US Politics: Mueller....Mueller....Mueller...

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Education.

That's overly simplistic.  Why will "education" guarantee people will not reward terrible actions or give power to the power hungry?

[Week]

8 hours ago, Altherion said:

Sure. In fact, as I said earlier in this thread, I expected more people to be making this argument, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Of course, there's also the Ned Stark school of thought which suggests exactly the opposite (i.e. that people in leadership positions should be willing to carry out the dirty work with their own hands every once in a while).

That would be the Duterte school of thought now -- we can clearly see where that leads.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/when-a-populist-demagogue-takes-power

[Rippounet]

2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

That's overly simplistic.  Why will "education" guarantee people will not reward terrible actions or give power to the power hungry?

It's not fullproof, but an educated citizenry is more demanding of its politicians. It won't prevent the power hungry from reaching power, because anyone running for national office is power hungry on some level or the other (I subscribe to the idea that anyone genuinely wanting the considerable responsibility of being president is not entirely sane) but it tremendously limits the tendency to reard terrible actions or bad behavior.

[Zorral]

Education, yes, but education into the rewards and strength that result for both the individual and the community > nation, that accrue from energetic public service, that is authentically service -- not corrupt nepotism and self-aggrandisement.

Perhaps, along with fostering a shame culture that shuns those who are selfish and cruel and corrupt?

But as long as our popular entertainment is built on the individual who succeeds and is glorified because he (and, now,  also, though not as often, a he with breasts) wields undifferentiated violence on his / her own brief -- that ain't gonna happen, that's for sure.

IOW we have the sorts of politicians and so-called public servants that reflect decades of non-stop glorification of violence and immaturity.  Hey it's profitable! Both of public corruption and violent pop entertainment

[Sivin]

6 hours ago, Inigima said:

You are an absolute fascist.

I'm glad someone else noticed.

[Zorral]

Yah, and Kushner is back much earlier to the US from the grumpioloa where's my other gold medals' tour -- wonder why, hmmmmm?

The Atlantic has an excellent round-up and summary of the investigations' discoveries so far in the Putin-trumpolapay-for-play mess here.  

Quote

 

The report in the Post could not immediately be independently confirmed and goes beyond reporting in other outlets. It stems from an anonymous letter the paper received in mid-December. Intelligence officials, the paper said, subsequently confirmed Kushner’s desire to establish a secret channel so that the Trump team could conduct politically sensitive communications.

National-security officials expressed surprise at Kushner’s reported move, which would circumvent the federal government’s established methods for communicating with foreign powers, including Russia.

"Why would Kushner want a secret channel? What information would the Trump team want to make sure is hidden from U.S. intelligence?" asked Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. "The idea of using Russian facilities to skirt Russian surveillance in the U.S. would either be a serious attempt to hide something or the actions of a young amateur."

Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who now runs the Soufan Group security firm, echoed that assessment.

“I'm trying to think of one really good reason for them to do something like this, and I seriously can't come up with any,” said Soufan of Kushner’s attempt to use Russian facilities to correspond with the Kremlin. "It indicates a lack of experience, at the least.”

In April, the New York Times reported that Kushner failed to disclose meetings with Russian officials. Kushner’s attorney Jamie Gorelick, a former Clinton-era Justice Department official with extensive national security experience, said the omission was an error and that the questionnaire had been submitted “prematurely.”

Shortly after the Post’s story was published on Friday, Reuters reported Kushner also had two previously unknown phone calls with Kislyak. One of the calls reportedly took place in April as Trump neared the end of the Republican primary season; the other occurred sometime in November. The report did not specify whether the second call took place before or after the November 8 election, nor did it indicate whether Kushner or Kislyak initiated the calls.

 

 

 

[Zorral]

More parallels of Gianforte with the antebellum's slavocracy's beliefs and behaviors here.

Quote

 

You wouldn’t say that Preston Brooks sucker-punched Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber in 1856—but only because he used a cane. Brooks, a South Carolina congressman, began bludgeoning Sumner, the anti-slavery Massachusetts senator, while Sumner wasn’t looking, and beat him unconscious as Sumner was still bent under his desk trying to stand up.

Brooks and his supporters in the South saw the incident as an act of great valor, as the historian Manisha Sinha writes. Brooks bragged that “for the first five or six licks he offered to make fight but I plied him so rapidly that he did not touch me. Towards the last he bellowed like a calf.” The pro-slavery Richmond Enquirer wrote that it considered the act “good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequence.” Other “southern defenders of Brooks,” Sinha writes, praised Brooks for his “manly spirit” and mocked Sumner for his “unmanly submission.” It would have been manlier for the unarmed Sumner not to have been ambushed.

