US Politics November 2017

And I should say I use my quote refers to the comment “oblivious liberal stuck-up-ed-ness”

i forget - did anyone know carter page before he suddenly appeared on the foreign policy team? i know it's kind of a mystery how some of the 5 people on the team were selected, and who recommended them. but was carter page an unfamiliar name before landing on the team, too?

the ken burns documentary event on this period is going to have to be at least 40 hours long, there's so much

Yeah I first remember Page's name surfacing around that time, and a couple of American reporter/policy types noting his Moscow trips and speeches -- I remember following one real time moment of coverage -- and them thinking he was all about bootlicking garbage.

https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/JRdoNqTii6kGVV7V3VxrQQ--~B/Zmk9c3RyaW07aD0zODg7cHlvZmY9MDtxPTk1O3c9NzIwO3NtPTE7YXBwaWQ9eXRhY2h5b24-/http://media.zenfs.com/en/homerun/feed_manager_auto_publish_494/876f0cd80a4a192d06ec76c4b5260fc9

this photo makes it look like Donald Trump was hiding behind a corner waiting to jump out so he could yell at Bowe Bergdahl.

xpost

first impressions were very accurate in this case. somehow i've managed to avoid video of him until this week. he is kind of fascinating. everything about him seems very unreal and unlikely, yet here he is, talking to everyone, no filter

miserable-looking soldier otm

The video of Carter Page’s speech in Moscow in June 2016 is one of the top Google results when you search for his name and it was widely covered at the time (partly because he tried to do part of it in Russian and ended up talking gobbledegook). The idea that none of Trump’s team recall him mentioning it before he went is vaguely plausible but the idea, which Sessions seemed to hint at, that he didn’t know about it afterwards is magnificently silly.

He is a nobody - no real business experience, no academic credentials and no expertise in Russian affairs bar having lived there for a few years iirc. He seems to have a minor talent for grifting.

Given that last point he should have been Trump's AG.

genuinely well-meaning people wanting to improve constituents' lives

that in no way describes nader or stein when they ran afaict

pretty sure sic was talking about Greens below the presidential level, like some who are winning offices

so this Asia trip should go well, huh

everything about him seems very unreal and unlikely, yet here he is, talking to everyone, no filter

Wait, are we talking about Trump or Carter Page?

page shaved his head in rejection of mr. trump's demanding leadership fwiu

ICYMI

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/03/561797675/im-the-only-one-that-matters-trump-says-of-state-dept-job-vacancies

let's try to think of hypothetical situations where it is good to have a leader that think he's the only person who matters

NPR's hourly news played a clip of Yam yelling over his helicopter "not an important meeting, don't remember much about it" re the Papadopoulos offer to set up a meeting with Putin. Then the correspondent wrapped up with "Last month, the president said he had 'one of the greatest memories of all time.'"

*twist*

L'etat, c'est lui

"We don't need all of the people. You know, it's called cost-saving."

the "it's called" formulation is one of the all-time classic condescensions of the 80s and 90s and i wouldn't be surprised if, like so many of his aggressively dumbass mannerisms, the condescension has just become so ingrained in his thought and action that it's become a tic, barely signifying its original cutting quality anymore and just part of the skein of general hostility that he approaches the world with

Our asshole president is landing here in Honolulu for a layover in a couple of hours. Mayor's let all 8,000 city employees take a vacation day if they want. Traffic is going to be hell as usual when presidential visits happen. There's a big demonstration planned at the state capital, and I'm on the fence about whether to go. Trump is probably going to be some distance away at Pearl Harbor the whole time, but hopefully he'll see the protests on TV and know he's not too welcome in Hawaii. I don't have a sign to wave but if I did it would say, uh, God I don't know, DIE IN A FIRE or smthg.

let's try to think of hypothetical situations where it is good to have a leader that think he's the only person who matters

― Karl Malone, Friday, November 3, 2017 4:32 PM (thirty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

FWIW, I don't think he's speaking wrt his role as president. I think this is genuinely his perspective of the world. Why should he care what a country full of NPCs think about anything?

What if...

...Trump's entire MO for the HNL trip is to inspect Obama's birth certificate?

xpost Our job is just to tell him which village to visit next and how to level up his fake news shield.

that in no way describes nader or stein when they ran afaict

yeah I deliberately excluded Stein before saying that

xp So I do have valid reasons to be ambivalent about the rally.

If Donald inspected the birth certificate and found Obama was born in Hawaii, of course he still wouldn't accept it then, either. Official records are fake news. Anything we don't want to be true is fake news.

xpost

Our armory carries the best equipment around!
...Our armory carries the best equipment around!
...You won't find a better shield in America!
...Our armory carries the best equipment around!

Pee tape imminent.

