"Although this may seem unfair and unjust, allowing white males to continue to call the shots politically and economically, following their actions over the past 500 years, is the greater injustice. "
Nah, I'm certain from your perspective it seems completely reasonable -- but why let us live? I mean, if we are so bad, why not just take us out all the way?
The "progressive" brain is really one of the wonders of the planet, if not the entire universe.
Lots of small details always seem to get in the way of the beautiful progressive utopia. Such a shame.
UPDATE: Power Line reports that they pulled this piece down. NOT because it was "nuts", but because it was apparently "fake". So some editor decided it was worthy to post if it came from a person with the alleged credentials ...
I'm more a text guy than a video guy, but it is worth following the link and watching this one, significantly because of the sadness of the liberal CNN reporter in double frame as her planned Trump takedown totally blows up in her face.
As the Syrian refugee says, if someone really cared about them, they would have done something about Assad rather than use them as political pawns.
I'm being unfair though -- the Democrats in charge DO care, it is just that what they care about is POWER. Many of the rank and file Democrat supporters are pretty much the same as sports fans. They cheer for "their team" and listen only to media outlets that tell them that Democrats are good, caring, kind, wonderful etc, and Republicans are evil, nasty, uncaring, killers, "Hitler", etc.
Rarely, even on CNN, or at the New York Times, some story that could give a Democrat pause will slip through. It will usually be so buried that most of them will never even see it -- and the few that do can validly dismiss it as an "outlier that needs no explanation" ... back to our regularly scheduled positive coveraged of THE HOME TEAM! ... "The Party", TP-D.
I got to hear this lament from NPR this PM about "how did we get to Trump from this?" as they pined away for the "good old days" when they tarred and feathered Mitt Romney with this story because "it seemed insensitive".
So they found the thick binders full of data on women that Mitt dutifully and honestly used to place women into positions in state government when he was governor. He was a decent and honest guy, aghast at the way politics was played against him, and aghast that it was leading to Trump in 2016. Even after what happened to him, he still had the illusion that the political game was somehow "fair", or "honorable".
One only needs to listen to the NPR story to understand that it isn't -- at least not if you have any ways of thinking that don't align completely with "The Party" (TP_D) in NPRs case.
The response of the Trump voters, including a whole lot of white women was "F**K your binders and the women populating them -- we understand your game now. We don't listen to you!"
If not for the "Binders", "the '80s called and want their foreign policy back", the lies about Benghazi being due to a "movie", the dog on the car roof, and a few other odds and ends, most likely Romney would have beaten BO and be in the 2nd term of his presidency now. Trump would have never been necessary -- America would not have fallen solidly into BOistan as it did in BO's 2nd term. We might have made some pretty decent progress the past 4 years!
Ah, "the good old days" of 2012 when crying wolf over "Binders of Women" was still listened to by many more sheep out in the hinterlands than "grabbing p***ey" was listened or cared about by 2016. No rules means NO RULES!
If you cry wolf enough times, eventually NOBODY is going to believe ANYTHING you cry! No rules means NO RULES ... and then everyone just screams whatever is on their mind LOUDER. Until they turn to violence ... which usually doesn't take that long.
Not that I really expect anyone at NPR to be able to understand that. They just don't understand how smearing Romney with a lie back in 2012 contributed to them being not listened to now, and they REALLY don't understand it, because they report with glee how in fact Romney actually was the kind of rube republican who thought if he "did the right thing", he would be treated "fairly". NPR knew what was happening and poor stupid Mitt didn't ... but what that hell happened?
Hopefully Trump explained it to him when he gave him the head fake on Secretary of State. "Hey Mitt, you are completely clueless, but it is nice to have dinner with you. How did you enjoy being a speed bump out there on my path to the White House last fall? Damn, you are one slow cookie -- when they slapped you up aside the head with those Binders of Women didn't you even wake up a TINY bit?
Hey, no harm no foul Mitt. Want a position in my administration? GET A CLUE MITTENS!".
Many of us saw this coming for a LONG time ... it's here.
The pictures in the linked article are what is important, so just go and look.
We are wired to be visual creatures, there is a reason that a picture worth a "thousand words" ... many, I'd argue are worth FAR more than that.
The MSM used to be "essentially marketing" for the left, now it IS marketing for the left! To the same extent that "You Deserve a Break Today" or "Nationwide Is On Your Side" is "fake", so is the NY Times. They are MARKETING a viewpoint to you, and that is ALL they are attempting to do -- they aren't about to have their "ads" ("news stories") give some other viewpoint like; "Well, our food isn't all that healthy and Subway might be a good choice as well", or "Insurance is a tough decision, be sure to look at all the facts and shop around".
To a significant extent, I "market" as well ... so does everyone! We ALL have our "teams, tribes, parties, heroes, sacred cows, friends, enemies, etc". Prior to say "1950", it was standard to have a whole lot of Americans with one or more shared transcendent views that were "accepted on faith". Christianity was the big one, American Exceptionalism ... as in Constitutionally limited government by rule of law was the other. A good post trying to understand bias in the old US vs BOistan media is here.
Now, to the extent that anything is "sacred", it is "might is right" and may the best marketing win.