The impetus for Brooks’s attack on Sumner was that Sumner had mocked Brooks’s second cousin, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, for his support of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The law put the question of slavery in the territories to a popular vote, exacerbating the tensions between North and South that would eventually lead to the Civil War. Sumner gave a speech accusing Butler of having chosen “the harlot, slavery,” as his “mistress.” Brooks’s defense of Southern honor was to ambush an unarmed man reaching under his desk. As Sinha writes, Brooks later said that attacking Sumner with a cane, rather than challenging him to a duel, was an attempt to humiliate Sumner for his abolitionism by treating him like a slave. Brooks was reelected after resigning in protest of being fined for the incident.

Northern papers rightly saw Brooks’s act of violence against Sumner as an attack on free speech; Sinha cites The New York Times editorializing that “without freedom of speech, there can be no freedom any kind—and the liberties of the Republic may well be regarded as in peril when such an act can be perpetrated with impunity.”

Despite Brooks’s public bravado, many of his contemporaries understood that what he had done was an act of cowardice. Anson Burlingame, a representative from Massachusetts, denounced Brooks on the House floor. “Strike a man when he is pinioned—when he cannot respond to a blow! Call you that chivalry? In what code of honor did you get your authority for that?” Mocking both Brooks and Butler as the “gallant nephew” and “gallant uncle,” Burlingame declared, “when we utter something which does not suit their sensitive natures, we desire to know it.” The speech was so memorable that The New York Times cited it in Burlingame’s 1870 obituary.

An infuriated Brooks challenged Burlingame to a duel. Burlingame accepted. The two men were meant to meet in Canada, where, according to The New York Times, an eager Burlingame hurried after stopping in New York to ensure that his skills with a rifle had not atrophied. The Times reported at the time that the proprietor of the shooting gallery “had witnessed, in his time, some accurate shooting, but nothing that equaled this.”

A member of Brooks’s entourage was spying on Burlingame, and according to the Times, witnessed “the shooting of the Broadway gallery.” He telegraphed Brooks in Philadelphia, who suddenly decided not to proceed to Canada on the grounds that he would have to travel through “a hostile country.” Brooks’s headstone would later say that heaven itself never opened its arms to a “manlier spirit.” It is perhaps kind to describe that as an exaggeration. Brooks was a precious little snowflake who melted at first thaw.

 

After this, the journalist gets to Gianforte.

For those who may not have been familiar previously with the Brooks-Sumner event, it was one of the many events of late 1850's that showed to those who paid attention that the slavocracy was inevitably going to make the War of Southern Aggression upon the Union. (In response, some in the Union attempted to start their own secession movement from the slave holding south, which they saw as their best hope not to have their states and homes forcibly shoved out of free soil into mandated slavery everywhere with no recourse.  The Fugitive Slave Law every day convinced these citizens that was going to be the outcome unless something equally radical was put in place.)

[OldGimletEye]

5 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

And as for the idiot in Texas, the obvious answer to suggesting reporters be shot for asking questions you don't like is that the reverse should be true as well. Suggesting governors who don't give answers you like be shot is a perfectly reasonable response.

Somebody just needs to tell ol' Govenor Ted Nugent here, to his face, that he is in fact a flamin coward and the moment that there is any real possibility that somebody will shoot back, he'll claim to have crapped his pants.

[MerenthaClone]

2 hours ago, Channel4s-JonSnow said:

lets be clear I'm not justifying violence. But the press are framing this in the most hysterical fashion, a man trying to shut down the free press!! Waaaah! We're living in communist Russia !!

Except it might just be someone who lost his cool at an invasive press. 

"I'm not justifying, it, I'm just desperately trying to normalize it and make it no big deal.  Totally different!"   Its not someone who lost his cool at an invasive press.  Its a candidate for office losing his cool to a literally criminal degree at a man doing his job in an appropriate manner, a job which acts as a tremendously important lynchpin of our entirely democratic tradition.  We need the press. We need investigative reporters, and we need them to not be concerned that their health or livelihood is at risk when they do that job appropriately.  Losing your cool and assaulting one should be utterly unacceptable, but instead you get protofascists arguing on the internet that its no big deal because he "felt harassed" while you specifically try to lay the blame for his actions on the reporter. 

[Week]

Invasive press would be publishing private information about his family, personal life, etc. Kind of like the way the Right-wing media treats the Clintons. Doggedly asking pertinent political questions does.not represent an invasive press.

[Mindwalker]

For a bit of childish glee... Macron greeting Trump at the NATO summit: https://twitter.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/867807337364500480/video/1

[Dr. Pepper]

5 minutes ago, Mindwalker said:

For a bit of childish glee... Macron greeting Trump at the NATO summit: https://twitter.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/867807337364500480/video/1

It makes sense to greet the leader of the free world first.

