Frank Gallagher
Player Valuation: £50m
just watching drone racing on eurosport!
Current Affairs Donald Trump POS: Judgement cometh and that right soon
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peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
Of course. My father was on a Royal Navy battleship escorting merchantmen to Russia during WW2, they were on our side once before. My real fear is that this EU that you'd like see built keeps pushing into Russia's area of influence and will one day cause real trouble. I'd be more than happy for both the USA and UK step back at that point and let them get on with it......
Mountfield1985
Player Valuation: £8m
Finally, a good question.
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
And more good news......
The Defcon Warning System, a private organisation which monitors world events and estimates the nuclear threat against America, is now at Level 5 - its lowest possible state.
Just weeks ago the warning was accelerated to Level 3 following increased tensions between US and Russia, with insiders fearing the West was creeping closer to nuclear war......
The Defcon Warning System, a private organisation which monitors world events and estimates the nuclear threat against America, is now at Level 5 - its lowest possible state.
Just weeks ago the warning was accelerated to Level 3 following increased tensions between US and Russia, with insiders fearing the West was creeping closer to nuclear war......
I'd rather we just all got along. I'm not sure Russia truly has our best interests at heart though.
Frank Gallagher
Player Valuation: £50m
i was just thinking that before, the USSSR collapses and all these new states/countries are born, and now these countries are wanting to join up with Europe and not be aligned with russia. cant be going down well with putin can it.
Here's this morning's tl;dr input compiled and edited by yours truly from sources you won't be reading. There's a message here, and it's not a happy one. That doesn't make the delivery any less necessary. Any answers lie in the future, not the past:
***********************************
The tale really began in 2008, or to an even earlier time when many Democrats refused to concede the 2000 presidential elections to George W. Bush. In each case the effects were similar, but growing in amplitude. "Not my president" replaced by "not your president". The 8 years of George Bush led to Barack Obama, determined to undo his predecessor and "fundamentally transform America". The 8 years of Obama have similarly led to Donald Trump who is equally determined to uproot what his predecessor planted.
Neither side appears ready to accept the legacy of the other. We have a series - each step of which consists of undoing the previous term. The result is divergent. Each election creates a backlash which drives half the country away from the other half. There is no coming together in consensus but rather a growing drifting apart. What David Brooks (the putative "conservative" in the NYT and on PBS - heh) offers with his vision of impeaching Trump within a year is more conflict, the same old, same old at a higher tempo. Why wait till 2020 when they can begin changing the president now? Why wait a year when you have now?
Readers of this forum will remember in this development the sorrowful fulfillment of an earlier prediction: that 2016 would mark the beginning rather than the end of conflict, because neither side could completely govern though either side could sufficiently give offense. Two factors will continue this explosive trend. The first is the Internet, especially social media, which has made it possible to recreate the sectarian quarters of the Ottoman Empire, where each side can retreat into its ideological echo chamber. It is now convenient to rabble rouse and doubtless everyone will continue to.
The second is a genuine crisis in the Left. It's dying, having exhausted the intellectual content of the Communist Manifesto. The 20th century has proved its program futile, unsuccessful and homicidal. The future in which it lived had at last been caught in the form of the EU and the gigantic Federal government, and upon examination that future looked just like the past.
What it had left was habit. On it shambled like a zombie. The residual power of the Left in Western institutions masked its intellectual bankruptcy until when tested that strength proved insufficient to stop Brexit or the election of Trump. Now it faces a bleak future: sans faith, sans conviction, sans power and sans tomorrow. It must reinvent itself, as the conservatives did after 2008 with its Tea Parties that never became parties but served as incubators for ideas that have not yet fully hatched. The Left must reinvent itself, perhaps even stop being Left and becoming something wholly new. For the moment they're lost and confused. As David Brooks clearly demonstrates, they're in hell and they hate it.
One of the main challenges of the next decade is to manage the conflicts caused by the simultaneous dying of radical Islam, the demise of the Western progressive project and the dissolution of the post-WW2 international order. Trump is not himself the problem, but part of a phenomena so big that we may not even grasp its full extent.