That is why I say we live in BOistan. BO made it completely clear that "rule by power" was acceptible and it was cheered by the left/MSM, and with the election of Trump, the left has shown us in fullness that the acceptance of the results of elections --- even both houses of congress, 75% of the state governments and the White House, is no longer one of their beliefs (see might is right).
Rather, it is cause for resistance at all costs, fighting with the courts not for accepting the will of the people and even ALLOWING (forget "bipartisanship", a word that has now died) the party with all the votes to move forward with any sort of comity. (remember when it was so "Un-American" when Republicans didn't "reach across the aisle" early in the BO administration?)
This is not so much about "politics" as it is cultural survival. This is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, which at it's simplest said "Absolute earthly institutional power corrupts". If "The Party" (TP-D) can't be controlled, and some majority of people returned to a belief in Christ, organized under some political organization, then what developed after the Reformation and reached it's pinnacle in the US is truly dead.
Perhaps you have another answer. If so, I hope that you will give some deep thought as to what that political structure might be -- please note that pure democracy opens the door to Sharia law and many other tyrannies of the masses. Western civilization post Reformation was quite a run. It was certainly not perfect, but up to the abandonment of Christianity, it was doing pretty well.
Without vision, the people perish. BOistan is a foreign land to many of us -- where do we go from here?
The 35% of collegs saw more applications is also true (see linked article), and obviously "60% of Colleges See No Negative "Trump Effect"" is also true. How many times have we seen "Obamacare still popular" articles with the percentage liking it a little over 50%?
The difference is MARKETING, not "news". Our MSM using positive and negative marketing techniques to support left leaning candidates and oppose right leaning candidates is not new at all. To anyone paying attention it isn't "fake news", it is no "news", it is MARKETING!
The linked article is a dedicated attempt to mark Steve King as a "racist", and therefore silence his voice, or at least make it "bad". The chief offending comment for this attempt is "our civilization can't be restored with “somebody else's babies”" ... but they dig some other comments out as well.
First of all, what is "our civilization"? I'd argue it is WESTERN civilization ... Greek, Roman, Christian, Enlightenment, Reformation, etc. Assuming THAT is what he means, what is "somebody else's babies"?
To me that would mean babies from people that don't share that civilization -- they aren't Christian, don't know about Greece, Rome, etc -- or at least don't subscribe to what at least once were the tenets of Western civilization -- free speech, private property, rule of law, ordered universe understandable by man (science), etc
Creatures can carry on their SPECIES and differences in the species -- like race, merely by propagation of genetic material. That however is not supposed to be a "civilization", or even a "culture". Humans want to pass on their culture / civilization to their children -- or at least the ones not in dying cultures and civilizations wanted to.
One of the other "racist" things he said was “The idea that every culture is equal is not objectively true,”. Obviously, it is racist to claim that there are value differences between cultures. The Nazi culture would be equal to the San Francisco hipster culture, which is equal to the culture in deeply red Emmetsburg IA where I spent the weekend, and also equal to a culture of cannibals in Borneo. To not agree with that is simply "racist" -- or maybe "culturalist"?
Here is what Thomas Sowell has to say on the topic (in a great column BTW). "There is no economic determinism. People choose what to spend their money on, and what to spend their time on. Cultures differ." Sowell is an intellectual giant who happens to be black ... so it isn't as important for the WaPo to lable him "racist" for having the same view as King.
We know that, much like climate change, this racist label is not up for "debate", because ... well, because we have been TOLD !
King's influence on the Republican Party and American culture writ large is something to be debated. But whether King's comments are about race is not up for debate.
In the world view of the WaPo, race and civilization or culture are totally equivalent, and thus, obviously totally EQUAL ... as in Nazi, Hipster and Cannibal culture being equal.
Our betters are so intelligent it is hard to imagine why a bunch of hick Emmetsburg IA folks would disagree with them and vote for King and Trump! The gall! And AFTER they have been TOLD!
The "worst flub in Oscar History" barely edged out the return of the "let's have bereaved parents say bad things about the Commander in Chief" gambit. In BOistan, even our admittedly fake tinseltown can't get it's known to be manufactured awards show right. Somehow it seems fitting that our fake news media stacks that failure on top of the old "bereaved parents" pornographic fakery.
In review, pornography is direct presentation of that which should be hidden for civilization to exist. "Obscenity" is an even better word -- showing what ought to be "off stage". Sexual porn is just the most familiar. Showing extreme violence, pain, emotion, etc publicly is also pornography -- the killing of the Christians in the Roman colosseum was pornography. We are DAILY hammered with emotional, violent and painful porn, that is far more damaging than the sexual porn because:
We are primarily emotional and rational beings, not merely sexual, violent, abusive, etc.
The fact that our population is not SCREAMING to shut down the daily pornographic manipulation shows that the media manipulators have been so successful, most don't even realize it is pornographic and destroying their natural desire for the proper distancing required to have a civilization.
When combined with constant direct manipulation for profit and political purposes, the human capability to know what is REAL and what is fake / created / dramatic / voyeuristic is damaged to the point where the basic ability to detect "propriety / distance / wisdom / decency" is lost.
Bereaved parents are bereaved. They are in great pain, they can be prompted to say lots of things. Their emotions are raw, open ... when pushed, it is possible to get nearly any angry statement you would like against ANYONE they remotely see as responsible for the death of their child from many if not most of them.
