Glostik91 wrote:David Quinn wrote:
Isn't this too much of a sledgehammer approach?
To put the same question another way: The very idea that the bloodsucking brute, Trump, is capable of being of value to the world is predicated on the assumption that the system is so corrupt and rotten that it needs to be blown apart. Is the system really this corrupt and rotten? Or have too many people allowed their daily, petty grievances get the better of them?
The bottom line is, I am not at all convinced of the wisdom of this course of action. I think we are playing with fire. I can see, however, that a lot of people are wanting this upheaval to happen, and thus there appears to be certain inevitability about it, and so it looks like we will soon get to see just how wise or foolish it turns out to be.
If you wanna make an omelette, you gotta crack a few eggs.
Are we really this short-sighted? Ya, Trump's plans will likely be detrimental, but allow me a moment to remind us all of Bush Jr. The Iraq war cost the United States $1trillion+ dollars over the course of just half a dozen years (enough money, mind you, to render our current healthcare problems solved outright.) His admin declined to regulate the mortgage industry, allowing any and all to get an adjustable rate mortgage, boldly leading the US into the worst recession I've ever lived through. And don't even get me started on Dick Cheney! How's that for an administration? As I recall, in 2000 Bush ran on a platform of reducing America's overseas intervention and fiscal conservatism. He did the exact opposite by unnecessarily invading Iraq, declining to ease or even possibly prevent the mortgage crisis, and thereby forcing us to run up the debt and deficit to astronomical figures. Even today he's laughing off these inexpressibly egregious blunders and LIES on Jimmy Kimmel's late night banality hour without anyone daring to shout LIAR, as if out of a random batch of 200 human beings (or however many fit into his audience), there was not a single honest man there.
Don't get me wrong. I agree with what David is saying here. I do NOT want Trump at the helm of this Man-o'-war. If another major terrorist attack occurs on US soil in the next 4-8 years, then we are fucked FU fucked. If you believe in god, pray for us.
What about an attack on an overseas Trump property? Will that qualify (in Trump’s mind) as an attack on the US? I think we all know the answer to that, don't we?
To a terrorist, those big gold TRUMP letterings must be awfully tempting....
Glostik91 wrote:If another major terrorist attack occurs on US soil in the next 4-8 years, then we are fucked FU fucked. If you believe in god, pray for us. If we manage w/o one though, I don't see how Trump could be worse than Bush. I just don't see it.
Well, I certainly see it. To my mind, Trump’s reign is guaranteed to end in disaster. It is going to be far worse than Bush, regardless of whether there is a terrorist attack or not. You can put your house on it.
It all comes down to psychology, and in this regard Bush differs immensely from Trump. Bush was vacuous, a figurehead, a puppet who was easily controlled by the power-brokers lurking behind the scenes. He didn’t have any grand plans to impose himself on the world. He was passive. He was just there, filling up space.
Trump is a completely different animal. He is aggressive, unstable, vindictive, megalomaniac, self-absorbed, addicted to being the centre of attention. He has shown repeatedly throughout his life that when he gets cornered, when people begin to put real pressure on him, he lashes out. He becomes vengeful, erratic and reckless. So what is going to happen when the pressures of office start to bear down on him, when his popularity starts to dwindle, when his own fan base begins to turn on him? How do you think he will respond?
At the moment, he is in the midst of a tremendous high. He is reveling in the bliss of being in the centre of the world’s attention. He hasn’t had to face any real crises yet or make any hard decisions. That is all yet to come. And when it happens, watch out! That is when it will all kick off. He will bungle things in his usual fashion and the blind devotion that has been lavished upon him by his personality cult will begin to dissipate. Anyone who has ever been around addicts when their drugs are withdrawn from them will know how violent and irrational they can be. When Trumps’s ascendancy reaches its end and begins to slide back down, he is not going to react well. He will much rather tear the whole place down than surrender meekly. And that is when he will truly start to become dangerous.
