U.S. Politics: If Trump Is In Attendance, The Next Protest Should Be A Roman Salute

[OldGimletEye]

6 hours ago, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

USA's share of the world economy has been declining pretty much every year since 1945, so in that sense it began a lot earlier. But yes, regarding international relations Bush certainly ruined a lot of the influence the US has built up after the end of the Cold War. 

No matter who got elected president, I don't think any reasonable person would have expected the US to maintain the economic hegemony it had during the 20th century into the 21st century.

It's more of question how the dynamic duo of Bush/Trump is destroying US credibility and trustworthiness.

And the irony here is that conservative complained excessively how Obama was destroying US reliability and trustworthiness. Man, talk about projecting your issues on to others.

Of course no reasonable person would deny others the right to better economic conditions. The Dumpster, however, sees this as threat.

And the irony here is that for years conservatives lectured places like China to adopt market oriented policies. And places China basically said, "Okay, we'll do that". And now you have conservatives running around saying, "OMG, their economy is growing!" Go figure.

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

18 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

No matter who got elected president, I don't think any reasonable person would have expected the US to maintain the economic hegemony it had during the 20th century into the 21st century.

It's more of question how the dynamic duo of Bush/Trump is destroying US credibility and trustworthiness.

And the irony here is that conservative complained excessively how Obama was destroying US reliability and trustworthiness. Man, talk about projecting your issues on to others.

Of course no reasonable person would deny others the right to better economic conditions. The Dumpster, however, sees this as threat.

And the irony here is that for years conservatives lectured places like China to adopt market oriented policies. And places China basically said, "Okay, we'll do that". And now you have conservatives running around saying, "OMG, their economy is growing!" Go figure.

My impression is that a lot of American Republicans did seem to hope for that. Whether they are reasonable or not is a good question though. 

But I agree. For the USA to maintain its superpower status in the future it will have to rely more and more on foreign relationships and less and less on its own strength. 

For example, even if the Chinese never end up being able to match American or Western living standards due to their autocratic system being less effective (if it actually is that), and they never grow beyond lets say half of American incomes per capita, their sheer population would still make their economy over twice as large as the USA's at that point. 

So for America to be able to match China long term it will need to maintain a lot more foreign allies than the Chinese. Basically the opposite of what Trump is doing right now. 

[OldGimletEye]

1 hour ago, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

My impression is that a lot of American Republicans did seem to hope for that. Whether they are reasonable or not is a good question though. 

I think we all know the answer to whether Republicans are reasonable.

Hint: They are brain dead.

[Martell Spy]

Honduran Man Takes Own Life After He Was Separated From Family at Border

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/honduran-man-takes-own-life-after-he-was-separated-from-family-at-border.html?via=homepage_taps_top

Quote

Muñoz, 39, became so agitated that he was labeled “pre-assault.” One agent said the Honduran man “had the look of a guy at a bar who wanted to fight someone.” Muñoz was then placed in a padded isolation cell at a jail 40 miles away. Twelve hours after he was booked, a guard found Muñoz dead with “a small pool of blood by his nose.” The guard also found “a piece of clothing twisted around his neck which was tied to the drainage location in the center of the cell,” according to the incident report.

 

[Which Tyler]

6 hours ago, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

My impression is that a lot of American Republicans did seem to hope for that. Whether they are reasonable or not is a good question though. 

But I agree. For the USA to maintain its superpower status in the future it will have to rely more and more on foreign relationships and less and less on its own strength. 

For example, even if the Chinese never end up being able to match American or Western living standards due to their autocratic system being less effective (if it actually is that), and they never grow beyond lets say half of American incomes per capita, their sheer population would still make their economy over twice as large as the USA's at that point. 

So for America to be able to match China long term it will need to maintain a lot more foreign allies than the Chinese. Basically the opposite of what Trump is doing right now. 

But he's the very bestest at maintaining, may growing allies!

How else do you explain his genius move of imposing tariffs onnhis friends, and then saying that friends should be tariff free?

You don't get more consistent and trustworthy than that!

[Martell Spy]

Emmanuel Macron Shook Trump’s Hand So Intensely He Left His Thumb Imprint

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/emmanuel-macron-shook-trumps-hand-so-intensely-he-left-his-thumb-imprint.html

Quote

Photos from the encounter showed how Macron squeezed Trump’s hand so tightly that he left what looked like a thumb imprint on his American counterpart’s hand.

 

[Jace, Extat]

4 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Trump apparently called Trudeau "weak and dishonest."  Incredible.  