When Trump got going on his "Fake News" campaign, I thought he was way out on a beach head too far. Now I am beginning to really wonder if he isn't actually at the heart of the matter. I've railed agains the level of media bias and how they use that bias to shape public opinion on daily basis way too often, but only after Trump picked up the Fake News battle did I really start to see the true scope.
It took the media awhile to get the upper hand on Reagan, but they did. They had HW from the git-go, and then did all they could to cheerlead Slick Willie. W was a punching bag from day 1 and never really got his footing, and then we had the 8 years of hyperdrive cheerleading for BO.
I too often forget how we are bombarded with selective tear jerking stores if bereaved military parents, families affected by immigration policy, selected sexual perversions and of course the house fire, car wreck, starving child, etc.
Our humanity has been increasingly damaged by living in the largely fake, always pornographic UNreality show of the BOistan fake news machine. Perhaps it takes a "reality star" to see just how damaged we all are.
Naturally, when BO targeted the media, including jailing some, it was "all good", after all, his heart was always in the right place, and anyone that disagreed with him was racist, homophobic, etc ... you know, "deploreables".
When Mr. Obama was elected in 2008, press freedom groups had high expectations for the former constitutional law professor, particularly after the press had suffered through eight years of bitter confrontation with the Bush administration. But today, many of those same groups say Mr. Obama’s record of going after both journalists and their sources has set a dangerous precedent that Mr. Trump can easily exploit. “Obama has laid all the groundwork Trump needs for an unprecedented crackdown on the press,” said Trevor Timm, executive director of the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation.
BO also made it frequently clear how much he disliked Fox news. Naturally, since the left hates "Faux News", they approved heartily.
When one is a lefty, the assumption is not only that your positions are right/good/moral/etc, and the other side is wrong/stupid/evil/etc, but also (and importantly!) that you should be protected from even having to hear those positions, other than to be aware that "wrong/stupid/evil/etc" exist out there in "flyover country".
Your definition of freedom means freedom FROM having to be exposed to alternate viewpoints including signs and symbols of Christianity. Typically, you are so sheltered that as your own lefty president targets media, you are not even made aware by the same media that you believe to be "unbiased", and then you have a cat when the shoe is on the other foot.
I love the title, a fantastic job by former Enron advisor Paul Krugman. The opposite of his predictions are to be firmly believed (night of Trump election, "the markes will NEVER recover").
Because the NY Times and Krugman are of a piece. They are fake to their very core -- there is "no there, there" in either case. Their entire existence is to blow with a leftward breeze no matter is happening in the real world.
Their hatred of Trump is a major proof of his goodness. For a leader, having the right people hate you -- STRONGLY, is every bit as important -- and maybe more so, then having people who love and support you.
Bill Buckley's boast that he could always detect a liberal got my brain a whirring. I've had one case for sure in my life where I had pegged someone 100% as liberal and turned out to SPECTACULARLY wrong. Nice looking, single woman few years younger than me, walked to work rather than driving a car, happy, outgoing, intelligent, obviously caring -- she just looked and seemed, well, "liberal". She was and is not -- mostly likely to the right of me a little bit (not that there is anything wrong with that)!
The term "Gaydar" might we related -- I've had to be told on multiple occasions "they're gay", when it never crossed my mind. Oh, sure, the flamboyant obvious case -- "Liberace, Elton John, etc", but Rock Hudson? Nope. Lesbian, no hope, I'm totally oblivious.
Here is what I believe.
I suspect that females have "Gaydar" that exceeds even the gay. They are wired to realize if they are "being checked out", and to realize if another female is being "checked out", especially by "their guy' (targeted or captured). Much like it is claimed that our 688 attack subs would figure out where our "boomers" (missile subs) were at because there was a "sonic hole in the water" (we built them TOO quiet, they were a sound screen), the "Gaydar" is really detecting that the male in question isn't giving off any level of female attention reading for ANY woman in the group ... ergo.
I believe that the default person is "liberal", meaning that they believe that humans are generally good, or if not good, easily educated to be good. When someone has been properly educated and socialized, they will as a matter of course be a fellow liberal. The more intelligence, communication ability, creative ability, artistic ability, social grace, etc a person has, the more likely it is that they are liberals. Liberalism is the natural state of political belief for a healthy happy human that wants to get along in society and be successful. Given basic intelligence, a normal desire to get along with others, and even fairly minimal education, any sentient person is liberal. It is a core liberal matter of faith.
As a conservative Christian, I agree liberalism is the natural human state. People like to see themselves as good, and they like to see those that agree with them as good. I was a liberal until I was 21 myself -- it is often said that if you are not a liberal when you are young, you have no heart. I agree with the generalization humor in that, but I disagree with the other part that if you are not a conservative by "40", you have no brain. I believe that high intellect and especially a high level of education, skill in a field, and even financial success (depends on type, small business will tend to turn people conservative) will generally encourage one to be and stay a liberal. The increasingly leftward direction of the US to BOistan, where liberalism is increasingly the state religion as well as just a good idea, makes it painful to not follow the crowd in especially the coastal areas and large cities.
