Do you like or hate Donald Trump, and why?
This test has obvious limitations but I think the variety of the questions can help to interrogate one's own positions
Fun guessing where people will situate..
In case you missed this when it was first published 1933 vs 2018
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/suffocation-of-democracy/
Blindboy says
Trump cares about nothing but his own magnificence.
I say
People are in institutions for being less disconnected from reality.
It is all a bit Cruella de vil .
Great link bb. Very sobering. Again.
"The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal."
Personally glad the polls got it right this time.
What the democrats do with their win is anybodys guess. So many options. Choose wisely.
At least we know what to expect from Trump and the Breitbart Head Banger Band...........more of the same.
If you thought the last 2 years were 'crazy' I reckon we ain't seen nothing yet.
....and something about dumb bullies brings out the best in me I suppose.
If that is a reply to my question Blob then it would be a stretch for me to conclude that you are motivated purely by the enjoyment of provoking.
I agree that Trump is being treated badly and I think his disposition toward life has a way to draw negativity toward him. There is a direct causality there. It doesn't mean he 'should' be treated badly, but he seems unwilling to consider that he has ultimate responsibility for how his life is an ongoing battle to escape from humiliation, so I don't feel any desire to defend him (unless he took some responsibility).
Blob. There's plenty of tests out there for you. Here's something my 8 year old suggested might improve your comprehension skills.
We dont want a repeat of that little episode yesterday now do we?
Yocal
I'm provocative when it suits my intention, and that's as much about job satisfaction as destabilisation......but I'm not a provocateur.
I'm too busy making runs ...
Way I see it I'm a free public service - if I didn't argue, how would people know they were wrong?.
I'm a bit Bolshie that way...
Yocal
Don't blame the victim.
We have seen a rapid and radical shift to the social progressive Left in western societies.
The universities, arts and especially media are now largely progressive rackets that are increasingly aggressive in the way they push conformity.
Conservatives are finally fighting back and they found their gladiator in Trump.
The progressive bullies are apoplectic because unlike Romney, Trump fights....and wins.
Unforgivable.
As I said at the beginning...you never heard a bad word about Obama, and you never hear a good word about Trump.
The game is rigged, and when people find out the fix is in they get angry.
HappyaS
Suggestion....you need a little bit of relevant argument to go with your ridicule....not saying your ridicule isn't top notch...but, you know..
oh blobby , you just love trolling , and making shit up.....so you can waste more of our time having to recheck your quotes which are a best alternative supposition...
Like Trump being a liar...after your rant on what an incredible person the Don is , and you blindly follow the Breibart narrative to the point.......
......."eg I can't agree with the negative judgements of Trumps motives or actions, because his actions in office have consistently lined up with his words.
He is so determined to keep his promises that attacks on his honesty take on the appearance of lies.".......I said with a touch of sarcasm ..." Don's the only man on the Planet who doesn't lie,".....as for me judging you and telling you to stop invoking the word of God as back up for your nationalist views....Blobby you seem very sensitive and even a bit bitchy , that I busted your veil of evil hypocrisy .....
it's OK blobby you love to have your fun on these boards and the best way it seems is finding a Liberal forum and come in and unload on the left while pretending to be a God fearing Christian , with the wrath of Trump providing the back story, and a nationalist view of the world and religion....entertaining , like the Don!
Jeff Sessions and his regressive attitude to marijuana gone . A victory for commonsense.
Trump's lighting one up as I type Blowin.
And you reckon he never does anything appropriate
There's the man of the hour! He sure did vote, twice now....
Sharkman and others, a comment I posted around 16 pages back:
"I get the feeling that Blob isn't really a Christian. Or even a Trump supporter. Hell, he may not even be an American!
I also get the feeling that he is clearly 'against' a lot of stuff, but not really 'for' anything in particular."
A few pages later, I posted this:
Fun factoids (and from Wikipedia, no less! Well, kinda):
The Blob was a 1958 American independently made science-fiction horror film.
The storyline concerns a growing, corrosive, alien amoeboidal entity that crashes to Earth from outer space inside a meteorite. It devours and dissolves citizens in a small community, growing larger, redder, and more aggressive each time it does so, eventually becoming larger than a tremendous hotel building. Yuge!
