US Politics Thread 2016-2020

[mapuc]

^ Frankie goes to Hollywood's song "Two Tribes" came up in my head.

Markus

[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Difficult to judge from a distance, but pretty much of what you say was on my mind as well (I was psychologist, mind you). However, I came to different conclusions than you, and I also think here regarding the function of a precedence. Trophy shots with enemy cadavers maybe are explainable on a psychological (though derranged) or deep-rooting archaic level, but there is also the need to maintain and hold up the cool professional level of discipline and executing military tasks that by behaviour like this get eroded. If this example becomes common, than determination in the military effort easily will turn into outright cruelty as a self-purpose, or worse: cruelty as a duty and goal to strive for.

Its probably more common than we think. No different than stalking and hunting a living, beautiful, majestic and strong animal. My first time I felt terrible, I still feel a tinge of remorse for taking an animals life but I have become more comfortable with it each time. We gather around it patting each other on the back, some saying how 'blessed' we are for making the kill, take a life to give a life etc etc. We talk about the freedom to take guns and find our food as if to trying to convince ourselves what we did was OK. Meanwhile someone takes a trophy photo of us with big grins on our faces kneeling next to the animals corpse.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Rockstar

Its probably more common than we think. No different than stalking and hunting a living, beautiful, majestic and strong animal. My first time I felt terrible, I still feel a tinge of remorse for taking an animals life but I have become more comfortable with it each time. We gather around it patting each other on the back, some saying how 'blessed' we are for making the kill, take a life to give a life etc etc. We talk about the freedom to take guns and find our food as if to trying to convince ourselves what we did was OK. Meanwhile someone takes a trophy photo of us with big grins on our faces kneeling next to the animals corpse.

I killed an animal just once, an ill dog straying around our camp, with a bow. I felt neither pride nor regret over it, I considered it necessary to protect us while sleeping, and so did it. I can imagine to kill an animal for food, but I again would nto feel pride or joy in it, and maybe even some regret. I understand that background and culture of hnting that you describe. Its just not my culture. I also understand the culture of war, and war culture, and how both affect each other over time. Both Kohn Keegan and Martin van creveld wrote two very differfnt and very recommendable boosk about it, I red both twice. I understand the psychological need of warriors" for symbolic self-reassurnaces and thus: bulding of ritual and customs that then are mandatory to follow. I all understand that, becasue all that cna be explained.


What i do not like is, however, to comoare deer huntign with war killing and to comoare a hunting trophy shot with posing with killed enemies in war. Savages may do that, but then thes esavges before committed often atricities today beign seen as unacceptable. Posng with dead bodies of humans, simply I do not accept. I also do not accept raping of women in conquered cities. I understand why it is beign done, why it happens, why it even gets commanded at times. But it is a stepping beyond a certain red line, and I do not accept crossing that line, not for me, and not for others.The same with needless torture and cadaver selfies. Its unethical, its barbaric, it shows a degree of iongoing dehumanization of those doing the deed, its is a severe crime, period.


And as I said, discipline and military order. An army is more than a pack of hungry rabid bastards.



We must make these diferences, else we are not any better than the worst scum we ever needed to wage war against.



What i have a prb

[em2nought]

Hello fellow cult members and all others! Once again they have placed their foot in their proverbial mouths and insure that history will repeat itself! This whole "cult" thing is going to be just as unfortunate for the democrats as the "deplorables" thing was in 2016. ROTFLMFAO


We're gonna need a hella amount of Kook-Aid! TRUMP 2020!

[Jimbuna]

I'm certainly no big admirer of Trump and even less of a one for Macron but I believe the POTUS is spot on here.

US President Donald Trump has accused his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron of being "nasty" for saying Nato was "brain dead".

Mr Trump is in London for a summit marking the Western military alliance's 70th anniversary.

Mr Trump said Nato served a great purpose, and Mr Macron's remarks had been "very insulting".

He also said he could see France "breaking off" from Nato, but did not explain why.

Nato - the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation - was founded after World War Two to counter the threat of Soviet expansion. The 29 member states pledge to come to the aid of one another should any come under attack.

But speaking last month, Mr Macron complained that Nato members were no longer co-operating on key issues.

He described the alliance as "brain dead", stressing what he saw as a waning commitment from its biggest guarantor - the US.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-50641403

[Catfish]

"Trump says NATO is obsolete organization"
"Trump says NATO is obsolete"
"Trump says NATO is obsolete but still 'very important to me'"
Trump says about NATO "I said it was obsolete. It's no longer obsolete"

Well changing one's mind makes sense, sometimes.

What Macron also means is that the NATO is now essentially unfit for its purpose, and looking at it i have to agree. Also, how should any country depend on the US when its president changes his mind twice a day.
France and the EU should make treaties and trade with Russia, competition that the US of course cannot like. On the other hand it does not make much sense to ship US liquid gas over the Atlantic to fuel european powerplants. Neither economical, nor ecological.

edit just saw this: Coal power becoming uninsurable
USA is pulling out. "Lloyd’s, the world’s biggest insurance market, is the only major European firm which continues to insure new coal projects."