My belief is that the biggest differentiator is belief in God ( the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God). Certainly not all conservatives are Christians, but in order to be a conservative, you need to hold to a set of values that can't be constructed by reason. They have to be, "felt, intuited, discrned". Modern brain science shows that unless we are a psychopath, sociopath, asbergers, etc person, we all DO feel the moral impulse.
Where does it come from? As we might all guess, that is a matter of faith. Hard work has been put into coming up with a narrative that might allow evolution to create it (eg "group selection"), however at best, that is always going to be highly speculative (as an atheist would say religion is).
Modern BOistan has gotten so lost that there are indeed a number of people who are supposedly God believing "christians" who don't believe much of the Bible or in the diety / redemptive power of Christ. Brokaw may even be one of those. It allows one to intellectually call themselves "chrisitan", while believing none of the tenets of the faith (Christ is Gods son, died for our sins, which we admit to, and will save us if we accept his life, death and resurrection and follow him as a result). The "secular christian" is essentially no different from the "secular humanist" in thinking that there may or may not be an afterlife, but since I'm certainly better than most people, I don't need to worry about it.
Again, this is a GENERALIZATION, so there are definiely "many" cases where it doesn't apply -- atheist conservtives, actual political liberals that somehow manage to correlate that with real faith (although I can't explain it, I'm not the judge, Christ is), the point is that in general, the conservative view follows quite naturally from "looking for God" ... or at a minium, the transcendent. The idea that this isn't all there is.
So as a conservative, I believe that man is flawed -- he has a moral nature, but he has an animal nature as well, and that is too prone to take over and cause short term evil that tends to begat longer term evil (cover-up, attachment to the evil, attempts to justify, etc). Also, without faith in a higher power, attention to long-term gain and willingness to accept short term pain for the long term benefit is difficult at best. Eternity is the longest of long term -- so foregoing questionable earthly pleasures in light of eternal gain makes a lot of sense to people with that outlook, obviously NONE to people without it.
If we didn't die, get sick, have to work in order to be fed clothed, etc, then liberalism would be the clear ticket. No responsibility (at least none except voting for "good people"). A world with a TON of "rights" ... freedom to say exactly what you want and recently to not have to hear anything that you don't like, free health, free education (to learn how to have greater pleasure ... like study the Karma Sutra), free shelter, free food, free beverages and recreational drugs (at least they SHOULD be covered!), guaranteed respect and participation trophies, freedom from war, violence (unless beating up a conservative for pleasure), etc, etc. A good reality if you can get it.
As PJ O'Rourke once said, liberals believe in Santa, conservatives belive in God. The only problem with liberalism is that there is no Santa!
It is clear why the young tend to be liberal -- in BOistan up to 21, and lately even 26 and beyond, many of their lives are close approximations of the previous slightly whimsical description. For a wealthy guy like Brokaw, it at least "seems" like the proper alingment of large beauracracy just "might" be able to keep things rolling in general, and it has certainly worked out GREAT for him! Yes, the "sickness and death" thing has started to intrude, but modern medicine helps keep the sickness thing as somewhat less horrible than formerly, and at least mostly hidden. Death is a nagging problem, but it MUST be kinda OK -- everyone does it, certainly it has to be graded on a curve at the very least, and "I'm OK". Why, even if it did somehow turn out that I was "personally responsible" (insane, but this nagging feeling ...), hey, I talk way better than just about EVERYONE, and when you get right down to it, I AM a pretty darned nice guy!
After all, I turned down NIXON (of course) ... in the unlikely event there is a hell in Brokaw's mind, I'm certain he sees Nixon as justifiably there. He LIED to the American people! He erased a tape!
Do I think I can usually spot the conservative in the room? Sure, the same way as a 688 attack sub spots a boomer, or a woman a gay. Because there is the absence of "standard liberal chatter" from that person. They avoid politics just a little bit more than is even the average. They never bring up SNL, and laugh only uncomfortably about "the great skit that really put Trump / Sarah Palin / W in their place!"
For some strange roll of the dice, I'm an even rarer breed, the "conservative inconoclast'. I keep silent not because I would not be perfectly happy to have the give and take, but because of the level of discomfort, hatred, and down right leaving the room screaming that will be ingnited if I expose myself is truly terrible. For some reason, the comination of large size, relatively glib tongue, not being totally stupid, and being decently aware of liberal positions as well as COUNTER positions is especially incendiary. if I dragged my knuckles, they could look the other way and go cluck cluck, but as it is, well, "they can't normalize pure evil"!
My thinking is that the reason for this is that it makes them question their assumption that "anyone reasonably intelligent / well read / emotionally able to communicate", MUST be a liberal! Certainly they at some level know this is not the case -- Buckley after all was WAY more intelligent, well read, glib tounged, etc than I, but my sense is they feel that anyone with even a wisp of that sort of madness ought be clearly marked, and not allowed to just walk around in the open. Perhaps the "outlier conservative preserve" should be formed in the interest of keeping liberals safe.
So I stay stealthy. At my workplace, I'm sure there are suspicions ... they know that I'm an Elder and a LCMS church! They haven't heard me say anything nasty about Trump! I've only laughed minimally and probably detectably and uncomfortably at nasty things said about Trump and Trump voters at the office where politics are to be STRICTLY off limits! Of course the executive director went out and marched in the woman's march, a couple of the people have "Vote Democrat" on their cars and in some strategic not too public spots in their office. After all, when you ARE a good person, you have to be just a little proud of it!