The community works out that The Blob's only vulnerability is being left out in the cold.
They then banish it to the Arctic. One of the citizens notes that while the creature is not dead, at least it has been stopped. To this, another replies, "Yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold".
Anyway, is Swellnet's The Blob proof that anthropogenic climate change is real?"
Ho hum.
Know thine gonif/macher and their shtick.
They walk amongst us!
Shalom.
It is no coincidence that the right wing parties of Australia, the UK and the US are all fracturing at the same time. In Australia, the dinosaur wing of the Liberal Party, led by Tony Abbott, is preparing to seize the leadership when, as seems inevitable, the party loses the next election. It will not be an easy victory and could damage the coalition seriously enough to hand the following election to Labor as well. In the UK the Conservatives continue to tear themselves apart over hard vs soft Brexit, while in the US the Republicans are divided into so many competing factions they resemble nothing so much as a jigsaw in which the pieces, when forced into place, fail to make a coherent image.
The root cause of all these divisions is the same; hubris. In each case, having risen to power by attracting moderate centre voters to support them against weak opposition, they seized the opportunity to impose the extreme right policies they had been dreaming of for decades. In each case they stoked fear of immigrants, cut welfare, over-indulged their taste for jingoistic rhetoric and lost the support of moderate voters.
In the US the Republicans have already started to pay the price and will pay even more heavily in 2020 unless they can unify behind more moderate policies. This will be a difficult task considering they have to work with an ill-disciplined President with no grasp of politics and no interest in policy except as a tool to gain re-election or boost his personal wealth. In the UK, while Brexit will probably go ahead, it will almost certainly cost the Conservatives the next election. In Australia of course, the next election appears unwinnable for the coalition. The right is in retreat. Its neo-liberal policies have been discredited, its racist allies exposed and its philosophical absurdities displayed for all to see.
Is it possible to over indulge in jingoistic rhetoric in the USA ?
I'd say we're a long way from business as usual. If people can't see that the right is owning the cultural moment then disillusionment awaits, as does yet more self-inflicted damage. And it's not enough to admit they own the zeitgeist, understanding why is paramount. For the first time in my lifetime a broad intellectual argument has been prosecuted by the right and it needs to be addressed.
If the left doesn't take this seriously then it's going to be a long and frustrating battle, and they'll lose good people along the way.
I have I missed something? the right's broad intellectual argument? @stu can you expand on that.
I personally see the right and its narrative of market based economics as now discredited but that's not to say they haven't won. Neo-liberalism/globalisation and the collapse of organised labour being massive victories for the right but voters in western democracies have woken up to those lies. So the fracturing that Blindboy speaks of is real and they seem to be struggling to find a new narrative, apart from the politics of fear and exclusion, is that what you are talking about @stu?
C'mon...
The argument that laissez faire globalisation is only benefitting the few.
That free trade practices cause greater impact than they're given.
That China's soft power needs to be handled with caution.
That we shouldn't be selling our land.
That nationalism has 'some' value.
That the academic left really needs to figure out who it serves (and how to serve them).
That calling everyone a racist, while sometimes warranted, serves no-one.
That shrill shutdowns of speech, while sometimes waranted, backfire on the protagonists.
That the right has its narrative, but the left is slow to form a new one.
Not all charges are coming from the neolib right, but they're all accusations the left has to address. In fact, if things panned out differently they could very well have owned a few of those issues.
The last one is perhaps most important, and I see hopes here and there. At least they're not completely tone deaf to the new reality.
I think the first two are much closer to traditional left views. The right has performed sleight of hand, criticising them with one hand while imposing policies that worsen them with the other.
Traditional left views that they’ve abandoned.
And I'd agree, yet they haven't been pursued by the left recently. It was Trump, with the aide of Bannon, who put them on the table, and that's why if those actions are pursued then he's the POTUS we had to have - despite all his personal failings.
If we take the second point, the traditional left response would have been to support those whose lives had been disrupted by free trade rather than to curtail trade. The background to that view being that the costs in developed nations have been hugely outweighed by the benefits to developing nations. The failure then has been that of governments in developed countries to put in place effective policies to retrain and support displaced workers. Governments that have been to the right of centre for the entire period. Blaming the left then seems a bit hard since there has been a long period when media ownership and political pressure have made it very difficult to put the left's case. Hopefully we getting to the end of that.