It's all there in his mind, ticking away. Only a trigger is needed to set it off.
Glostik91 wrote: [Trump] is a natural phenomenon. He is an opportunist who is exploiting the flaws in our system and ripping them open wide for all to see. He is a cleansing masculine energy like chemotherapy which, perhaps, we can reason will be a wake up call, and serious changes will have to be made to the government.
I believe it is very unwise to think of Trump as a “cleansing masculine energy". I’m thinking about the masculine part, in particular. Trump might end up being a cleansing agent of sorts, but masculine he will never be. Not in any deeper sense.
While masculinity is usually associated with things like conquest, aggression, single-mindedness, purposefulness (which we find in Trump), it is also linked with consciousness, soul, conscience, integrity, structured thought, insight (which are almost entirely absent in Trump). So at best, what we have here is a very distorted form of masculinity. So distorted, in fact, that it would be more accurate to call it an extreme form of femininity.
His constant war on truth is a good example. Day after day, Trump is blatantly disregarding facts, making unsubstantiated claims, engaging in conspiracy theories, rejecting scientific theorizing and other forms of expertise, and generally covering us all with mountains of bullshit. Now in some people’s eyes, this could be considered a form of masculinity. It could be argued that Trump is so masculine that he doesn’t even submit to the dictates of truth. You can see how Trump's mind works in this regard: only suckers allow themselves to be tied to truth, or knowledge, or facts, or laws, or norms, and suckers are there to be taken advantage of. He knows that most people are deeply attached to these things and he knows how to use that attachment against them - to unsettle them, to create confusion in their minds, to have them chasing shadows. And while all this is happening, Trump is happily riding off to the next town with all of their money in his pocket. It is a classic con trick that he has been pulling his whole life.
Importantly, Trump’s conquest over truth doesn’t come from a heightening of his consciousness. He isn’t intensifying the masculine spirit in an effort to dissolve all duality. Rather, his rejection of truth comes from the opposite direction, from a diminishing of consciousness. It is the same dynamic by which women reject the concept of truth.
Trump often says that he likes to be unpredictable, which mirrors the common womanly desire to be enigmatic. If you add to this, Trump’s extreme vanity and obsession with his self-image, together with his speech patterns which can only be described as henids and usually delivered in a campy, effeminate fashion, then what we are looking at is not a man, but a very aggressive woman.
By linking masculinity to Trump and his movement, we are in fact debasing the very concept of masculinity. And in the future, when all this blows over (and assuming that the human race still exists), I believe this is something we will all come to regret.
Russell Parr wrote:
As far as I can tell, the main crux of this thread is to call out Kevin for what David sees as a lack of focus. Those of us that have been around long enough have seen this before. As it so happens, Kevin's so called involvements isn't as ill-advised as David projected it to be. Clearly David has backed off of this stance to some degree, it just took a little persuasion from others.
No, I haven’t backed off at all. In my view, Kevin’s involvement is still as misguided as ever.
To illustrate this, I’ll point to Sam Harris as a contrasting example. I use Sam Harris because he is the most rational public figure I have come across in this whole sorry saga. He mirrors my own approach to these matters.
I like his neutrality. On the one hand, he comes down hard on the left and the SJWs - e.g.
The Left is Irredeemable - and yet he remains fully conscious of the reality and dangers of Trump's abnormal psychology - e.g.
How to defend Donald Trump. In other words, in opposing the left-wing nutcases, he doesn't feel a need to side with the right-wing nutcases. The nature of his opposition in all directions is apolitical, rational and ethical.
In particular, I agree with Harris's assertion that a new political space needs to be carved into being, one that rejects both the politically correct left and the lunatic right. The political situation, not just in America, but around the world, is becoming so polarized it can only lead to war and violence. We really need as many people as possible to pull back from the brink, and that means people on the left conceding that they have gone too far in their political correctness/identity politics crusade, and people on the right conceding that they have gone too far in supporting a dangerous lunatic like Trump and his war against truth/science/expertise.