US Politics: Chaos Made to Border

[karaddin]

28 minutes ago, Ran said:

Do we really think most of the presidents were shitty people? Weird thought.

I don't think it's possible to effectively carry out the job of POTUS without having to compromise any kind of personal morality that would let me consider someone a good person. Too much having to choose the lesser evil takes a toll on the "soul" in as much as this atheist thinks one exists.

[TrackerNeil]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Do we really think most of the presidents were shitty people? Weird thought.

I think there is a tendency among some to view politicians, all of them, as somewhat morally deficient, which I guess makes sense if you take a view that pragmatic compromise necessarily means moral compromise. I don't take that view, but even if I did, I suppose I could make an argument that in doing the necessary-but-dirty work so the rest of us can maintain our moral purity, a president is, in the end, doing a really good thing.

[Zorral]

12 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

celebrates a New York vigilante group assaulting a man,

That's dumCurtis Sliwa and his 'guardian angels' -- who were doing a self-promo interview event there ... the only guy the fascists could put up to counter dumDem mayoral candidate dumpretendDem-and-lazy Eric Adams, who now is our constantly moving di$a$ter mayor

 

12 hours ago, Stark Revenge said:

accused him of being senile

That's the lead headline on both the NYT and the WaPo today.  Just what we don't need.  But both those papers are constantly leaning to the fash -- they just can't seem to help themselves, as they've been doing it for a very very very long time.

 

9 hours ago, karaddin said:

the last bit talking about Israel/Gaza

It's not that he's not prepared, it's nobody knows how to deal with this w/o majorly alienating major voting blocks, which are in conflict with each other on this war and both of which he/Dems need to stay in office.  His natural, knee jerk inclination is all in w/o criticism of Israel, while he and bibi despise each other, and while the younger voters, particularly the African American voters, are calling what Israel is doing ethnic cleansing and obscene.

You also forget he's a life-long stutter so is always balancing that while communicating.  It's like someone who is hard of hearing who is also doing simultaneous translation in real time.  The effort is incredible, yet somehow they do it successfully. But it really wears you out.

[Martell Spy]

12 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Who is interviewing the Russian dictator?

Putin walks away with propaganda victory after Tucker Carlson’s softball interview

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/08/media/vladimir-putin-tucker-carlson-interview-reliable-sources/index.html

Quote

 

It’s evident now why Vladimir Putin granted an interview to Tucker Carlson.

Over the course of the more than two-hour sit-down, the former Fox News host turned online commentator largely refrained from challenging the Russian authoritarian, whose brutal war on Ukraine has led to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Those expecting a hard-hitting face-off will have surely walked away sorely disappointed by the long-winded and rambling interview, in which Tucker himself at times appeared lost.

Instead of pressing Putin on the many topics at hand, including credible accusations Russia has committed war crimes and the imprisonment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Carlson allowed the autocrat a free lane to manipulate the public and tell his version of history, no matter how deceptive it may have been. At times, between the airing of grievances, Putin appeared to school Carlson on historical events as the host looked on in bewilderment. Or to put it more plainly, Carlson provided Putin a platform to spread his propaganda to a global audience with little to no scrutiny of his claims.

 

 

[Zorral]

As for POTUSes generally being morally deficient persons, recall until 1860, the vast vast majority of them were slaveowners, and even slave traders -- like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and James Polk. Buchanan, who did everything he could to facilitate the transfer of federal arms and money, sent the navy to the Pacific coast of South America, etc, the last president before Fort Sumter, wasn't a slaveowner himself, but his 'wife' owned one of the largest slave plantation in the South, before he died of yellow fever, or was it malaria or cholera? or something else of that nature? I forget. (So did Polk die, of one those.  He earned it.) Just as before THE WAR even the few potuses who weren't slaveowners, were very sympathetic, such as Franklin Pierce, after Lincoln and Grant, we got all those glorious lost cause glorifiers as POTUSes such as Woodrow Wilson.  Thank you very much.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 hours ago, Ran said:

Sienna has him at 14.

Do we really think most of the presidents were shitty people? Weird thought.

To the latter, yes.

The major problem with Clinton isn't his sex scandal, it was his pivot away from traditional Democratic principles to the corporate world that hurt everyday people. He completed what Reagan started and it totally fucked everyday people over for a generation with little chance things will get better.