Longtime Trump bodyguard to face questions about 2013 Moscow trip https://t.co/zupTSatxOo

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) November 4, 2017

We ain’t that lucky/cursed.

please let the pee tape drop on 12/25/17

all i want for christmas is u(rine)

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLIppgE45wM

I hate zappa but when I was a kid that was the FUNNIEST shit.

Throwback to a bad soap opera that feels like it was broadcast half a decade ago, even though it was, like, this July: Today I noticed that my currently dormant Viennese experimental music calendar/Twitter account from back when I lived there was follow-spammed by the Mooch. I let the beautiful absurdity of it all linger for a few hours, then did what I guess was the ethically sound thing to do

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DNyxbBMWsAA6eQ0.jpg:largehttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/DNzge5mWAAA3-io.jpg:large

Hm, that first screenshot was kinda unnecessary. Anyway, one day he'll turn up at the Alte Schmiede or Rhiz or another one of Vienna's marvelous underground/experimental etc. venues and proclaim proudly that he found all of this without the help of @VienneseMoon

WASHINGTON — One of President Trump’s biggest disappointments in office, by his own account, was discovering that he is not supposed to personally direct law enforcement decisions by the Justice Department and the F.B.I. So, instead, he has made himself into perhaps the most vocal critic of America’s system of justice ever to occupy the Oval Office.

Just this week, he denounced the criminal justice system as “a joke” and “a laughingstock.” He demanded that the suspect in the New York terrorist attack be executed. He spent Friday berating the Justice Department and F.B.I. for not investigating his political opponents. He then turned to the military justice system and called a court-martial decision “a complete and total disgrace.”

The repeated assaults on law enforcement cross lines that presidents have largely observed since the Watergate era, raising questions about the separation of politics and the law. But as extraordinary as Mr. Trump’s broadsides are, perhaps more striking is that investigators and prosecutors are so far ignoring the head of the executive branch in which they serve while military judges and juries are for the most part disregarding the opinions of their commander in chief.

“You know, the saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department,” Mr. Trump said in a radio interview on Thursday on the “Larry O’Connor Show.” “I am not supposed to be involved with the F.B.I. I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.”

That frustration has been fueled particularly by Mr. Trump’s inability to control the special counsel investigation into whether his campaign coordinated with Russia during last year’s election, an investigation that unveiled its first criminal charges this week against Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman and two other advisers.

...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/us/politics/trump-says-justice-dept-and-fbi-must-do-what-is-right-and-investigate-democrats.html

seriously, one of my biggest frustrations is that i would really, honestly, love to hear trump's thoughts on the long-term repercussions of allowing a president to control investigations into the activities of presidential administrations. what would he think if obama were allowed to shut down an investigation into the obama administration? or clinton? or nixon? i would love for him to consider this question, and then just lay out his vision for how the world would be better that way.

no need to state the obvious, that he's not capable of it, that he's a literal piece of shit, no literally, he is literally a piece of shit, etc. i know all that. i'm just saying, god damn is it frustrating to know that none of us will ever get clear answers to so many things about trump. at some point maybe we will achieve some measure of closure with what has happened the last few years, but there will be always be some things that are just so fucking unbelievable, with no answers. at least nixon was an intelligent man and you could imagine having a conversation with him where he revealed, inadvertently or purposefully, what his motives were. but trump..god damn. it is maddening.

also, giantmiddlefinger4K_HD.png to david rivkin.

Some conservatives defended Mr. Trump’s right to exercise oversight of the country’s law enforcement agencies, saying that it would be dangerous to have an attorney general and an F.B.I. director who were not answerable to elected leaders.

“The notion that law enforcement, in particular, is somehow to be insulated from political influences and therefore inevitably insulated from political accountability is a horribly dangerous idea from the standpoint of civil liberty,” said David B. Rivkin Jr., a White House and Justice Department lawyer under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

However, Mr. Rivkin added, “That doesn’t mean you exercise your authority to direct those things in a crude and obscene fashion. You have to exercise some politesse about it.”

It would be better because since every Dem is a criminal, Trump making the justice department great again (MtJDGA!) would mean no Dem would ever become president, ensuring that that power would never be misused.

"I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.”

