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    Quote Originally Posted by Tendrin View Post
    Yeah, but people heard '2000 checks', and will think of it as a seperate thing from the paltry $600. They should just go ahead and do the 2k. $1400 is just the Dem caucus negotiatng with itself.
    Exactly $2000 checks was sexier to campaign on as oppsed to "an additional $1600. And at this point, as you pointed out, it feels like they negotiated themselves down when they basically had a mandate after GA to get this done and it would have bipartisan support to pass.

    Stupid misstep on their part and it just gave them an opening they didn't need.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    One problem with Marjorie Greene's statement is that if the currently radicalized GOP reps get the House Majority they would almost certainly move immediately to impeach Biden for no reason whatsoever, just to delegitimize him and strike back for the (completely just) double-impeachment of Trump.

    And the same can be expected of any Dem President in future.

    The GOP is so compromised that letting them into the WH and the House is a national security and constitutional disaster waiting to happen.

    And that means the Dems can't afford to be anything less than their best. And I am sorry, Biden's stimulus plan has some good stuff ($15 minimum wage, $10K student loan forgiveness, and economic investment) but if he can go that big he can scrap a few more shekels to make it $2k. Otherwise, he's just throwing stuff away to the right.
    Yeah the House is a real problem now. Also the election results pretty much guaranteed further gerrymandering, so you are going to keep getting more fringe Republican districts and have these dopes. The Senate is far less radical because the whole state votes.

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    Quote Originally Posted by KNIGHT OF THE LAKE View Post
    Yeah the House is a real problem now. Also the election results pretty much guaranteed further gerrymandering, so you are going to keep getting more fringe Republican districts and have these dopes. The Senate is far less radical because the whole state votes.
    Yeah but what if you get to a situation where the Republicans get the house and senate and you have a Dem President, either in 2022 or 2024, then Republicans can Impeach the Dem and even get a senate majority but fall short of 2/3rds, just to get their optics.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    One problem with Marjorie Greene's statement is that if the currently radicalized GOP reps get the House Majority they would almost certainly move immediately to impeach Biden for no reason whatsoever, just to delegitimize him and strike back for the (completely just) double-impeachment of Trump.

    And the same can be expected of any Dem President in future.

    The GOP is so compromised that letting them into the WH and the House is a national security and constitutional disaster waiting to happen.

    And that means the Dems can't afford to be anything less than their best. And I am sorry, Biden's stimulus plan has some good stuff ($15 minimum wage, $10K student loan forgiveness, and economic investment) but if he can go that big he can scrap a few more shekels to make it $2k. Otherwise, he's just throwing stuff away to the right.
    Problem is, they may actually lose supporters in doing so. Of course there are those, like the ones who went to DC on the 6th, who would just eat that up. But then there are those voters who just want Congress to get back to work, everyday people trying to survive.

    It's kind of like the ACA. At first everyone was angry, then they decided that they liked it and got angry at the Republicans who were trying to take it away from them. It will be at least 2 years before Republicans have a chance of taking back control of either House and/or Senate. Trying to impeach Biden for no reason now might make some in the voter base happy, but two years from now, if Biden does what he promised to do, that number will shrink greatly.
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    After Capitol riots, Trump’s Florida supporters huddle online, plan and wait

    Traditionally, extremists make up a small group at the fringe of society, he said. Now, America finds itself massively polarized, manipulated by disinformation, with its media, educational system and electoral process under fire.

    “I used to say it’s going to get really bad like this. I saw this as the natural conclusion,” said Claire Wardle, the U.S. director of First Draft News, an organization that seeks to protect people from misinformation. “But I thought we had another five years to prevent this.”

    Inside Trump’s loyal following, many baseless theories abound about why the prophecy did not come to pass as promised. His supporters were told if they showed up Jan. 6, if they were loud enough, if they were “strong” like Trump asked, then they could prevail, no matter what the electoral count said.
    The question has crept into local pro-Trump forums: if their leader didn’t succeed with a coup they wished for, what comes next?

    Should they create a radio station? A new party?

