration. It is one thing to ask a small community to take in two Syrian families, but impose 200 and liberalism will have an eternally uphill struggle.

There is always a balance to be struck in any community, between its right to order its own identity and a wider obligation to welcome strangers, particularly refugees. Even Poland’s Europhile Donald Tusk admitted this year that the EU had been wrong to pursue an unqualified belief in “a utopia of a Europe without nation states”.

British liberals, of whatever party, have spent the past six months fleeing one trauma after another, hurling insults over their shoulders. But as John Stuart Mill said: “He who knows only his own side of a case, knows little of that.”

The apostles of identity liberalism have fallen into Mill’s trap. They see authoritarianism in others, but not in themselves. They see discrimination in others, but not their own. In guarding their chosen tribes, they fail democracy’s ultimate test, of tolerance for the concerns of those with whom they disagree. Someone else is always to blame.

Such tunnel vision has jeopardised the progress made by the cause of European liberalism over the past half-century. It has been given a bloody nose, and there are more on the way.

 

[JonS]

I like the idea of all the normal left and right wing terms being broken down.

It will be interesting to see if Trump (who is not someone I would have normally felt much allegiance with) manages to change things for the better (jobs and economic prospects) for those people in need. If so he will have done a lot better than soft left liberal leaders across the western world.

It will also be interesting if he indulges in protectionism trade wise and how successful he is with that compared with the free market globalism practised by the rest of the western economies.

He certainly looks like bringing something different to the job and I hope he follows those instincts and doesn't get drawn into the globalist inertia that slowly seems to be making everyone poorer.

 

[TheFinnFan]

I like the idea of all the normal left and right wing terms being broken down.

It will be interesting to see if Trump (who is not someone I would have normally felt much allegiance with) manages to change things for the better (jobs and economic prospects) for those people in need. If so he will have done a lot better than soft left liberal leaders across the western world.

It will also be interesting if he indulges in protectionism trade wise and how successful he is with that compared with the free market globalism practised by the rest of the western economies.

He certainly looks like bringing something different to the job and I hope he follows those instincts and doesn't get drawn into the globalist inertia that slowly seems to be making everyone poorer.

Good points. Good start would be that democrats and liberals would start to live by their principles and give Trump a chance because he won fair democratic elections.
THATS the bottom line here.

 

[JonS]

Good points. Good start would be that democrats and liberals would start to live by their principles and give Trump a chance because he won fair democratic elections.

The thing is parts of his agenda - the protecting and building up of industry, providing jobs, not indulging in regime change are all things normally on a socialist agenda.

As long as he doesn't indulge in racism or starting wars the dems and liberals should be happy to give him a chance unless their professed wishes to help poor people isn't sincere and they'd rather just protect their place in the elite.

I really don't think much of Blairite Labour and its supporters in the UK for this reason. I'm a Corbyn supporter but in the US I think Trump could turn out to be closer in some ways to socialism than Clinton would have been.

 

[Moomin]

Ann Coulter, Louise Mensch, Katie Hopkins.

shag, marry, kill?

Kill the lot.

 

[rascal]

These latest findings certainly highlight that President-Elect Snowflake is illegitimate, there's no doubt about that.

 

[JonS]

Kill the lot.

While I cant defend Katie's previously calling migrants cockroaches recently she has been far more interesting visiting the Calais refugee camps and Cuba where she wrote some surprisingly insightful articles.

Even her liberal bashing has been fairly on the mark (I remember her laying into Chukka Ummuna for just sniping at labours leadership from the sidelines rather than actually standing for leader himself).

Though I don't always agree with her I rate her as a bright star burning brightly and I hope she survives her health issues.

 

[TheFinnFan]

These latest findings certainly highlight that President-Elect Snowflake is illegitimate, there's no doubt about that.

Haha talking about fake news.

 

[dholliday]

These latest findings certainly highlight that President-Elect Snowflake is illegitimate, there's no doubt about that.

no doubt about what, rascal? why is he illegitimate?

if you're referring to the FBI increasing pressure on Russia by implicating hackers from their (huge) country leaked Clinton mails to Wikileaks then you may be disappointed to hear that even the FBI admit the overall impact to the election results was underwhelming.

What about all these leaks implicating Trump's rudeness towards women? Would they have made a Clinton win illegitimate?