... and that's the way it is! As another noted liberal used to say. As a rather funny postscript, I went off to find a Youtube of Walter doing the signoff (easy to find if you want), but instead explained that he came up with it because "other distinguished broadcasters had one, why shouldn't he?" even though his boss correctly pointed out that it might well not be true -- they may have made mistakes, not gotten all the information, drawn wrong conclusions, etc. But, "people liked it" -- as many DO tend to like "authority", so it became part of the liberal manufactured "reality" of the US -- "fake, but true", or at least accepted as "true". "Uncle Walter" was always right, and we could all believe him ... as he signed off each night with something that was suspect at best, and in many cases, a direct lie.
Americans have enjoyed fake news for a very long time!
We knew during the election that the left had gone around the bend, this is really not that surprising. The question that begs is if the Republican party wants to allow a twiddle of the dial from BOistan back toward the Constitutional Republic we used to have ... "America" I think it was called, or if they really want to sign on fully for the slide to a total pagan tribal state.
Based on the tail spreading of the peacock John McCain, it is certainly easy to see how a few RINOs could easily side with "The Party" and snatch a defeat of gigantic proportions from the infant cries of a new administration that won a victory of truly epic proportions.
As he as evidenced over the last 30 years though, John McCain is a man of a extremely strong principle -- he only has one. It's all about John, and John ALWAYS knows best. He is VERY loyal to John -- everyone else ... meh.
What he loves best is attacking a president of his own party -- he was fine with BO destroying America and creating the tribal state of BOistan. If BO's campaign plane had crashed in '08, McCain would have probably have renamed the country "John" or possibly "Songbird", supposedly his nickname at the Hanoi Hilton because he liked to talk to the Viet Cong so much. It is no wonder he likes "The Party" -- he probably thinks Schumer is Ho Chi Min.
Damn. If Trump is really a bad ass, finding a nice skeleton in McCain's closet and getting him drummed out of the Senate would be one of the very best ops to pull. Arizona is reliably Republican, it wouldn't change the balance in the senate.
It's been obvious since at least February 12 1999 (the day the senate failed to convict Slick Willie) that it is time for desperate measures ... the past 8 years made that abundantly clear.
Now, there is a chance, all be it a slim one, of moving the dial away from our current failed tribal state. We have to expect the dominant tribe, TP to fight hard and DIRTY. It's all they know. Baggage like McCain needs to either muzzled TIGHTLY and QUICKLY, or better yet, removed.
Essentially, all any of us ever sees of ANYTHING is "imaginary". Science is now fairly certain that the data arriving to our brains from our eyes, ears and other senses is WAY too sparse to create the movie, much less that meta-narrative that we are all CERTAIN that we "see". We are all living in our imaginations.
For 10's of thousands of years, our movie was our own little area of nature, our family, our tribe, our meta-model of how the "gods", "spirits", etc that surrounded and even lived in us interacted with all that was part of our existence. Everyone we contacted in other than a battle shared our model ... and if they didn't, they were typically sent packing or simply killed.
It was an incredibly rich model ... everything fit together. Our place, role, task, meaning, understanding, destiny, purpose, etc all made perfect sense to ALL of our tribe. We lived, we died. Our prey and the plants lived and died, the seasons lived and died. The stars and symbols they represented lived, died and came back each year! Our lives might go on in a "happy hunting ground", or our spirits might return to inhabit the area we lived, the creatures we hunted, or even other family members in future generations. We KNEW our place and our destiny!
Or we were created a shorter time ago, or by a longer term directed process with the same "wetware / spiritware / consciousness" ... we will never know the answer to that question in this mortal coil.
What we do know is that we were NEITHER evolved or created for the "reality" we find ourselves in. If we consider "The Matrix", a Black Lives Matter march, Obama promising over and over to "close Gitmo on day one", the media level of certainty that it was impossible for Trump to win, or virtually any discussion with Trump, it should be very clear that we no longer live in a "shared reality".
Not so long ago we were a Christian nation, we nearly all lived in a created universe that had meaning and purpose. Families were generally made up of two parents, a man and a woman, men were men and women were women. There was once a time when CBS news would not even consider using a forged document to take down a sitting president, and a president having oral sex with an intern in the oval office was unthinkable, and certainly career ending were it to occur.
We don't live there anymore. We live in a tribal state where "truth" is tribal -- as it was for most of man's history if you are an evolutionist. In any case, our nature and grasp of reality is very oriented toward tribal truth. There are now no transcendent values, so there is no transcendent truth -- truth is whatever your tribe says. You have to agree with that, or you are no longer part of your tribe.
So, as I've beaten to death, in one tribes imagination, how good a fighter pilot W was 30+ years ago was "news", while in the other tribe it was a matter of no concern. 25% of the Democrat tribe considered 9-11 to be an "inside job". A similar number of the Republican tribe considered BO to be a Kenyan (according to his book, he was a Luo tribesman, but who knows, it's all imaginary anyway). We were once told that "if we liked our healthcare, we could keep it". In various imaginations, all of these things were "real / true / important / etc" ... and some of them still are. It all depends on what the imagination of your shaman is.