Also think it’s funny that BB believes that it’s only the right that’s fractured .
Look at the loss of votes the ALP is witnessing compared to a decade ago. I for one , never envisioned I’d ever vote anything but Labor . Now it’s a stretch to think they’ll ever win me back .
...... but they will still win the next election and unless you are in a seat with an independent your preference will still flow one way or the other. Happy for it to go to scomo's mob are you?
Nice list stunet...you have been listening...whilst a few of ya mates are srill in denial.
I'd say the left is lacking a cohesive argument much more than the right. Whilst the right is all sliced up by factions, they generally agree on a lot. Somewhat cohesive.
The left however is all over the shop. Too many pet projects on the run whilst flat out denying any need to address the first two on the list. Yes, they've been dragged kicking and screaming to the negotiating table, but pelosi's best attempt at genuine concern yesterday upstaged the scomo in the trying ti appear genuine stakes.
I think it would be so fucking easy for the left to win across the board across the world at the moment. Dead easy, in the bag. It's so bloody obvious what people are screaming for atm it's embarrassing they cannot adjust.
The likes of Blindboy taking the pathetic shore lapping half footer as a so called 'blue wave' doesn't give me much hope. His unbounded enthusiasm to return to a clintonesque status quo is just flat out alarming.
But...each to their own...
Of course not , BB.
That’s what so shithouse. Neither of them deserve my vote.
sypkan, find a single positive comment I have made about Clinton or withdraw your comment. I am really pissed off with people putting words in my mouth. My position over a number of years, well before Trump, has consistently been that the US is in decay and its domestic and international policies have been reprehensible. So how about discussing the matters at hand rather than taking cheap shots which lack even the justification of accuracy!
problem is the new guy replacing Sessions is possibly worse , and will try and shut down the Meuller investigation as he has previously stated over the last 12 mths......so still a lotta shit to go , more confusion , more polarization of the people....so what damage can be done in the next couple of mths...like eg firing Mueller and stopping the Russian Investigation and the possible impeachment for obstruction of justice......we have more years of discussion coming up...ouch!
In a previous post I referred to the philosophical absurdities of right wing parties but did not explain what I meant. As an atheist I try to avoid religious discussion. It is very hard to argue against what people believe, since belief is generally acknowledged as a bulwark against rational thought. I am happy to include atheism under that heading. It is a belief, I am unable to see any rational arguments against it but that maybe exactly the kind of self-imposed blindness it is tempting to criticise in others.
My point about philosophical absurdities unfortunately then does involve religion. It rests in the conflict between the explicit expression of Christian belief while proposing policies that directly contradict Christ's preaching. Christ proposed compassion, inclusion and the forgiveness of sin. Right wing parties across the developed world have imposed policies that show no compassion to the disadvantaged, seek to exclude on the basis of race, religion or even simple inconvenience. To add insult they then lay the blame for disadvantage, however wrongly, on the individual and refuse forgiveness where some blame might attach.
My knowledge of the Bible is not strong but I recall that the Book of Revelation quite specifically warns about those who would debase Christ's message for their own benefit and predicts the appearance of an anti-Christ. The "Christian" supporters of anti-Christian right wing policies might like to re-read that bit!
El Facto , yes our Blobby Boy is quite a unit , very weak on his so called Christian values , but very , ah , robust on right wing / Nationalistic issues to the point that the issues are more important than his supposed Christian Values......which means he has put the law of man ahead the Law of God......and that is not Christian!
So I think your right , he could be just a ablobination from outer space , sounds logical to me!
You might be right sharkman...
Well you clearly chose clinton over trump.
And you clearly subscribe to much that her wing of the party is pushing. If that offends you...well..er....all Ive got is sorry...
Do you really think the democrats are currently more cohesive than the republicans? Even with trump, that's a big call.
Labor is oz may have sorted their little differences (in the public eye anyway). But the argument about who and what they stand for is at least as much all over the shop as the libs.