***
It would be wrong to impute huge numbers of down-market whites voting for Trump simply to racism, as many on the left predictably are doing. Quite a few Trump voters in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio turn out to have voted for Obama—twice. They wanted change, Obama didn’t deliver, so they gave Trump a chance to be the change-agent in Washington they have long sought. The roots of their dissatisfaction are social and economic more than racial, and bien-pensant efforts to portray their legitimate grievances as “hate” reflect the worst of post-modern progressive intolerance.
All the same, it cannot be denied that ethno-racial concerns played a role here—and that it was the Democrats who opened that can of worms. Since the beginning of the century, liberals have been crowing about the “emerging Democratic majority” being delivered by changing demographics, heavily fueled by immigration (legal or not). President Obama’s reelection four years ago seemed to conclusively prove that the “new” America—morally superior to the old, white-dominated one—had arrived, and the Republicans were on life support, waiting for GOP voters to go the way of the dinosaur. As one of Obama’s media acolytes hailed the 2012 victory:
President Barack Obama did not just win reelection tonight. His victory signaled the irreversible triumph of a new, 21st-century America: multiracial, multi-ethnic, global in outlook and moving beyond centuries of racial, sexual, marital and religious tradition.
To the surprise of no one who understands human nature, many whites didn’t appreciate being told that they had to die off for “progress” to be achieved. They didn’t like being derided by their betters as “bitter clingers” with their guns and Bibles, and they especially didn’t like being termed “deplorables” unworthy of compassion or consideration. In the last days of Hillary’s doomed campaign, its contempt for a huge chunk of the American population had become so blatant that one of her top celebrity surrogates publicly hailed the “extinction” of straight white men as a step in the right direction.
Trump is no political genius. He made an appeal to working-class whites, who correctly felt that the Democrats viewed them with undisguised contempt and didn’t want their vote. The “emerging Democratic majority” thesis included the need to get some of those whites, a legacy Democratic voting bloc, to win national elections; under Obama, his party decided they didn’t need them at all, which was a terrible, almost incomprehensible mistake. It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that running against working-class whites—at almost 40 percent of the electorate, the biggest voting bloc in America—is the definition of political insanity.
Yet progressives somehow managed not to see the nose right on their face. Hence President Trump. What commentators term “identity politics” has now become normative, thanks to the Democrats indulging in it, and Trump is now aping them. It would be more correct to term this what it actually is: nationalism. Ethno-racial nationalism is an enormously potent political force; wise politicians know this and employ it cautiously. Nationalism arouses genuine passion and is a political motivator like no other, which explains why a majority of white women voted for Trump, to the bitter consternation of outraged feminists.
Moreover, once nationalism becomes the main political factor, there’s no putting that troublesome genie back in the bottle. Politics become tribal, ethnic conflicts waged at the ballot box rather than on the battlefield.
***********************************
The tale really began in 2008, or to an even earlier time when many Democrats refused to concede the 2000 presidential elections to George W. Bush. In each case the effects were similar, but growing in amplitude. "Not my president" replaced by "not your president". The 8 years of George Bush led to Barack Obama, determined to undo his predecessor and "fundamentally transform America". The 8 years of Obama have similarly led to Donald Trump who is equally determined to uproot what his predecessor planted.
Neither side appears ready to accept the legacy of the other. We have a series - each step of which consists of undoing the previous term. The result is divergent. Each election creates a backlash which drives half the country away from the other half. There is no coming together in consensus but rather a growing drifting apart. What David Brooks (the putative "conservative" in the NYT and on PBS - heh) offers with his vision of impeaching Trump within a year is more conflict, the same old, same old at a higher tempo. Why wait till 2020 when they can begin changing the president now? Why wait a year when you have now?
Readers of this forum will remember in this development the sorrowful fulfillment of an earlier prediction: that 2016 would mark the beginning rather than the end of conflict, because neither side could completely govern though either side could sufficiently give offense. Two factors will continue this explosive trend. The first is the Internet, especially social media, which has made it possible to recreate the sectarian quarters of the Ottoman Empire, where each side can retreat into its ideological echo chamber. It is now convenient to rabble rouse and doubtless everyone will continue to.
The second is a genuine crisis in the Left. It's dying, having exhausted the intellectual content of the Communist Manifesto. The 20th century has proved its program futile, unsuccessful and homicidal. The future in which it lived had at last been caught in the form of the EU and the gigantic Federal government, and upon examination that future looked just like the past.