There's something that's been really hard to reconcile throughout this entire nightmare which is that the Trump people, on the one hand, have acted really hard to try to cover up their connections with Russia.  But when it comes to policy and the idea that Trump is Putin's puppet it doesn't even seem like he's trying to hide it.  Almost everything Trump does fits with the theory that Putin wants to break up the post WWII order.  And it's actually happening.  

 

 

I just got a tweeter note to see Chris Cuomo 'put Miachael Caputo's feet to the fire' but it was 9 minutes of the same fillibuster nonsense with ten seconds of Caputo saying he personally don't trust Russia but genius Trump must have a genius plan.

[Martell Spy]

Quote

"It's no wonder that ACICS and Secretary DeVos didn't want this report to come out,” said Alex Elson, senior counsel at the National Student Legal Defense Network, which sued to release it on behalf of the Century Foundation, a liberal think tank. “Clearly, she was well aware that ACICS was getting worse, not better, and has been working to help them anyway."

DeVos reinstated for-profit college accreditor despite staff objections, report shows

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/09/devos-for-profit-college-accreditor-report-611935

[Altherion]

4 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Almost everything Trump does fits with the theory that Putin wants to break up the post WWII order.  And it's actually happening.

I'm pretty sure Putin would love to have the post WWII order back and be at the head of one of the two super power states (the weaker of the two, but still). What he's not very fond of is the post Cold War order and yes, he's been doing his best to dismantle it -- but the fact that it is showing signs of strain is caused by its internal issues far more than it is by anything Russia has managed to do. Trump and the like are not the causes of the strain, they are its symptoms. Here's an article about this:

Quote

Is this where we get back to Trump and Brexit and the rise of authoritarianism and right-wing nationalism around the world? It is. Varoufakis sees all those things as clearly connected and part of an unmistakable backlash. After mainstream politicians had cynically transferred those billions of dollars in banking losses onto ordinary people both in America and Europe – magically combining the high taxation of social democracy with the austerity state of free-market capitalism -- they then pretended to be baffled by what happened next.

The political movements that benefited from this climate, as Varoufakis puts it, were those fueled by racism and xenophobia, "the right-wing monsters that breed in the environment of deflation." Establishment parties then "wondered why it was that the discarded people from our neighborhoods and villages and towns turned against them and decided to vote for somebody that peeved them, annoyed them, just in order to get back at the establishment that had discarded them. Great wonder, isn’t it?”

 

[Jace, Extat]

22 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Will read the article, but even if it's true that there were fault lines before Trump it is still stunning to see the American President antagonizing Germany and Canada and others like this.  Putin wants NATO weakened and what better way to facilitate that than for the US to no longer be allied with Germany, France, Britain, etc..

ETA:  Oh, I actually read that one earlier today.  I really do need to get some help for my internet addiction, lol.  I want to read Yanis' book.  Knowing the article now I would reiterate that none of this even come close to taking the teeth out of the point that Trump is doing anti-western Alliance stuff that Putin almost certainly wants and the only question is whether Trump is going at Putin's direction.

No, the only question I'd whether Trump knows he's doing things at Putin's direction.

[Teng Ai Hui]

Nominee for scariest headline of the year:  Florida Didn't Conduct Gun Background Checks for a Year Because an Employee Couldn't Log In

 

The last line of the article is just as scary:

Quote

The Division of Licensing is housed under the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Service. Adam Putnam, the commissioner of that department, is now running for Governor.

 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

I'm pretty sure Putin would love to have the post WWII order back and be at the head of one of the two super power states (the weaker of the two, but still). What he's not very fond of is the post Cold War order and yes, he's been doing his best to dismantle it -- but the fact that it is showing signs of strain is caused by its internal issues far more than it is by anything Russia has managed to do. Trump and the like are not the causes of the strain, they are its symptoms. Here's an article about this:

 

I think it's a bit of a stretch to call Trump merely a symptom of the current state of things. I mean, the Republican Party has been actively campaigning for years or even longer on a paradigm that views people merely as commodities to be exploited.

I think Trump was able to thread the needle by capitalizing on racist, sexist and homophobic backlash while also promising economic governance in outright contrast to Republican orthodoxy (won't cut SS or Medicare, health care for all, raise taxes on the wealthy, etc.). His actual governance of course has been right up Republican alley, and most of the noises being made are weak-kneed Republican zealots scared that his intemperate nature will screw the sweet deal they have going on now.