[Zorral]

The Disgusting Furor Over Biden’s Age

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/06/opinion/thepoint#krugman-biden-age

Quote

 

When the news broke about the special counsel’s hit job — his snide, unwarranted, obviously politically motivated slurs about President Biden’s memory — I found myself thinking about my mother. What year did she die? It turned out that I didn’t know offhand; I knew that it was after I moved from Princeton to CUNY, because I was regularly commuting out to New Jersey to see her, but before the pandemic. I actually had to look into my records to confirm that she died in 2017.

I’ll bet that many readers are similarly vague about the dates of major life events. You remember the circumstances, but not necessarily the precise year. And whatever you think of me, I’m pretty sure I don’t write or sound like an old man. The idea that Biden’s difficulty in pinning down the year of his son’s death shows his incapacity — in the middle of the Gaza crisis! — is disgusting.

As it happens, I had an hourlong off-the-record meeting with Biden in August. I can’t talk about the content, but I can assure you that he’s perfectly lucid, with a good grasp of events. And outside that personal experience, on several occasions when I thought he was making a serious misjudgment — like his handling of the debt ceiling crisis — he was right and I was wrong.

And my God, consider his opponent. When I listen to Donald Trump’s speeches, I find myself thinking about my father, who died in 2013 (something else I had to look up). During his last year my father suffered from sundowning: He was lucid during the day, but would sometimes become incoherent and aggressive after dark. If we’re going to be doing amateur psychological diagnoses of elderly politicians, shouldn’t we be talking about a candidate who has confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and whose ranting and raving sometimes reminds me of my father on a bad evening?

So to everyone who’s piling on Biden right now, stop and look in the mirror. And ask yourself what you are doing. ....

 

I have to do the same, with my parents' death, even though that took place in the year in which it seemed everybody died, and I fell into depression w/o realizing it,  now that so much time has passed.   And I need to do that with my baby sister's death, even though it took place weeks after my first trip to Cuba, which death knocked me out of the unexpected Cuba trance in which I continued to move after returning from that visit -- a continuation of a travel experience in mind as vivid and revelatory as the experience itself, which had never happened before for me.  And it happened the year the Wall fell!  Yet I have to think about the date, because, a long time ago.  Yet her death and the Cuba visit are ever locked together in my mind, though I do have to stop and think now, as to which year it was exactly.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

43 minutes ago, Zorral said:

As for POTUSes generally being morally deficient persons, recall until 1860, the vast vast majority of them were slaveowners, and even slave traders -- like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and James Polk. Buchanan, who did everything he could to facilitate the transfer of federal arms and money, sent the navy to the Pacific coast of South America, etc, the last president before Fort Sumter, wasn't a slaveowner himself, but his 'wife' owned one of the largest slave plantation in the South, before he died of yellow fever, or was it malaria or cholera? or something else of that nature? I forget. (So did Polk die, of one those.  He earned it.) Just as before THE WAR even the few potuses who weren't slaveowners, were very sympathetic, such as Franklin Pierce, after Lincoln and Grant, we got all those glorious lost cause glorifiers as POTUSes such as Woodrow Wilson.  Thank you very much.

Yes, that's true, but it's rather easy for us to insist that we would have behaved differently, if only we were born in their place, hundreds of years ago.

I am not against unflinching histories of our founding fathers sins and foibles. But to flat-out condemn individuals from the past as morally shitty people, without further analysis, is wrong. It fails to assess where they fell relative to everyone else in their culture. And there's always the implied, and conveniently untested, assumption that we could have done better in their place.

Edited February 9 by Phylum of Alexandria

[kissdbyfire]

1 minute ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Yes, that's true, but it's rather easy for us to insist that we would have behaved differently, if only we were born in their place, hundreds of years ago.

I am not above unflinching histories of our founding fathers sins and foibles. But to condemn individuals from the past as morally shitty people is wrong. It fails to assess where they fell relative to everyone else in their culture. And there's always the implied, and conveniently untested, assumption that we could have done better in their place.

And yet there were people then who had very different stances on a variety of issues, including this one. So it's not like absolutely everyone was incapable of understanding how amoral some of their actions & opinions were. 

That said, I agree that none of us can affirm that we would have acted and even thought differently had we been in their shoes. We like to think we would, and maybe some of us would, but we can't really be certain of that.

[Darryk]

I knew Carlson was gonna be a softball interview with Putin using his usual KGB tactics to deflect and obfuscate. Wouldn't expect anything less of that crypto-fascist propagandist.

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Martell Spy said:

Putin walks away with propaganda victory after Tucker Carlson’s softball interview

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/08/media/vladimir-putin-tucker-carlson-interview-reliable-sources/index.html

 

What else would one expect of Carlson?  He’s so far up Putin’s backside you can only see his heels.