What it had left was habit. On it shambled like a zombie. The residual power of the Left in Western institutions masked its intellectual bankruptcy until when tested that strength proved insufficient to stop Brexit or the election of Trump. Now it faces a bleak future: sans faith, sans conviction, sans power and sans tomorrow. It must reinvent itself, as the conservatives did after 2008 with its Tea Parties that never became parties but served as incubators for ideas that have not yet fully hatched. The Left must reinvent itself, perhaps even stop being Left and becoming something wholly new. For the moment they're lost and confused. As David Brooks clearly demonstrates, they're in hell and they hate it.
One of the main challenges of the next decade is to manage the conflicts caused by the simultaneous dying of radical Islam, the demise of the Western progressive project and the dissolution of the post-WW2 international order. Trump is not himself the problem, but part of a phenomena so big that we may not even grasp its full extent.
***
It would be wrong to impute huge numbers of down-market whites voting for Trump simply to racism, as many on the left predictably are doing. Quite a few Trump voters in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio turn out to have voted for Obama—twice. They wanted change, Obama didn’t deliver, so they gave Trump a chance to be the change-agent in Washington they have long sought. The roots of their dissatisfaction are social and economic more than racial, and bien-pensant efforts to portray their legitimate grievances as “hate” reflect the worst of post-modern progressive intolerance.
All the same, it cannot be denied that ethno-racial concerns played a role here—and that it was the Democrats who opened that can of worms. Since the beginning of the century, liberals have been crowing about the “emerging Democratic majority” being delivered by changing demographics, heavily fueled by immigration (legal or not). President Obama’s reelection four years ago seemed to conclusively prove that the “new” America—morally superior to the old, white-dominated one—had arrived, and the Republicans were on life support, waiting for GOP voters to go the way of the dinosaur. As one of Obama’s media acolytes hailed the 2012 victory:
President Barack Obama did not just win reelection tonight. His victory signaled the irreversible triumph of a new, 21st-century America: multiracial, multi-ethnic, global in outlook and moving beyond centuries of racial, sexual, marital and religious tradition.
To the surprise of no one who understands human nature, many whites didn’t appreciate being told that they had to die off for “progress” to be achieved. They didn’t like being derided by their betters as “bitter clingers” with their guns and Bibles, and they especially didn’t like being termed “deplorables” unworthy of compassion or consideration. In the last days of Hillary’s doomed campaign, its contempt for a huge chunk of the American population had become so blatant that one of her top celebrity surrogates publicly hailed the “extinction” of straight white men as a step in the right direction.
Trump is no political genius. He made an appeal to working-class whites, who correctly felt that the Democrats viewed them with undisguised contempt and didn’t want their vote. The “emerging Democratic majority” thesis included the need to get some of those whites, a legacy Democratic voting bloc, to win national elections; under Obama, his party decided they didn’t need them at all, which was a terrible, almost incomprehensible mistake. It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that running against working-class whites—at almost 40 percent of the electorate, the biggest voting bloc in America—is the definition of political insanity.
Yet progressives somehow managed not to see the nose right on their face. Hence President Trump. What commentators term “identity politics” has now become normative, thanks to the Democrats indulging in it, and Trump is now aping them. It would be more correct to term this what it actually is: nationalism. Ethno-racial nationalism is an enormously potent political force; wise politicians know this and employ it cautiously. Nationalism arouses genuine passion and is a political motivator like no other, which explains why a majority of white women voted for Trump, to the bitter consternation of outraged feminists.
Moreover, once nationalism becomes the main political factor, there’s no putting that troublesome genie back in the bottle. Politics become tribal, ethnic conflicts waged at the ballot box rather than on the battlefield.
That's a very long winded way of saying white people in middle America were motivated to vote this cycle...
Some write in votes in Dekalb County, GA
1. "Anyone Else" (Seven votes)
2. Cannabis
3. Taco Bell
4. Toby Keith, modern country artist
5. Kanye West, rapper (eight votes)
6. Ric "The Nature Boy" Flair, professional wrestling legend/rapper Waka Flocka Flame
7. Ross Perot, who ran for president in 1992 as an independent and for the Reform Party in 1996
8. "."
9. "Give us better choices"
10. “I exercise my right not to vote for any of these non-principled jokers.”