    “It doesn’t seem as if Trump has an ace up his sleeve. Although I keep wishing he did,” wrote a Trump supporter from Sarasota in a “Rules for Deplorables” chatroom run by a right-wing blogger from Pinellas County. “Why can’t there be a new political party with Trump’s ideology? Yes it would split the ticket, but I’d rather lose fighting than keep voting in the same crooks.”
    Trump had an ideology?
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    Wouldn’t it be interesting that this Trump supporter clarify this point?
    “Strength is the lot of but a few privileged men; but austere perseverance, harsh and continuous, may be employed by the smallest of us and rarely fails of its purpose, for its silent power grows irresistibly greater with time.” Goethe

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tami View Post
    Trump had an ideology?
    Not a coherent philosophical ideology like Marxism or Liberalism or even some varieties of Conservatism.

    But yeah, Trump does have ideas that people respond to. All of them really bad ideas speaking in a moral sense, a technical sense, a Poli. Sci. sense and so on. And of course by focusing on the latent issues of Trump's ideas, what's there on the surface, that doesn't discount stuff that's hidden or suppressed, namely white supremacy, and white grievance.

    Speaking in the most value neutral sense, Trump's ideas are:

    -- Make America Great Again, i.e. America is in decline, that the present of America is significantly worse than the past.
    -- America First, i.e. globally America is losing to emerging powers and economies and that America's economy must benefit itself over others.
    -- Citizenship is a privilege to be doled out to the chosen few.

    These are the overt ideas of Trump. And they fall under what's been called "herrenvolk democracy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herren...ated%20concept.) The word Herrenvolk by the way means "Master Race". Trump's idea is that America's democratic rights are aristocratic, meant for the few and not egalitarian. That's quite analogous to Nazism. A lot of people say National Socialist Workers Party and use that to claim spuriously that Nazis were socialist but what they don't get is that in Nazism you had socialism for the aristocratic few, as an aristocratic privilege for the few and as a way to dole out loyalty to exclude the oppressed and needy.

    In the most neutral sense, Trump's ideas do in fact respond to, or let's say intersect oddly with, issues in the real world. The sense of "America is in decline" and "America is significantly worse than the past"...Trump has obviously exaggerated that disproportionately and lied about it maliciously and so on, but in a broad sense after the failure of the W. years, where America saw its prestige fall sharply in a way that was only partially recovered by Obama, you no longer have the confidence in America despite political rhetoric that they should or could act unilaterally. Obama's refusal to intervene in Syria, his N-Deal with Iran, great stuff by the way, was born out with that. The thing is that Obama could never admit, because it would be political suicide no matter how moral and correct it is do so, that
    a) America is and has been an Empire for a century and more,
    b) Americans don't like to admit they are an Empire. That's not the same as "not liking being an Empire" (which I think Americans do like).
    c) America should try and come up with ways to not be an Empire anymore, which Obama tried to do but without doing a) and b). You can't be half-Disraeli and half-Mandela, my dude. So that meant that Trump could paint Obama's multilateralism as a sign of America's decline in the world stage.

    Likewise "America First" and so on, globalization and so on is an easy enough villain for both the right and the left, and Trump's response to that which is a radical nativism is obviously false but again a real problem in society can have both a right-wing and a left-wing response. The Taliban and various fundamentalist outfits in the Middle East are quite valid in responding to imperialism and colonialism of various kinds but they are a right-wing extreme response to that real problem, and the problem in the Middle East is that there aren't significant left-wing alternatives of comparative political force. One of the few was the Kurds and now that's gone.

    The question of citizenship...well that's just nonsense, but it's a logical enough escalation from the two.

    So I'd say that's the ideology of the Trump base and Trump himself.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    Not a coherent philosophical ideology like Marxism or Liberalism or even some varieties of Conservatism.

    But yeah, Trump does have ideas that people respond to. All of them really bad ideas speaking in a moral sense, a technical sense, a Poli. Sci. sense and so on. And of course by focusing on the latent issues of Trump's ideas, what's there on the surface, that doesn't discount stuff that's hidden or suppressed, namely white supremacy, and white grievance.

    Speaking in the most value neutral sense, Trump's ideas are:

    -- Make America Great Again, i.e. America is in decline, that the present of America is significantly worse than the past.
    -- America First, i.e. globally America is losing to emerging powers and economies and that America's economy must benefit itself over others.
    -- Citizenship is a privilege to be doled out to the chosen few.

    These are the overt ideas of Trump. And they fall under what's been called "herrenvolk democracy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herren...ated%20concept.) The word Herrenvolk by the way means "Master Race". Trump's idea is that America's democratic rights are aristocratic, meant for the few and not egalitarian. That's quite analogous to Nazism. A lot of people say National Socialist Workers Party and use that to claim spuriously that Nazis were socialist but what they don't get is that in Nazism you had socialism for the aristocratic few, as an aristocratic privilege for the few and as a way to dole out loyalty to exclude the oppressed and needy.