I really like the Macron/Trump handshake.  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/05/26/the-reason-behind-macrons-firm-handshake-with-trump-revealed-he-was-warned/?utm_term=.ee1385d7f3a1

[HoodedCrow]

Republicans condone sexual harassment, assault, instigating assault, forcing doctors to lie to patients about reproduction, forcing women to undergo unwanted medical procedures, making birth control difficult to obtain, hating women's who enjoy sex, setting restrictions on consensual sex, discriminating against homosexuals, rape, making general medical care unavailable to anyone who isn't rich, or pricing people out, letting insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies explode prices, removing drug oversight and disease monitoring, cutting taxes for extremely wealthy people, removing toxic waste dumping laws, removing financial and ethics oversight, letting guns be sold to the mentally ill and domestic abusers, giving very long sentences for drug possession and keeping prisoners in for profit prisons enabling a slave factory system, controlling science showing climate change and problems with pesticides, pro conflict of interest, religion paid for in schools with public money, no debt relief for students, corrupt police or politicians, policing transgender people in bathrooms, restricting protest and not cooperating with free press.

Republicans are still hard on drunk drivers and underage drinking unless you are in a fraternity.

Did I miss something?

 

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

3 minutes ago, HoodedCrow said:

Republicans condone sexual harassment, assault, instigating assault, forcing doctors to lie to patients about reproduction, forcing women to undergo unwanted medical procedures, making birth control difficult to obtain, hating women's who enjoy sex, setting restrictions on consensual sex, discriminating against homosexuals, rape, making general medical care unavailable to anyone who isn't rich, or pricing people out, letting insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies explode prices, removing drug oversight and disease monitoring, cutting taxes for extremely wealthy people, removing toxic waste dumping laws, removing financial and ethics oversight, letting guns be sold to the mentally ill and domestic abusers, giving very long sentences for drug possession and keeping prisoners in for profit prisons enabling a slave factory system, controlling science showing climate change and problems with pesticides, pro conflict of interest, religion paid for in schools with public money, no debt relief for students, corrupt police or politicians, policing transgender people in bathrooms, restricting protest and not cooperating with free press.

Republicans are still hard on drunk drivers and underage drinking unless you are in a fraternity.

Did I miss something?

 

But her emails and BENGHAZI!

[Ormond]

There is definitely a link between incidents like the Preston Brooks assault in 1850 and those who excuse Gianforte today. It is called the "culture of honor". To oversimplify, there are many people who believe that physical assault is not only an appropriate response to verbal insult, but that one is actually "not much of a man" if one does NOT respond with physical violence to certain kinds of verbal insult.

These beliefs are more common in the South than other parts of the United States, and more common in the rural West than they are in other parts of the North.

https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/cultural-psychology/culture-of-honor/

This is one factor that should help us understand the motivations behind Gianforte's actions. Note that a major concern of men in cultures of honor is "reputation", and I think toxic personalities like Gianforte's (and Trump's)  will immediately interpret questions about their policies or motives as being attacks on their reputation.

 However, I believe it is personally important in the modern world to proclaim that cultural values which condone physical violence as a normal response to verbal insult should be condemned, just as we now condemn values which condone slavery or honor killings of women who violate patriarchal norms. Obviously there will have to be several more generations to overcome that -- this isn't a "quick fix" here.

Modern Republican politics did not create these cultural values. It's just that the so-called Southern strategy and the influence of Cliven Bundy type libertarian ideas in the West have led to the huge majority of Americans who support "culture of honor" values now being part of the Republican coalition, something that would not have been the case 40 years ago.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Ormond,

That does exist but I, and many others, think that is crap.

[Ormond]

3 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Ormond,

That does exist but I, and many others, think that is crap.

Well of course. I am sure almost everyone who posts in this thread regularly agrees with you. Unfortunately, you will not change the values of someone who does believe in the culture of honor simply by telling them you think it is a crazy way to live.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

15 minutes ago, Ormond said:

Well of course. I am sure almost everyone who posts in this thread regularly agrees with you. Unfortunately, you will not change the values of someone who does believe in the culture of honor simply by telling them you think it is a crazy way to live.

Understood.  My point is that when Preston Brooks assaulted Sumner that culture was dominant in the South.  In my area I no longer believe that is the case.

[LongRider]

Don't agree.  My opinion is swayed by this book; Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty By Roy F. Baumeister 1996.

 

Quote

“Violence ensues when people feel that their favorable views of themselves are threatened or disputed by others. As a result, people whose self-esteem is high but lacks a firm basis in genuine accomplishment are especially prone to be violent, because they are most likely to have their narcissistic bubble burst. — P.25-26

The author of this discussed these themes among others but the idea is close to what Ormond was trying to communicate.  It's been years since I've read this, but his ideas that lashing because one's self esteem (now becoming a bit of an archaic term) has been disrespected still has some value I would think.  However, Ormond saying 

24 minutes ago, Ormond said:

I am sure almost everyone who posts in this thread regularly agrees with you.

is one I can't agree with.  

[Ormond]

18 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Understood.  My point is that when Preston Brooks assaulted Sumner that culture was dominant in the South.  In my area I no longer believe that is the case.

The research does show that over 50% of Southerners do now disagree with many questions relating to this. However, you still get a much higher % of Southerners with these views than Northerners. Unfortunately I am unable at the moment to find exact figures because I am about to walk out the door to have dinner with a friend.