REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Wednesday, November 20, 2024 08:17
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Saturday, July 20, 2024 7:07 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Democrats say Trump is an existential threat. They’re not acting like it.


Because they know it's horseshit and they're not drinking their own Kool-Aid.

Drink up, boy.
You fail to recall the existential threat from WWII, which had been in motion for many years (already killing millions and millions) before the Republicans and Southern "Democrats" in Congress were forced by Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war to vote very grudgingly for a declaration of war against Hitler. Then those same Republicans and Democrats from Dixie angrily and bitterly claimed that FDR had secretly allowed Pearl Harbor to occur to force a vote for a declaration of war.

There is a strong connection between how Republican voters acted in the days of FDR and how Trumptards act today. Trumptards won't accept what they truly are and why that truth makes life so hard for them but that's how it is with seriously flawed people. They seldom become aware (and soon forget) how their flaws make life hard for themselves.

No, FDR Did Not Know The Japanese Were Going To Bomb Pearl Harbor
December 6, 2016 3:16 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/2016/12/06/504449867/no-fdr-did-not-know-the-japan
ese-were-going-to-bomb-pearl-harbor

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, July 20, 2024 7:10 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


His excoriating critique of Western liberalism is more relevant than ever.

Eliot A. Cohen | February 20, 2024

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/solzhenitsyns-warnin
g-for-the-united-states/677508/

While clearing out a storage room filled with books, I came across a slim volume, A World Split Apart, the text of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard commencement address. I remember listening to the speech at the time and being disconcerted by the petulant commentary it elicited. Solzhenitsyn had been in the United States only three years, having been expelled by the Soviet government and living as a recluse in Vermont. The consensus—certainly among the great and the good of Cambridge, Massachusetts—was that he was an ultranationalist, a reactionary, and, above all, an ingrate. At the time, I thought the reaction peevish and beside the point. Rereading the speech, it seems even more urgent that we pay heed to his excoriating critique of Western liberalism.
Read at https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/a-world-split-apart
Quote:
I am sincerely happy to be here with you on the occasion of the 327th commencement of this old and illustrious university. My congratulations and best wishes to all of today’s graduates.

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas.” Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it. This is the source of much discord.
Solzhenitsyn did misunderstand some of the key elements of Western, and specifically American, liberal democracy. He was no democrat, although he unreservedly opposed cruel and arbitrary government. It is true, too, that his deep religious faith and mystical belief in Russia’s destiny were and remain alien to most non-Russians. And it is true, as well, that he had cordial if cautious relations in the early 2000s with Vladimir Putin, although he was staunchly in favor of letting the Soviet Union’s subject nations, including even Ukraine, go their own way.

But what matters now as it did then is his critique of us. We have just seen a feckless House of Representatives pass a ludicrous impeachment of a Cabinet secretary by one vote—and then skip town while avoiding a vote on aid to Ukraine. We have seen the West’s inability to prevent the murder, by direct or indirect means, of a heroic dissident, Alexei Navalny, and the gleeful insouciance of the Russian dictator hours after it was reported. We have seen a foreign war used as an excuse to hound Jews on campuses and in the streets, and we have the horrifying spectacle of a possible return to the presidency of one of the most corrupt and dangerous politicians in American history. Which makes it worthwhile to return to Solzhenitsyn’s speech, a dark reflection for a different dark time.

The speech begins with a slap to our face: “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.” That is as true now as it was then, possibly truer. At home, a great political party collapses in craven subservience to a demagogue. Abroad, we fear to arm Ukraine adequately to defeat a monstrous aggressor; we fear to punish an Iranian regime that has repeatedly sought to kill our people and occasionally succeeds; we fear to face the fact that all of us in the liberal-democratic world are spending way less than what we need to defend ourselves.

Domestically, we fear to dissent from the orthodoxies of our respective subcultures. Nowhere is this more true than among those who should prize intellectual courage, as Solzhenitsyn did. “Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.” When the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression consistently rates America’s oldest and most prestigious university one of the very worst for freedom of speech, something is deeply amiss. And that is, of course, Harvard, the very university at which Solzhenitsyn spoke, whose motto is Veritas—“Truth.”

One is hard-pressed today to name more than a handful of truly courageous professors, deans, and university presidents willing to jeopardize their careers and their social standing by taking unpopular stands—unyielding opposition to DEI rules and bureaucracies, for example. The very notions that reasonable people can disagree on important matters, that one’s point of view reflects individual thought rather than identity or tribe, and that physical intimidation has no place in civilized politics are all at risk.