11. "A bald eagle"
12. "Barney Sanders, the former governor and U.S. senator"
13. Beetlejuice
14. "Alan Mulally, former CEO of Ford Motor Co."
15. Homer Simpson of "The Simpsons"
16. Former Atlanta Brave Fred McGriff
17. U.S. Representative John Lewis
18. The "Sweedish" (sic) Chef
19. Justin Timberlake
20. Atlanta rapper Killer Mike
21. "Me"
22. Country legend Willie Nelson
24. Sherlock Holmes, fictional detective
25. Robocop
25. Satan (two votes)
26. Hillary Clinton, who was on the ballot but curiously written in about 12 times
27. "Sweet Meteor of Death" (two votes) ( @LinekersLegs )
1. "Anyone Else" (Seven votes)
2. Cannabis
3. Taco Bell
4. Toby Keith, modern country artist
5. Kanye West, rapper (eight votes)
6. Ric "The Nature Boy" Flair, professional wrestling legend/rapper Waka Flocka Flame
7. Ross Perot, who ran for president in 1992 as an independent and for the Reform Party in 1996
8. "."
9. "Give us better choices"
10. “I exercise my right not to vote for any of these non-principled jokers.”
11. "A bald eagle"
12. "Barney Sanders, the former governor and U.S. senator"
13. Beetlejuice
14. "Alan Mulally, former CEO of Ford Motor Co."
15. Homer Simpson of "The Simpsons"
16. Former Atlanta Brave Fred McGriff
17. U.S. Representative John Lewis
18. The "Sweedish" (sic) Chef
19. Justin Timberlake
20. Atlanta rapper Killer Mike
21. "Me"
22. Country legend Willie Nelson
24. Sherlock Holmes, fictional detective
25. Robocop
25. Satan (two votes)
26. Hillary Clinton, who was on the ballot but curiously written in about 12 times
27. "Sweet Meteor of Death" (two votes) ( @LinekersLegs )
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
Euobserver......
Hungarian foreign minister Peter Szijjarto attacked what he called “the political hysteria sweeping through the European political elite” about Trump’s victory.
“We think the election of Donald Trump is a good thing,” he said, speaking for Hungary's right-wing and populist government.
He added that EU and US liberal elites must respect the will of the people.
“It is an odd interpretation of liberal democracy that as long as the citizens of a country make decisions that certain elites like, then that democracy is considered to be fine and worthy to follow, but as soon as the decisions are of a different nature, we immediately start crisis talks and criticism,” he said.
Hungarian foreign minister Peter Szijjarto attacked what he called “the political hysteria sweeping through the European political elite” about Trump’s victory.
“We think the election of Donald Trump is a good thing,” he said, speaking for Hungary's right-wing and populist government.
He added that EU and US liberal elites must respect the will of the people.
“It is an odd interpretation of liberal democracy that as long as the citizens of a country make decisions that certain elites like, then that democracy is considered to be fine and worthy to follow, but as soon as the decisions are of a different nature, we immediately start crisis talks and criticism,” he said.
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
Is that the Jobik supporting neo-nazi holocoust denier and Roma hater?
Bernie Sanders:
And people are asking: How does it happen that a political party which wants to give tax breaks to billionaires, which nobody supports; which wants to cut programs for working people; wants to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; many of whose members do not even believe in the reality of climate change – how in God’s name do these guys win elections? Well, the Democratic leadership of today hasn’t figured this out. It is time for profound change. ...
----------------------------
I think he kinda nails it on the head...these folks in middle America are voting for people that would give tax breaks for the wealthy, cut social programs that help them, as well as other government funded retirement and health programs designed to help them. It truly does beg the question...why would they vote for them?
And people are asking: How does it happen that a political party which wants to give tax breaks to billionaires, which nobody supports; which wants to cut programs for working people; wants to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; many of whose members do not even believe in the reality of climate change – how in God’s name do these guys win elections? Well, the Democratic leadership of today hasn’t figured this out. It is time for profound change. ...
----------------------------
I think he kinda nails it on the head...these folks in middle America are voting for people that would give tax breaks for the wealthy, cut social programs that help them, as well as other government funded retirement and health programs designed to help them. It truly does beg the question...why would they vote for them?
Who can say no to the Crime Dog in times like these?
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
He says nice things about you though.......
It's the new right, if everyone's racist it can't be wrong.
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