Outside of trivia like "2+2=4", reality is actually quite obscure and "culturally (tribally) determined". In Native American culture, hearing voices is a GOOD thing -- not so much in what used to be Western civilization ... I'm not all that certain in "post Western civilization" that it won't be just fine again.
So which press conference did YOU see? It is all a matter of your "tribe". I didn't watch the whole thing, but what I saw I kinda liked. The other tribes heads seemed to be exploding, which in a tribal state is always a good thing! (as long as it is the OTHER tribe!)
We worked VERY hard to get here. No shared transcendent truth! Everyone is FREE, FREE, FREE! If Bernie was elected, even the beer and weed would be FREE, FREE, FREE!
It is all just grand! We have been assured for decades that this is exactly the way it "really is". Truth is an illusion. Your imagination is REAL! Long live Post-modernism and the fruit of it's loins -- Trump!
** Note, again, as a Christian Burkean conservative, I don't REALLY have a tribe. However, I AM a human being -- so I certainly feel the pull of the tribe, just as I get a shiver at Lambeau when the crowd chants "Go Pack GO!". When we used to have a nation to be proud of, I got that same shiver when Star Spangled Banner was played. I'd love to see is get down to the hard business of moving BOistan back toward what we once were ... I have no idea if that is even possible, let alone if there is a ghost of a chance for Trump to start that journey. The fact that pretty much half the country has decided to not honor an election isn't a good sign however.
I've been observing for a very long time that the concept of "truth" in the West has fallen on hard times. Knowledge of Philosophy and Theology are at all time lows. Very few can tell much about the relation between fact, dialectic and rhetoric, understanding of which would help the author of this column a good deal.
During his first week in office, Mr. Trump reiterated the unfounded charge that millions of people had voted illegally. When challenged on the evident falsehood, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, seemed to argue that Mr. Trump’s belief that something was true qualified as evidence. The press secretary also declined to answer a straightforward question about the unemployment rate, suggesting that the number will henceforth be whatever the Trump administration wants it to be.
So in a nation where many states have no voter id, what would qualify as "evidence". Here is some from a 2012 Pew Study:
About 24 million voter registrations are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate.
More than 1.8 million dead people are listed as voters.
Approximately 2.75 million people are registered in more than one state.
So that is an OPPORTUNITY of 27 million. If 10% of the opportunity voted, that would be 2.7 million. Up to now, nobody has really looked for voter fraud, nor do we still have a good mechanism. My son voted in Colorado, when I voted in MN, there was his name right above mine. MN requires no voter ID ... anyone that knows his name and the fact that he is registered could have walked in, voted as him, and be completely secure against prosecution and likely detection (they would have to do a cross-check between MN and CO).
Of course, if one knows about fact, dialectic and rhetoric, they realize that is NOT the point. What Trump engages in, what the linked column engages in is rhetoric -- unidirectional convincing speech. If the author of the column and I engaged in a debate, that would be dialectic, and in both, we may or may not attempt to use "facts". I used a few (assuming you accept Pew as a source) in my response to his rhetorical response to Trump's rhetoric in which BOTH of them conclude that "the number will we what **I** say it is!" ... NY Times columnist asserts zero, Trump and minions assert "millions".
NY Times columnist asserts that he is believable and Trump is not based on -- er, well, "bluster". A very common tool of rhetoricians.
The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
Exactly, always has been, always will be. What difference did it make if W Bush was a great national guard fighter pilot or a mediocre one? None, but the idea of it was enough to take down Dan Rather. What difference did it make if someone "leaked" that Valeria Plame, who drove into CIA HQ everyday actually worked there? None ... but it occupied a lot of media pages for over a year anyway.
The point of rhetoric since Plato and Aristotle has been to convince humans at a level "beyond factual" ... because humans actually never do anything for purely rational and factual reasons, and they never have. As long as "your side" is winning, the standard human tendency is to never even observe the difference between factual basis and rhetoric.
When "your tribe" loses and you understand nothing about truth, philosophy, dialectics or rhetoric, you are suddenly adrift. Your "moorings" are slipped, and it is obvious to you that "the others" have somehow changed.
This may explain one of the more revealing moments from after the election, when one of Mr. Trump’s campaign surrogates, Scottie Nell Hughes, was asked to defend the clearly false statement by Mr. Trump that millions of votes had been cast illegally. She answered by explaining that everybody now had their own way of interpreting whether a fact was true or not.
It turns out that everybody has always had their own way of interpreting wether a "fact" was true or not -- it's just that the column author recently notices that less people than he thought were navigating the shoals of truth and falsehood based on the rhetoric of the NY Times.
Here is what I consider to be Golberg's central pontification of the linked column:
But I’d like to inter a different common retort: that Trump is playing ten moves ahead; that he’s playing 4D chess; that he’s brilliantly distracting the media by creating this or that controversy. I’m willing to concede that there are times when he’s deftly sent the media chasing their tails. But the idea that Trump’s brilliant master plan is unfolding just as he intended is frick’n bonkers.
First, let it be said that I admire Jonah Goldberg and am even significantly jealous of him -- multiple books, respected journalist at the magazine founded by Buckley, who I nearly idolized.
I realize that in order to operate in life in the position he is in, he needs to:
Take firm interesting positions
Always be confident no matter what
To some degree, that is what it takes for "good mental health", even a "good Christian life". Living boldly in the present, forgetting / forgiving ones past errors, enjoying and continuing to live boldly in the future present moments with no concern for the morrow.
