US Politics November 2017

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.

where's the tax returns?

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

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

He doesn’t know the difference between 41 and 43 right

Rand Paul was just beat up by his neighbor?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/11/04/sen-rand-paul-assaulted-his-kentucky-home-man-arrested/832663001/

so who would be the best kind of aggrieved constituent for him to have been assaulted by, politically

A woman

Reported elsewhere it's his neighbor.

Yeah, not a rando

sounds like a Bowling Green massacre

p sure any major military contractor doesn't like Paul v much

otoh no major military contractor has ever actually suffered so much as a broken fingernail from his posturing nonsense

Such people don't like unfriendly rhetoric even if it is ineffectual, e.g. Wall Street turning on Obama because he made grumpy noises while he ensured that they paid not a jot for their Subprime Era crimes.

"don't just suck me off, tell me how much you like it"

Trump: I came here to see the pokemons.
Abe: They aren't real.
Trump: Just show them to me. pic.twitter.com/mlkjCVhYmg

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) November 5, 2017

is...did...I...just... https://t.co/TGgP7YDbGi pic.twitter.com/9y6p8LGSm5

— Eric Geller (@ericgeller) November 5, 2017

It's funny the way that qualities I'd find charming in a three-year-old make me want this septuagenarian to go to sleep and never wake up.

Donald Trump, forever lobbing katanas at ballistic missiles

Looks like Flynn and his idiot son are next

Please let this happen while Trump is still overseas

Sounds like this shoe is finally dropping.

EXCLUSIVE: Special Counsel Robert Mueller has enough evidence to bring charges in Michael Flynn investigation https://t.co/8TD2rrfPiw pic.twitter.com/0WSRPX1Kd7

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 5, 2017

Oh I should clarify. It’s Flynn’s idiot son, not Trump’s

You know what's weird? I heard that apparently Michael Flynn's son is actually named Michael Flynn. Not Michael Flynn Jr., just Michael Flynn. I think he informally goes by Jr.

This winter: Indictment Mondays!!

xp Is that weird? I share the same name as my father and grandfather and none of us have a suffix.

maybe it's not weird?

You're only a junior if your full name is exactly like your dad's, including middle name.

The Jr. thing is very American. So given that he is American, I suppose it's weird.

Flynn the Elder, Flynn the Younger, Flynn the Eskimo...

Flynn Jr. is currently posting jubilantly on Twitter about a woman being punched.

flynn the traitor. tomorrow's gonna be interesting

That would be his twitter, @mflynnjr

Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary in the Trump administration, shares business interests with Vladimir Putin’s immediate family, and he failed to clearly disclose those interests when he was being confirmed for his cabinet position.

Ross — a billionaire industrialist — retains an interest in a shipping company, Navigator Holdings, that was partially owned by his former investment company. One of Navigator’s most important business relationships is with a Russian energy firm controlled, in turn, by Putin’s son-in-law and other members of the Russian president’s inner circle.

Some of the details of Ross’s continuing financial holdings — much of which were not disclosed during his confirmation process — are revealed in a trove of more than 7 million internal documents of Appleby, a Bermuda-based law firm, that was leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The documents consist of emails, presentations and other electronic data. These were then shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists — a global network that won the Pulitzer Prize this year for its work on the Panama Papers — and its international media partners. NBC News was given access to some of the leaked documents, which the ICIJ calls the “Paradise Papers.”

...Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said members of Congress who were part of Ross’ confirmation hearings were under the impression that Ross had divested all of his interests in Navigator. Furthermore, he said, they were unaware of Navigator’s close ties to Russia.

“I am astonished and appalled because I feel misled,” said Blumenthal. “Our committee was misled, the American people were misled by the concealment of those companies.” Blumenthal said he will call for the inspector general of the Commerce Department to launch an investigation.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/leaked-documents-show-commerce-secretary-concealed-ties-putin-cronies-n817711

good luck blumenthal

Donald Trump found in a dog's ear pic.twitter.com/q0K6sdpg1G

— Faces in Things (@FacesPics) November 4, 2017

well that’s a uniquely upsetting image

Here's a tweedledum-fat profile picture of him to clear your mind:
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/11/05/us/06PREXY/06PREXY-superJumbo.jpg

At this rate this may be the first president with his first Lil' Scoot. Lil' Scoot One.

OK, I know the URL refers to the plane behind him but the fact that the Times tagged that photo "06PREXY-superJumbo" is cracking me up.

Ha, that was my thought, too!

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. — Sen. Rand Paul is recovering from five broken ribs and bruises to his lungs, and it is unclear when he will return to Washington, aides said Sunday, signaling that injuries he sustained Friday are far more severe than initially thought.

Fat Trump is fat, but he ain't no William Howard Taft.

give him time