Solzhenitsyn talked about intellectuals because, as a Russian of that ilk, he believed that writers were the conscience of their countries. For politicians he had little use, but surely courage is sorely lacking there as well. When Donald Trump sneered at John McCain, a heroic figure if ever there was one, who had suffered terribly for his country and loved it unreservedly, Trump paid no political price. Which means that the problem was not so much Trump as it is us. It has been a very long time since a rising young American politician, badly injured in his own war service, published Profiles in Courage and was acclaimed for it.

At the root of the West’s troubles, Solzhenitsyn believed, was the view that man is the measure of all things, that social problems of all kinds can be managed away, that evil is not embedded in human nature, and that the ultimate purpose of life is happiness. In large measure, we in the West still believe these things. Above all we talk endlessly about happiness, as measured by psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists. To which Solzhenitsyn observed, if “man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die.” And as he pointed out, if such a credo holds, “for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good?” Which may explain the struggles of many armies, including the American, to fill their ranks.

Of course, Solzhenitsyn’s imprecations were too harsh—that is the nature of prophets and seers, who of necessity scorn popularity. And of course, there are exceptions, although today they are found at the margins of the West more than at its core. The dogged persistence of Ukraine in its unequal war, the return of some Israeli citizens to their devastated settlements on the Gaza border, the example of not only Navalny but many other Russian writers and dissidents including Anna Politkovskaya and Vladimir Kara-Murza tell us that the wellsprings of courage are not yet dry. Perhaps they never can be. There is consolation as well in the thought that, in the end, the evil empire that Solzhenitsyn fought against collapsed of its own weight, that its persecution of him, like its successor’s murder of Navalny, bore testimony to its weakness, not its strength.

But the moment is an undeniably bleak one. Solzhenitsyn concluded: “The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?” True enough.

I am just old enough to remember the shock of Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume Gulag Archipelago, which brought home to Western audiences the full nature of Soviet terror, and not just of the Stalinist variety. In many countries (France most notably, but others as well) it broke through the tendency to think of the Soviet Union as being as much sinned against as sinning, or its actions as those of a superpower with only somewhat worse manners than our own. Yet versions of such cynical beliefs thrive today, as in Tucker Carlson’s flippant assertion that all leaders kill people, so what’s the big deal?

A few heroes are out there, but too few. There are some minor prophets, but they lack the furious eloquence of their predecessors. So perhaps it is the time to recall the old heroes and reread the old prophets, and ask what they would make of the crisis of the West, and how they would have met it. Then we should let their words and their example inspire us to meet this challenge, as we have others in the past. As Solzhenitsyn concluded, the way forward is upward.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, July 20, 2024 5:32 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Democrats say Trump is an existential threat. They’re not acting like it.


Because they know it's horseshit and they're not drinking their own Kool-Aid.

Drink up, boy.
You fail to recall the existential threat from WWII, which had been in motion for many years (already killing millions and millions) before the Republicans and Southern "Democrats" in Congress were forced by Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war to vote very grudgingly for a declaration of war against Hitler. Then those same Republicans and Democrats from Dixie angrily and bitterly claimed that FDR had secretly allowed Pearl Harbor to occur to force a vote for a declaration of war.

There is a strong connection between how Republican voters acted in the days of FDR and how Trumptards act today. Trumptards won't accept what they truly are and why that truth makes life so hard for them but that's how it is with seriously flawed people. They seldom become aware (and soon forget) how their flaws make life hard for themselves.

No, FDR Did Not Know The Japanese Were Going To Bomb Pearl Harbor
December 6, 2016 3:16 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/2016/12/06/504449867/no-fdr-did-not-know-the-japan
ese-were-going-to-bomb-pearl-harbor

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


You've already shown everybody many times what a piece of gutter trash you actually are.

Nobody takes your judgement about anybody else seriously when it's clear that you are incapable of self-reflection. It doesn't matter how many times you repeat these non-truths.



--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Sunday, July 21, 2024 6:31 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You've already shown everybody many times what a piece of gutter trash you actually are.

Nobody takes your judgement about anybody else seriously when it's clear that you are incapable of self-reflection. It doesn't matter how many times you repeat these non-truths.