My position on Trump definitely "evolved" -- I thought he had no chance, I was aghast when it became obvious that he did, etc. I essentially went through the stages of grief. (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) as we ALL do sometimes many times in a day over matters great and small in our lives. I could go back and link some of my blog entries together and likely chart the progression (with some regressions) relative to Trump.
I feel like Charlton Heston screaming at the Statue of Liberty on the beach. You people blew it all up. You embraced a man who has no serious allegiance to the ideals you got rich peddling and who had a vanishingly small chance of winning in the first place — even if he had been the disciplined candidate he deceitfully vowed he would be. Trump is now an albatross on the party and he will leave a Cheeto-colored stain on both the GOP and the conservative movement for years to come.
Goldberg was one of the founders of the #nevertrump movement on the right. He was CERTAIN that not only was Trump going to lose, but that his loss (and the very likely loss of the Senate with it) was "the end of the GOP" for at least the foreseeable future. Based largely on my reading of Scott Adams and the fact that I had COMPLETELY underestimated Trump relative to the nomination, I was "mildly hopeful" on election day, but far from certain that he would win.
When he started to look like he might win the nomination last spring, I started looking for "other information". It was a tiny example of the same logic that led me to find National Review in the late '70s when I realized that I wasn't ready to turn off my Christmas lights, put on a sweater and accept that the best days of America were behind us.
When I realize that I'm wrong, I like to do a reset and look for "other information". Apparently that is even odder than I realize.
I've been wrong too many times to believe that I KNOW that Trump is not playing "4D Chess" -- or to think that he is a bumbling corrupt idiot savant that happened to luck into the White House (maybe with Russian help). I firmly believe that it is possible that he is a genius with a master plan that STILL makes mistakes and can lose "battles" while still winning the war. Back in August, I was getting more convinced he had to be a "plant". Hell, maybe he WAS a plant, and in trying to throw the election he accidentally won because Hillary is such a putz. We have been living in insane times for certain at least since Slick Willie was able to skate with BJs from an employee in the oval office (or was that "oral office"?).
Goldberg is a smart person, WAY smarter than me. Does he realize that even his supposedly educated conservative readers have such short attention spans that they have forgotten what he wrote last fall? or is it simply true that nobody cares about such tired concepts as "truth", "consistency", etc? If that is true however, what is the objection to Trump? Or anything really -- if BOTH sides (all sides?) have abandoned consistency, truth, "history" (of even the less than 6 months sort), then what exactly do words mean?
Perhaps I missed the memo and everyone else but me decided that it IS actually true that we each defined our own meanings of all words -- including "IS" ... so we have passed through the looking glass, and everything operates with each of us playing Humpty Dumpty ...
"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master— that's all."
There is nothing very surprising about the video -- I prefer text, but very little reporting has been done on this from any source, left or right. What I learned from it was this:
Scott has the ONLY black chief of staff in the US Senate.
Scott is one of three black Senators in the current US Senate (I looked this up) , here is one of the others ... I'll let you make you make your own determination on her "level of blackness"
He was nice enough to not read the ones that had the "N word" in them
The media is a lot more concerned about what happens to Faux Native American left wing women Senators than they are about Republican Black male Senators.
Modern psychology continues to attempt to catch up with Jesus. He knew that people hate to be called hypocrites, thus he says in Matt 23
27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
That is just one of my favorites, it is a litany of "you hypocrites", with the "whitewashed tombs" being a metaphor that stings me hard enough to be more memorable -- I'm a tomb lacking even decent whitewash.
Strangely though, while the amoral poltical left, who proudly proclaim that they are not hypocrites since they have no values, love to talk of "Christian hypocrisy", no true practicing Christain can be a hypocrite. Why?
Because if we really believe what we say before at least some of our communion rituals, we don't ever claim any form of sinlessness -- we proclaim our SINFULNESS and beg for redemption.
I confess to God Almighty, before the whole company of heaven and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned in thought, word, and deed by my fault, by my own fault, by my own most grievous fault; wherefore I pray God Almighty to have mercy on me, forgive me all my sins, and bring me to everlasting life. Amen.
The article talks a lot about why hypocrites are hated, (it's all about falsely signallying morality), then goes on to recommend that we say things like "I think it is morally wrong to waste energy, but sometimes I do it anyway". This would seem to be tautalogically true, since if wasting energy is morally wrong, all the energy wasted by the computers involved in typing the artitcle in and spraying it over the internet would clearly be "immoral".
"Morality" used to be something special -- murder, lying, infidelity, etc. Improper use of a resourse was once about efficency, engineering trade-offs and such rather than "morality".
So given this latest NYT view, is hypocrisy possible without talking? When Al Gore flys to a warm climate on a private jet to discuss global warming, is is action "moral hypocrisy", since he clearly did not use the most energy efficient conveyance possible?
And some thought that medieval theologians were wasting time as they discussed how many angels could fit on the head of a pin!
Executive orders are now a TERRIBLE thing ... when they were WONDERFUL just a few months ago. What changed?
Protests are now hugely to be applauded. Remember when the rather mild Tea Party gatherings in '09 were "chiling and racist"?