[Rippounet]

Not directly enslaving other humans is a pretty low bar to clear, regardless of the times you were born in. Of course, awareness of the socio-economic structures brings in a lot of nuance, but the way one uses a higher status in society has always been a reflection of their moral character, everywhere, since forever.

[Zorral]

13 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

to insist that we would have behaved differently

In fact, many people born in the time, did behave differently, and think differently.  One of the causes of the War of Independence, and certainly THE CAUSE of the War of the Rebellion.

So that argument does not, as it never has, carry any water.

Sheesh, even in the daze of the writers of the Old Testament, in a world in which the labor power of almost everything everywhere, was slave labor, there were those who opposed slavery and denounced it as a spiritual dearth and unwonted cruelty.

[TrackerNeil]

13 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Yes, that's true, but it's rather easy for us to insist that we would have behaved differently, if only we were born in their place, hundreds of years ago.

I am not against unflinching histories of our founding fathers sins and foibles. But to flat-out condemn individuals from the past as morally shitty people, without further analysis, is wrong. It fails to assess where they fell relative to everyone else in their culture. And there's always the implied, and conveniently untested, assumption that we could have done better in their place.

Do you remember, two years ago, there was a flap about how a gay character in "Stranger Things" was portrayed? Critics charged that this character should have been presented as more out and proud and blah blah, which was a very 2022 view of 1986. Having lived in 1986, and been gay in 1986, I can say that those who were out and proud often had a very hard time of it, and I don't blame any of us for staying closeted. Maybe it wasn't optimal in terms of moving society forward, but expecting people to trash their lives so that future generations might or might not have it easier is a lot to expect. 

Some of called this "colonizing the past", and I guess that term serves as well as any. For myself, I generally have little interest in posthumously shaming people for not taking a 2024 position on an 1824 issue. 

[Phylum of Alexandria]

10 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

And yet there were people then who had very different stances on a variety of issues, including this one. So it's not like absolutely everyone was incapable of understanding how amoral some of their actions & opinions were.

I agree with you. I said in my original comment that further analysis was necessary to determine where someone fell on an issue relative to others in their culture and time.

But even there, can we really confidently say we would do better in their place? Rather than be weak, or mediocre? Talk is cheap, and so those judgments come off as cheap to me as well.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

1 minute ago, Zorral said:

In fact, many people born in the time, did behave differently, and think differently.  One of the causes of the War of Independence, and certainly THE CAUSE of the War of the Rebellion.

So that argument does not, as it never has, carry any water.

Sheesh, even in the daze of the writers of the Old Testament, in a world in which the labor power of almost everything everywhere, was slave labor, there were those who opposed slavery and denounced it as a spiritual dearth and unwonted cruelty.

See my response to kissbyfire. Which in essence, points back to my original comment.

[Spockydog]

17 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Yes, that's true, but it's rather easy for us to insist that we would have behaved differently, if only we were born in their place, hundreds of years ago.

I am not against unflinching histories of our founding fathers sins and foibles. But to flat-out condemn individuals from the past as morally shitty people, without further analysis, is wrong. It fails to assess where they fell relative to everyone else in their culture. And there's always the implied, and conveniently untested, assumption that we could have done better in their place.

Yeah, what a load of horseshit. Pretty sure every single slave owner knew it was wrong.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

2 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

Do you remember, two years ago, there was a flap about how a gay character in "Stranger Things" was portrayed? Critics charged that this character should have been presented as more out and proud and blah blah, which was a very 2022 view of 1986. Having lived in 1986, and been gay in 1986, I can say that those who were out and proud often had a very hard time of it, and I don't blame any of us for staying closeted. Maybe it wasn't optimal in terms of moving society forward, but expecting people to trash their lives so that future generations might or might not have it easier is a lot to expect. 

That's funny. When watching that same content in Stranger Things, I found it odd how the gay character lacked any situations of terror, or even just casually cruel jokes from his friends. That's something that Stephen King got quite well in IT.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

2 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Yeah, what a load of horseshit. Pretty sure every single slave owner knew it was wrong.

Not what I said.

[SeanF]

5 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Not directly enslaving other humans is a pretty low bar to clear, regardless of the times you were born in. Of course, awareness of the socio-economic structures brings in a lot of nuance, but the way one uses a higher status in society has always been a reflection of their moral character, everywhere, since forever.

Just this morning, I was reading a long article, online, about how being a Southern slave was better than being a factory worker.  Apparently, their masters treated them like family members.

So, even today, there are people who could not clear that low bar.