Or, to put it another way, he'd love to be doing the kind of things he's not supposed to do. Which basically translates as, "I'd like do anything and everything I feel like doing. I'd love to be Il Duce or Der Fuehrer."

what is the name for a society built upon a commonly shared respect for facts? it's not the social contract. is it just referring to the preconditions of civil society? i'm blanking on a key term, sorry.

but whatever it is, it feels like it's crumbling. the white house approves a climate report that is, while supported by science and in line with past reports, completely at odds with every action the trump administration has taken on climate change. what a jarring conflict! it makes no sense! and it really doesn't matter. feels like things like this happen all the time, recently.

if trump were playing dimensional-style chess, i'd almost argue this was the final goal, more than anything else: showing that the government can pretty much fall on its face and be incompetent everywhere, and you'll still get by. the corporations are doing fine, and they're here to make sure that we can be fine, at least when using their products. i'm not criticizing the escapists - i have been escaping all the fucking time the last year+. it can be a way of life. but corporatization of everything has accelerated in a gross way. it is everywhere and it permeates everything. i have no proof or evidence, i just feel it, and believe it. it permeates the culture. have you heard of the new trivia quiz app HQ? it is accidentally the purest distillation of dystopia, and it is real, and it is your hand twice a day. 30,000 people competing for $150 with the Smash TV voice as the host. it's hard to explain, and if you do decide to check it out let me know since it gives me a free extra life if i refer you. doubling the user base twice in 2 days, then again in another 2 days, then again. exponential growth, from the founders of Vine! i can't stop playing it.

sorry, got the rainy saturday blues. but for me one of the mental images of the year was facebook, twitter, and google sending their lawyers to testify in front of congress, instead of the CEOs appearing, as is usually the case when a company or entire industry completely fucks up. they sent their representatives! that's power. have your people talk to my people. and did anyone really care for longer than 24 hours? anyway, it just seems like a result of all of this is showing that the effective control of...civil society...? can shift from a system that is at least nominally based upon representation and elections to one that is wholly corporate and privatized. i can already hear the people saying that happened 50 years ago, but imo we have seen many glimpses of it before, but never so broadly across society, and so persistently, and more importantly without sufficient complaint to push it back.

On the plus side, Zuckerberg during their earnings call deviated from script and said specifically that the company was spending so much to right the ship that earnings would actually be negatively affected. So there is that.

what is the name for a society built upon a commonly shared respect for facts?

According to the neo-cons in the GW Bush administration, it's "the reality-based community". Strange to say, they proudly excluded themselves from that community.

On the plus side, Zuckerberg during their earnings call deviated from script and said specifically that the company was spending so much to right the ship that earnings would actually be negatively affected. So there is that.

that's what i mean, though! a plus is that this unelected dude we have no control over has generously decided to donate a small portion of his company's profits to the idea of helping out the country that currently contains their headquarters, and we're all like "well, he can do whatever he wants and it affects all of us, but glad they did the right thing here." that is power

the name is "the state of nature"

wait i mean the other way round lol. sure fucked up that partic gnomic truism

anyway i posted this in the pol phil thread cuz found it spooky

sheldon wolin on hobbes:

The state of nature symbolized not only an extreme disorder in human relations, causing men to consent to the creation of an irresistible power; it was also a condition distraught by an anarchy of meanings. In nature each man could freely use his reason to seek his own ends: each was the final judge of what constituted rationality. The problem posed involved more than the moral issues arising from man's vanity or his desire for pre-eminence. It was a genuinely philosophical one involving the status of knowledge....
[Man] alone of all the animals possessed speech and was capable of science, yet he alone could turn speech into deception, ideas into sedition, learning into mystification.... These ironical overtones rule out interpreting the state of nature as belonging to the remote past... Instead, it represented an imaginative reconstruction of a recurrent human possibility ... built on the causes and consequences of political breakdown. Its meaning remained eternally contemporary and urgent....

In this sense, the concept did not belong solely to the past or even to the present. Its status was that of an ever-present possibility inherent in any organized political society, a ubiquitous threat which, like some macabre companion, accompanied society in every stage of its journey. It was present each night, as men sealed themselves in their homes and succeeded only in locking in fear.... The content of the state of nature could be filled in by consulting "the manner of life which men that have formerly lived under a peaceful government, use to generate into, in a civil war."

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, January 11, 2017 10:25 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In Nietzsche's dream we each remain the arbiters of rationality, and like Hobbes this betrays the usual promise of objectivity; but there is, he says, another way to understand objectivity:

understood not as `disinterested contemplation' (which is a non-concept and absurdity), but rather as the capacity to have one's pro and contra in one's power, and to shift them in and out: so that one knows how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge...There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival `knowing'; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our concept of this matter, our objectivity be.

Objectivity as completeness: but this is the aim only of a very powerful individual, one who can assume so many different identities that she can see the question from every angle.

To N there is no "neutral" point of view, no neutral individual, no neutral state. Only the best, though, can inhabit a multiplicity of points of view, of identities; on them rests the possibility of another escape from the state of nature.

hey that sounds democratic

yes!

tho tbf it also sounds okay to the kind of guy who thinks he's my voice

stopped clock

NEW: WH responds to Bush41 calling POTUS a "blowhard". Calls Iraq "greatest foreign policy mistakes in American history". via/ @NoahGrayCNN pic.twitter.com/XQ2f1JK81C

— Ryan Nobles (@ryanobles) November 4, 2017

Impending death clears the mind.