    In the most neutral sense, Trump's ideas do in fact respond to, or let's say intersect oddly with, issues in the real world. The sense of "America is in decline" and "America is significantly worse than the past"...Trump has obviously exaggerated that disproportionately and lied about it maliciously and so on, but in a broad sense after the failure of the W. years, where America saw its prestige fall sharply in a way that was only partially recovered by Obama, you no longer have the confidence in America despite political rhetoric that they should or could act unilaterally. Obama's refusal to intervene in Syria, his N-Deal with Iran, great stuff by the way, was born out with that. The thing is that Obama could never admit, because it would be political suicide no matter how moral and correct it is do so, that
    a) America is and has been an Empire for a century and more,
    b) Americans don't like to admit they are an Empire. That's not the same as "not liking being an Empire" (which I think Americans do like).
    c) America should try and come up with ways to not be an Empire anymore, which Obama tried to do but without doing a) and b). You can't be half-Disraeli and half-Mandela, my dude. So that meant that Trump could paint Obama's multilateralism as a sign of America's decline in the world stage.

    Likewise "America First" and so on, globalization and so on is an easy enough villain for both the right and the left, and Trump's response to that which is a radical nativism is obviously false but again a real problem in society can have both a right-wing and a left-wing response. The Taliban and various fundamentalist outfits in the Middle East are quite valid in responding to imperialism and colonialism of various kinds but they are a right-wing extreme response to that real problem, and the problem in the Middle East is that there aren't significant left-wing alternatives of comparative political force. One of the few was the Kurds and now that's gone.

    The question of citizenship...well that's just nonsense, but it's a logical enough escalation from the two.

    So I'd say that's the ideology of the Trump base and Trump himself.
    Yet, at the same time Trump has been identified as being a Populist, which is mixed up crazy in some ways. Since he is about as Elitist as one can get.

    What Is a Populist? And is Donald Trump one?
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tami View Post
    Yet, at the same time Trump has been identified as being a Populist, which is mixed up crazy in some ways. Since he is about as Elitist as one can get.

    What Is a Populist? And is Donald Trump one?
    Populism has always been about rhetoric. It's not really a tangible political idea. You can have populist liberals, democrats, socialists, conservatives and you have had that across the ages. Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party were both populist rhetorically but you can't simply brand them both as the same thing because that's just absurd.

    Trump is rhetorically populist in that he makes his largely white base feel oppressed by the political establishment which seems to be opening itself up to a multicultural and multiracial society...and Trump appeals to the white base to make them see the establishment as excluding them from that. That's why you have this rhetoric about revolution, which is in fact a counter-revolution. It's an attempt at mobilizing white grievance against the establishment and making them remind them that they belong to white America.

    What you saw in the Putsch is the logical endgame to that. You have a largely white mob objecting to the certifying of votes which were largely and overwhelmingly from African-American,s Latinos, immigrants and others for the Democrats. We saw earlier instances like in Michigan with those two Republicans trying (and failing) to refuse to certify the votes of Detroit (a largely African-American city) that went overwhelmingly for Biden.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    Not a coherent philosophical ideology like Marxism or Liberalism or even some varieties of Conservatism.

    But yeah, Trump does have ideas that people respond to. All of them really bad ideas speaking in a moral sense, a technical sense, a Poli. Sci. sense and so on. And of course by focusing on the latent issues of Trump's ideas, what's there on the surface, that doesn't discount stuff that's hidden or suppressed, namely white supremacy, and white grievance.

    Speaking in the most value neutral sense, Trump's ideas are:

    -- Make America Great Again, i.e. America is in decline, that the present of America is significantly worse than the past.
    -- America First, i.e. globally America is losing to emerging powers and economies and that America's economy must benefit itself over others.
    -- Citizenship is a privilege to be doled out to the chosen few.

    These are the overt ideas of Trump. And they fall under what's been called "herrenvolk democracy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herren...ated%20concept.) The word Herrenvolk by the way means "Master Race". Trump's idea is that America's democratic rights are aristocratic, meant for the few and not egalitarian. That's quite analogous to Nazism. A lot of people say National Socialist Workers Party and use that to claim spuriously that Nazis were socialist but what they don't get is that in Nazism you had socialism for the aristocratic few, as an aristocratic privilege for the few and as a way to dole out loyalty to exclude the oppressed and needy.