[August]

This is a very interesting read:

Populism, Elites, and National Security

Michael J. Glennon The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

The tensions that have arisen of late between populism and elites pose grave risks for the United States and, I believe, for western democracies generally. These tensions extend far beyond their more obvious manifestations in international trade, immigration, and race relations.
.....
What we have been witnessing over the last year, however, is precisely that: an epic collapse in the image of public harmony. A week has barely gone by in which a salvo was not exchanged between the President and managers of the security bureaucracy. The President tweets that the former FBI director is an “untruthful slime ball,”9 compares the CIA to Nazis,10describes its former leaders as hacks;11 the security managers and their alumni colleagues respond with a counter-barrage of name-calling and leaks. The Washington Post cited nine senior intelligence sources for one critical story; the New York Times cited four for another.12
Set aside the question of who started it or who’s right: The consequence of this public breach is that there is no longer a unitary imagined order governing the making of national security decisions. The myth system has collapsed. Talk of a deep state is now rampant; the President himself regularly refers to it. Three-fourths of the public now believes there is a deep state, defined as a group of “unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national security policy.”

https://css.cua.edu/wp-content/uploa...l-Security.pdf

[Onkel Neal]

Well, of course there's a deep state, probably has been since the country matured after WWI. The govt carries a lot of entrenched career bureaucrats, they are going to have an effect.

[Skybird]

You might be surprised that Snowden seems to have a slightly more positive view of the state bureaucrazy. In his book he called it the kast functioning instance of the state (different to the polticians and parties). He said the problem is that the bureaucratic services move too many dutries and works to external private contractors - who do jto need to supply the same security certificates as the servant sin state service must show up with ( at their cost, finacially, and needing one year to pass). The state/the tax payers must pay for the certtificaitons of state employees, who then get hired by private comoanies who then use their foot in the door at providing said services for as high a prce as they cna reach. Private business just reaps the fruits, but does not contribute to the costs. Snowden writes the biggest and most shocking revelation to him, during the years when he became aware of how much ifś going ill, is when he relaised that for this and certain other reasons - to bypass survveilance by congress and other reasons - the "state" even wants this system to not function. Chapter 11.


I once again recommend the book, "Permanent Record". Well written, with a nice touch of self-irony, and it shows with what a family and man you are dealing here when condemning him., its an impressive - and revealing - history. Those not knowing his family's background, might be surprised. And the man himself gave his country and peopel a very great service that showed his integrity. Those just condemning him as a "traitor", have no real idea. I appreciate the way oh how he reached to his final conclsuons - and the consistence to stick with the consequences and so doing what he did.



As he put it somewhere: the country'S hardware and much of its software are okay, but its operation system is a big mess.

[Jimbuna]

[Skybird]

For a few seconds you got me there, Jim!

[August]

From the article I reference above:

The most pernicious embryonic myth is that the Framers handed down a system of checks and balances that is self-correcting. That myth is perhaps the most dangerous one of all. The system is not self-correcting. The myth that it is self-correcting probably derives from the familiar intention of the Framers to set ambition against ambition so as to preclude the rise of autocratic power. That was of course their purpose, but it’s only half of the picture. The other half involves the need for civic virtue, at two different stages. The Framers believed, first, that citizens themselves must be engaged and informed, so as to be able to participate meaningfully. Decision-makers cannot be held accountable unless citizens have enough knowledge and intelligence to do that. The Framers also believed, however, that people must select officials who are committed to advancing the public interest, rather than their own private, personal interest. People have to be wise enough not only to reject another Caesar, but to reject another Crassus. Absent civic virtue at both levels, they believed that the equilibrium of power would collapse, and democracy would not survive. Like the rest of the Framers, Madison had no doubts in this regard. He said: “I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us?
If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”14 Nonetheless that seems to be just the myth that some educated Americans are now beginning to embrace—the illusion that our government is a machine that runs of itself, whatever the level of virtue among the people.There is a corollary myth that has emerged alongside the myth that the political system is self-correcting. The corollary is that the security bureaucracy is an appropriate check on elected officials—that its managers are wise, all-seeing guard-ians charged with commandeering the ship of state when some unsteady captain or crew sails it into the shallows. This myth is of course welcomed by some security managers them-selves, who have coveted bureaucratic autonomy for years but have never been willing to stand up and claim it outright. Of course we can appropriately check elected officials, some now think—why any longer be coy about it? A number of former prominent officials have very candidly stated their hope or expectation that their successors will do just that. Michael Mor-rell, a former acting head of the CIA, worried openly that “the president’s advisers have not been able to properly ‘manage’ the president.”15 Listen to the recent words of Phillip Mudd, a former top official in both the CIA and FBI:So, the FBI people—I’m going to tell you—are ticked, and they’re going to be saying, I guarantee it, you think you could push us off this because you can try to intimidate the director, you’d better think again, Mr. President. You’ve been around for 13 months; we’ve been around since 1908. I know how this game is going to be played, and we’re going to win.16

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Skybird

For a few seconds you got me there, Jim!

That was the general idea

[Skybird]

" “I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us?"

----

None that I could see of a sufficient scale. Parsites bribe the voters to come to power. Votrers are uneduacted, clueless and lazy. Dilettantees rule. Predators make the laws protecting their game.

Madison went into the same trap that Marxists and communists step into. He counted on what he considered to be the best in man. By that, he missed the sober reality. Because I doubt that his assumption even was valid already back in his time.

I do not believe in the good in man. I believe in some good in some men. And these days,a ll too often they cannot make a difefrnce anmyore, they are too few, the world is too rotten, and the mades are too many.

Disillusionment is the motto of this stage of my life. In princip0le we still live in the social order of the deepest medieval, with neufeudal self-proclaimed "elites" own enslaved peasants who are fed with illusions about how "free" they are. The world I see, is a slaughterhouse, and only those at the very top feast at the dining table. No blank bajonets in the streets over here. But illusions being fed, brainwashing being enforced, dependency commanded, self-reliance fought against.

[u crank]

Sometimes a more realistic view of the things we have little control over can help to mitigate feelings of hopelessness and delusion. In the case of politics and the ruling class things have changed very little since the dawn of man.