That's not to say Democrats haven't been complicit in reaping the benefits the criminal titans of industry have thrown their way, but Republicans are the ones who have really campaigned on treating people as objects.

Something that has received almost zero coverage: industry leaders declare broad-based raises reflecting profitability are a thing of the past, will look to reduce workforce going forward.

[Mindwalker]

Apparently Trump has withdrawn his signature of the G-7 statement... via Twitter. A class act.

[Jace, Extat]

5 minutes ago, Mindwalker said:

Apparently Trump has withdrawn his signature of the G-7 statement... via Twitter. A class act.

Only if the class is 2nd grade.

And the act is a child with a tantrum!

Boom. Still got it. 

[Yukle]

On 6/8/2018 at 9:56 PM, dmc515 said:

The rationale behind primaries is the US is a two party system.  I'm not sure what you mean by preferential voting - that could mean ranked, runoff, or open list - but it's pretty axiomatic that those in power make the electoral rule, and the two parties have (and have always had) an interest in putting only one candidate up for the general election.

That doesn't really work with single member districts.  You can't vote for a candidate and party simultaneously, you just have to vote for a candidate.

Ah... so, if I have this right, primaries are meant to prevent a fairer system by design?

And preferential voting can work in single-member districts. There are two ways we do it in Australia (it's also used for our Senate, but that's also STV, because it's multi-member).

You can either number all of the candidates 1 to n. It doesn't matter if you have more than one person from the same party, as people tend to preference candidates from the same party in running order anyway. Some parties have agreements to only field one candidate, but not always. This does make all run-offs instantaneous, though, since candidates are always filtered immediately.

Alternatively, one of the states, Queensland, provides the option of numbering all of the boxes or simply putting a 1 next to your preferred candidate. If you do this, your vote uses a predetermined preference ballot from that particular candidate. These lists are provided to each voter as a booklet at the ballot box.

Now I think of it, though, minor parties and independents are fairly common in our system, both at state and federal level. That could possibly be why the USA doesn't use the same system; not because the people don't want it, but because it's not in the interests of the 2 parties in power.

[Holy Sith!]

https://media.giphy.com/media/l41YzgX4tiv1nLSzm/giphy.gif

New official portrait of Donald J. Trump, Pretender to the Presidency

[DMC]

3 hours ago, Yukle said:

And preferential voting can work in single-member districts. There are two ways we do it in Australia (it's also used for our Senate, but that's also STV, because it's multi-member).

Yes, ranked choice and/or instant runoff can be used in single member - as can majority system or two-stage runoffs.  Actually, the latter is done in a number of states for primaries - and even general elections in Georgia - and Maine is just now trying to implement instant runoff.  Anyway, I disagree with the underlying assumption that ranked choice is intuitively more fair than plurality.  Arrow's impossibility demonstrated this is a faulty assumption nearly 70 years ago.

3 hours ago, Yukle said:

Now I think of it, though, minor parties and independents are fairly common in our system, both at state and federal level. That could possibly be why the USA doesn't use the same system; not because the people don't want it, but because it's not in the interests of the 2 parties in power.

Right.  Plurality - and majority - systems perpetuate two party systems, so that's what both parties are always going to prefer.

 

[Mexal]

When you think it can't get much worse, Peter Navarro and Larry Kudlow hit the Sunday shows trashing Trudeau and Canada. Will Republicans say anything? Nah. Will Democrats get any kind of platform to say anything? Nah. Shit goes round and round.

 

[maarsen]

1 hour ago, dmc515 said:

Yes, ranked choice and/or instant runoff can be used in single member - as can majority system or two-stage runoffs.  Actually, the latter is done in a number of states for primaries - and even general elections in Georgia - and Maine is just now trying to implement instant runoff.  Anyway, I disagree with the underlying assumption that ranked choice is intuitively more fair than plurality.  Arrow's impossibility demonstrated this is a faulty assumption nearly 70 years ago.

Right.  Plurality - and majority - systems perpetuate two party systems, so that's what both parties are always going to prefer.

 

We just had an example of a weighted voting system delivering an contrary result. The Progressive Conservative party up here in Ontario had an election for party leader using the format of a ranked ballot and a system where each riding had an equal number of points towards the outcome regardless of the voting numbers in the riding. The person who was the first choice of the most delegates in total and the won the most ridings still ended up losing. As a result we now have a premier who has the lowest approval rating at around 20 %, and yet still managed to get elected with a majority in our legislature. The flaws inherent in both systems are on full display here in Ontario.

[Mexal]

Not even trying to hide it anymore.