Oh, miliary casualties? Back on the front page. More soldiers died in Afghanistan under BO than under W, but one would be hard pressed to know that from reporting. What happened to the anti-war movement that was only operating under "conscience"? Crickets ... perhaps it was more politics than conscience?
The first serviceman died under Trump a couple weeks ago -- big news on NPR, they even had the heartwarming story of family and friends from his hometown. Totally predictable. This is the way i think it ought to always be -- service lives lost with a Democrat in power are every bit as precious as those lost with a Republican in the Whitehouse. If your son or daughter dies under a Democrat president, that sacrifice is every bit as worthy and heart rending as if an awful Republican orders them to their death.
Over the course of his presidency, though, the U.S. military will have allocated more money to war-related initiatives than it did under Bush: $866 billion under Obama compared with $811 billion under Bush.
Again, this is not a story that the left wants published, so it only shows up in the middle of obsture articles. The cost of the "Bush wars" is often listed in the trillions ... naturally BO bears no responsibility for what happened on his watch.
The adversarial press is definitely back. It is a shame they don't realize that the reason they are supposed to exist is to counterbalance BOTH SIDES! Partisan opposition is just partisan opposition, not fullfilling what was once supposed to be the reason for having an "independent" press!
If you want to go into more depth on how special forces raids are planned and carried out, this is a good article. If you don't believe that this would have happened just as it did if Hillary had been taking over and that the news in the press would have been "muted to none", well then you are not a reality based person.
This screed isn't worth your time. Brooks is an elitists elitist and he is what counts for a "conservative voice" at the NY Times as well as every Friday being the voice of the far left, "against" the voice of the far far left, E J Dionne, on NPR. I'm quite certain that neither of them know anyone that knows anyone that even considered voting for Trump.
When the CONSERVATIVE from the NY Times votes for BO against John McCain because he likes the "crease in his pants", it is awfully easy to understand why we need Trump!
Over the weekend, Trump made good on his promise to restrict Muslim immigration and increase vetting. As with most of what he did in week one, this was following through on clearly made campaign promises. The nation has become so expectant in campaign promises being completely meaningless, or just out and out lies, following through on them is shocking! (eg BO, "I'll close Gitmo on day one!". "If you like your health insurance you can keep it!"). It's now a shock to the nation to see a successful candidate do what they said they would do.
There were demonstrators out in Rochester and accross the country, special call in shows on NPR, and the lefties on Facebook blew up in anger, sadness, fear, etc. Over?
So what do we need to know about this order?
Like anything in the first week or two of a new president's adminstration, it is largely based on things that BO either did or did not do during his administration. He did a similar ban on Iraqi refugees in 2011, he discriminated against Christians (Trump is mildly reversing that).
"On the whole, 2016 was the first time in a decade when the United States let in more Muslim than Christian refugees, 38,901 overall, 75 percent of them from Syria, Somalia, and Iraq, all countries on Trump’s list — and all countries in which the United States has been actively engaged in drone strikes or ground combat over the past year. Obama had been planning to dramatically expand that number, to 110,000, in 2017 — only after he was safely out of office."
What he is doing is in line with what he has done all through the campaign, written about in his books, and used during his business career -- staking out a position beyond what he expects to get and negotiating. Scott Adams covers that in detail here.
Most people are completely unaware that BO executed a similar order in 2011 because BO did it, so it HAD to be good!
I highly recommend to read the Adams link. While I am still not convinced that Trump is playing 3-dimensional chess while the rest of the world is stuck on Tic-Tac-Toe, it IS possible.
You start the negotiation by throwing a cherry bomb into the room -- because it puts everyone off guard and it makes them LOOK at you.
You take a position that 70-80% will think is "crazy", but 20-30% will think "did not go far enough" -- eg, why not Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries as well? The 20-30% will see the rest of the world going nuts over what they think is not enough and realize that Trump tried very hard to give them what they wanted, but it was a bridge too far.
Because everyone is looking at you and thinks you are crazy, things will come out that would not have otherwise; BO's Iraq order, the discrimination against Christians, the fact that BO had radically increased Muslim immigration on the books for this year, what our historic rates have been, etc.
I would like Trump to do a speech focused on the the 40K over the last decade and the over 100K planned for this year alone and say; "BO pulled the pin on an immigration bomb and left it in the Oval Office. I fell on it as soon as I found it and there is collateral damage. I can live with that, my mission is to protect the American Peoople."
Much like during the campaign, the most entertaining thing about Trump is to watch the fireworks. I've always enjoyed fireworks!
Democrats can't really say that the idea of calling a Republican "illegitimate" is new -- they did it with W in '01 as well
But this is also part of a pattern. Lewis and Lee, along with some other Democratic lawmakers at the time, also boycotted to make a point when President George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2001. The Washington Post reported at the time that Lewis "thought it would be hypocritical to attend Bush's swearing-in because he doesn't believe Bush is the true elected president."
Naturally the Democrats have all sorts of excuses! The Republicans opposed BO! Er, well, none of them boycotted his inaugurations, but McConnel said he wanted to make him a "one term president"!
Notice any difference with statements relative to Trump?
"The Party" (TP-D) is all about power all the time. The ONLY thing that is "legitimate" for them is 100% TP power 100% of the time. They consider anything else illegitimate.