As pathetic as scomo is, I'm not seeing any solid enthusiastic arguments for shorten. It's more so....'don't vote for that guy'. Which has proven to be a possible fail in teems of strategy.
So by your logic preferring Turnbull to scomo makes me a Turnbull supporter? Yeh right.
El Facto , yes our Blobby Boy is quite a unit , very weak on his so called Christian values , but very , ah , robust on right wing / Nationalistic issues to the point that the issues are more important than his supposed Christian Values......which means he has put the law of man ahead the Law of God......and that is not Christian!
So I think your right , he could be just a ablobination from outer space , sounds logical to me!
It's not just the person. Besides they're on the same team.
It's the narrative that you share with clinton. And you're not alone.
@Sypkan,
To be fair, and this is where I differ from you and Blowin, there was no alternative to continuing globalisation until Trump came along. Barely anyone was talking about it, not on here, not in wider forums, it was a marginal issue until Bannon connected it with simmering working class unease.
So to say, "Labor should have been doing X, Y and Z" is to miss all the context, and even veer towards hypocrisy because you weren't doing it either.
A political party can only go where its constituents want it to go. Five years ago, if the Labor Party said they're rejecting globalisation and harnessing nationalism, they would've been roundly condemned. Expelled to the fringes. Probably by you and Blowin too - the times weren't right.
It's taken a disruption of this magnitude to explode those end-of-history beliefs and let the pieces fall in new ways.
I’ve been saying it since 2010 or so. That’s when I started seeing labour hire companies replacing Australians en masse. ALP permitted it and encouraged it
. The realities of globalisation were stark then .
I watched a Chinese state owned company try to create a virtual vassal state in WA whereby they would bring in an entire Chinese workforce on a Chinese owned ore mine , with their own airport and an Australian customs desk as a partial nod to our sovereignty. That was 2009 or 2010.
When Labor ditched the mining tax for political expediency was when I knew they were all over for me.
So much for free speech or questions
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-08/jim-acosta-donald-trump-clash-in-...
@Blowin
They didn't ditch it. Liberals did. Though Labor watered it down in a bid to keep office.
Which makes sense.
Who cares about your tax if you're in opposition?
I'd say your ire is better directed towards the Libs.
So sypkan, please outline the narrative I share with Clinton. I have no,idea what you are talking about. Do you?
US politics you really cannot make this stuff up
"A Nevada brothel owner who died last month has won a heavily GOP state legislative district."
BTW he was an Evangelical Christian
They shit their pants and caved, Stu.
Sure they might have faced tremendous forces of opposition in the minerals council, but it was still piss weak.
The new acting AG
"Whittaker was part of firm accused of massive scam by feds
Acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker – currently the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the country – sat on the advisory board of a company that was ordered to pay a $26m settlement to federal authorities over allegations of running a massive scam"
I think lots of people have been saying this stuff for a lot longer than that. Myself included.
The problem is the left weren't listening. The 'deplorables' were written off a long time before clinton said that rather reckless statement.
With the left busying itself, with you know what, they took it upon themselves to curb the uglier forces challenging globalisation. Fair enough, that may have been a priority, at the time, but they busied themselves so much they missed the real burning issues of the day. They got caught with their pants down big time, and no one there with clout had the balls to tell the emperor.
Trust me you weren't the only one wise to S11 and various other goings on. It's just that they were all written off as a fringe element. And it took the powers that be a long time to realise there was more to it than that. Some still haven't realised. ..
From blowin
"...Look at the loss of votes the ALP is witnessing compared to a decade ago. I for one , never envisioned I’d ever vote anything but Labor . Now it’s a stretch to think they’ll ever win me back ."
I reckon there's a hell of a lot of people that fall into this category too. I also reckon 'the left' seriously underestimates what it will take to win them back too.
Trust and loyalty are big with some parts of community, once they're gone, you're getting deep into the unknown.
What about Andrews signing Victoria up to the Chinese Belt and Road deal.
OMFG.
More treason.
Yes some form of globalisation was inevitable, necessary even, but the left didn't have to jump in with such gusto.
They made it their's, bad calculation that one!
I am curious if you guys like DonaldTrump, or do you hate him?