    In the most neutral sense, Trump's ideas do in fact respond to, or let's say intersect oddly with, issues in the real world. The sense of "America is in decline" and "America is significantly worse than the past"...Trump has obviously exaggerated that disproportionately and lied about it maliciously and so on, but in a broad sense after the failure of the W. years, where America saw its prestige fall sharply in a way that was only partially recovered by Obama, you no longer have the confidence in America despite political rhetoric that they should or could act unilaterally. Obama's refusal to intervene in Syria, his N-Deal with Iran, great stuff by the way, was born out with that. The thing is that Obama could never admit, because it would be political suicide no matter how moral and correct it is do so, that
    a) America is and has been an Empire for a century and more,
    b) Americans don't like to admit they are an Empire. That's not the same as "not liking being an Empire" (which I think Americans do like).
    c) America should try and come up with ways to not be an Empire anymore, which Obama tried to do but without doing a) and b). You can't be half-Disraeli and half-Mandela, my dude. So that meant that Trump could paint Obama's multilateralism as a sign of America's decline in the world stage.

    Likewise "America First" and so on, globalization and so on is an easy enough villain for both the right and the left, and Trump's response to that which is a radical nativism is obviously false but again a real problem in society can have both a right-wing and a left-wing response. The Taliban and various fundamentalist outfits in the Middle East are quite valid in responding to imperialism and colonialism of various kinds but they are a right-wing extreme response to that real problem, and the problem in the Middle East is that there aren't significant left-wing alternatives of comparative political force. One of the few was the Kurds and now that's gone.

    The question of citizenship...well that's just nonsense, but it's a logical enough escalation from the two.

    So I'd say that's the ideology of the Trump base and Trump himself.
    That's interestingly thought out. I struggle to believe that Trump has any philosophy above a naked, primitive self-interest coupled with an unquenchable thirst for adoration, and an equally irresistible need to crush anyone who bruises his ego, even if accidentally.

    The question then, perhaps, becomes "what do Trump's followers believe his ideology to be?" Their actions suggest a few things to me:
    • Restore American Dignity At Home (meaning white supremacy, and making somebody provide high paying jobs)
    • Restore American Dignity Abroad (meaning quit cooperating and impose American will)
    • Restore American Common Sense (meaning denigrate and silence experts who tell me that easily understood answers won't work on complicated problems)
    • Restore American Liberty (meaning don't tell me I have to care about anyone else if it interferes with my whims or superstitions, especially if those people arent like me).


    It's particularly pathetic in that some of the goals (force a return of jobs, and maximizing liberty) are inherently incompatible. Just personal opinion, but I think the rise of this mass gullibility has corresponded with the US persistent defunding of public education. Some of that was straight up racism, and some from embrace of Rand's Objectivism by the Investor Class, and those who share Trump's need to feel superior, whether deserved or not.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tami View Post
    Yet, at the same time Trump has been identified as being a Populist, which is mixed up crazy in some ways. Since he is about as Elitist as one can get.

    What Is a Populist? And is Donald Trump one?
    It's always cracked me up that the refusal of Clinton because she was a "Coastal Elite" was answered with voting for... a "rich" man from New York.

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    Quote Originally Posted by DrNewGod View Post
    That's interestingly thought out. I struggle to believe that Trump has any philosophy above a naked, primitive self-interest coupled with an unquenchable thirst for adoration, and an equally irresistible need to crush anyone who bruises his ego, even if accidentally.
    Trump himself is a personal force. Let's put it this way, if there had been no Donald Trump -- Obama still gets elected, Home Alone 2 still gets made, a lot of life and society would remain the same* -- but 2016 becomes HRC's year and the Republican base remains a Tea Party coalition, good enough for midterm turnout but not enough for a national party. So yeah, right wing grievance and issues still exist and percolate but they don't get activated like they did without 45.

    So Trump himself was a consequential man in terms of activating and centering these issues. Donald Trump had a personal hatred towards Obama, an irrational hatred to Obama, and he himself was personally radicalized by Obama's election and victory. So that allowed him to personally give voice to the white grievances and bitterness that many Americans felt about a black man in the Oval Office. So Trump's own radicalization accompanied the mobilization of white grievance.

    Trump long had ambitions to become a President...not for policy reasons but in sense of a fantasy. Since everything about him is fantasy. And I think the death drive (which as Freud said is the moment you realize that you are getting old and don't have long to live so you start going into a kind of midlife crisis mode or to use a popular expression start making up the Bucket List), drove that because he realized that he's really old, deep in debt, has multiple bankruptices and then an African-American guy who worked hard and earned his way, a meritocratic success in every sense, managed to become President something that he himself couldn't buy his way too. And that I think flipped his switch.

    It's particularly pathetic in that some of the goals (force a return of jobs, and maximizing liberty) are inherently incompatible. Just personal opinion, but I think the rise of this mass gullibility has corresponded with the US persistent defunding of public education. Some of that was straight up racism, and some from embrace of Rand's Objectivism by the Investor Class, and those who share Trump's need to feel superior, whether deserved or not.
    Absolutely.


    * Would the Central Park Five have gone to prison without Trump's monstrous Ad? He poisoned their chances of a fair trial but even then I think the justice system would have sent them to jail.

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    Quote Originally Posted by WestPhillyPunisher View Post
    Impeached for abuse of power, according to that harridan. Pretty good trick, considering Biden won’t assume said power until Wednesday. Nutbags like her have ZERO business in Congress.
    This is the natural byproduct of people living in two separate realities with this president. One side recognizes it is wrong to ask for foreign assistance in our elections and additionally inappropriate to incite violence on the Capitol. The other thinks that, for some reason or another, these are more menial than having a consensual affair in the Oval Office and view it as a reduced precedent and necessary standard for impeachment.
    With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility

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    Why the defunct South Vietnam flag was flown at the Capitol riot

    The yellow-and-red-striped banners of the former South Vietnam flew above crowds of rioters all over the Capitol grounds. Many of the flag carriers were Vietnamese Americans who, in support of President Donald Trump, have often used the emblem to express nostalgia for a lost home and opposition to communism.

    "This flag to me is an anti-Communist flag," Michelle Le, a Seattle-based real estate broker who flew the banner at the rally, wrote in a Facebook post, which has been deleted. "It's a reminder of my roots and heritage. I had lived through Communism and I know the tyranny and the pain it had inflicted on many families." (She declined to comment.)

    But to community advocates who saw the South Vietnamese flag, or the Yellow Flag, as a symbol of democracy and unity, its presence at a riot was both alarming and infuriating.
    "The ideas of authoritarianism, of overturning the people's will, are not the principles that this flag stands for," said Tung Nguyen, president of the Progressive Vietnamese American Organization, or PIVOT. "It's about us being free, and Trump is not someone you can be free under. White supremacy is not something you can be free under."
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    The thing is that Obama could never admit, because it would be political suicide no matter how moral and correct it is do so, that
    a) America is and has been an Empire for a century and more,
    b) Americans don't like to admit they are an Empire. That's not the same as "not liking being an Empire" (which I think Americans do like).
    c) America should try and come up with ways to not be an Empire anymore, which Obama tried to do but without doing a) and b). You can't be half-Disraeli and half-Mandela, my dude. So that meant that Trump could paint Obama's multilateralism as a sign of America's decline in the world stage.
    Most people both online and offline can't seem to grasp the idea that America is an Empire or the idea that all states are innately self only looking out for their best interests. I think Obama's inability to deal with the former resulted in mistakes in foreign policy in both the MENA and in East Asia. His attempts at trying to build the TPP against China was just never going to contain a rising China given China's geopolitical goals such as rebuilding the Sinosphere and forcible reunification with Taiwan. Likewise his overtures with Iran ignored the fundamental geopolitical realities and alliances that historically existed between the US and the Arab states or that fundamentally that Iran and its ideology was antagonistic to America/Arab State and that Iran had imperial ambitions in Lebanon/Syria/Bahrain/Iraq. I think in particular, there seems to be a disconnect that Pot-Revolutionary states like China and Iran were never going to be satisfied with the American lead international order given that both states were founded in opposition to American backed regimes (the Shah in Iran, Chiang Kai-Shek in China).


    I think this ties into how the GOP have made in-roads with minority communities through the spread of right wing memes and conspiracy theories on social media (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/o...mmigrants.html). The anti-communist sentiments of the older generation and their generally negative experiences with Communist Regimes in particular makes them vulnerable to this. For Vietnam, the refugees from Southern Vietnam were generally Christians who had fled from the North and had felt prosecuted by the Northern Communist Government.
    Last edited by Bruce Wayne; 01-16-2021 at 10:29 AM.

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