--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
6ixStringJack, do you remember being an alcoholic? Then, almost instantaneously, you stopped. After decades, you figured out that alcohol was bad and saved yourself, but you lost years of life and your teeth. Perhaps you will eventually see what is wrong with Trump and Fascism (so many things more than wrong with alcohol) and will stop sooner than decades.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, July 21, 2024 6:35 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Solzhenitsyn Warned Us
The great Russian writer understood the West and predicted its future with frightening precision.

By Gary Saul Morson | July 2024

https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn
-warned-west/

Western intellectuals expected that novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, once safely in the West after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, would enthusiastically endorse its way of life and intellectual consensus. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead of recognizing how much he had missed when cut off from New York, Washington, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, this ex-Soviet dissident not only refused to accept superior American ideas but even presumed to instruct us. Harvard was shocked at the speech he gave there in 1978, while the New York Times cautioned: “We fear that Mr. Solzhenitsyn does the world no favor by calling for a holy war.”

For his part, Solzhenitsyn could hardly believe that Westerners would not want to hear all he had learned journeying through the depths of totalitarian hell. “Even in soporific Canada, which always lagged behind, a leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my limited Soviet and prison camp experience,” Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited this is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!”

The West “turned out to be not what we [dissidents] had hoped and expected; it was not living by the ‘right’ values nor was it headed in the ‘right’ direction.” America was no longer the land of the free but of the licentious. The totalitarianism from which Solzhenitsyn had escaped loomed as the West’s likely future. Having written a series of novels about how Russia succumbed to Communism, Solzhenitsyn smelled the same social and intellectual rot among us. He thought it his duty to warn us, but nobody listened. Today, his warnings seem prescient. We have continued to follow the path to disaster he mapped.

_____________

We Have Ceased to See the Purpose collects the most important speeches Solzhenitsyn delivered between 1972 and 1997. (See footnote 1) Inspired by various occasions—Solzhenitsyn’s winning the Nobel Prize, arriving in the West, and delivering that Harvard University commencement address, among others—these speeches convey a single message: Western civilization has lost its bearings because it has embraced a false and shallow understanding of life. The result is the accelerating decay of the West’s spiritual foundations. The very fact that the word “spiritual” sounded suspiciously outdated to so many intellectuals at the time shows how far the decay had already progressed. Sooner or later, Solzhenitsyn warned, Western civilization as we know it would collapse.

Solzhenitsyn would not have been surprised that, three decades after the collapse of the USSR, American intellectuals again find Marxist and quasi-Marxist doctrines attractive. Young people embrace “democratic socialism,” a phrase that Solzhenitsyn calls “about as meaningful as talking about ‘ice-cold heat.’”

Today we can ask: Why do so many cheer, or at least not object, when they witness mobs embracing the bloodthirsty and sadistic Hamas? Perhaps for the same reasons that young, pre-revolutionary Russians once celebrated terrorists who murdered innocent citizens? Having studied his country’s history, Solzhenitsyn foresaw the process that would lead to today’s chants of “globalize the intifada” and “any means necessary.” He repeatedly cautioned that Russia’s past may be America’s future.

How can it be, Solzhenitsyn asked, that so many Russians found the strength to “rise up and free themselves…while those [in the West] who soar unhindered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and fatefully, almost [seem] to crave slavery?” Why do crudeness of thought and the repetition of ill-understood slogans pass for sophistication? “I couldn’t have imagined to what extreme degree the West desires to blind itself,” Solzhenitsyn told a London audience in 1976.

Those who have reflected on Soviet experience, Solzhenitsyn advised, readily discern “telltale signs by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society.” Referring to the electrical blackout that struck New York in 1977, he identified one such warning: “The center of your democracy and your culture is left without electrical power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.” What would he say if he had seen the Antifa riots following the murder of George Floyd or the cowardly responses to today’s university encampments?

Solzhenitsyn discovered the root cause of the West’s decline in its assumption, shared by almost everyone with any influence, that life’s purpose is individual happiness, from which it follows that freedom and democratic political institutions exist to make that goal easier to attain. And so elections usually turn on the growth of an already abundant economy. Could there be a view of life less worthy of human dignity? America’s Founders acknowledged a higher power, but now the most “advanced” people have succumbed to “the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious, humanistic consciousness. It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.”

Acknowledging nothing higher than themselves, people overlook the evil in human nature. Original sin, what’s that? Sophisticates laugh at phrases such as “the Evil Empire” or “the Axis of Evil” because “it has become embarrassing to appeal to age-old values.” And so “the concepts of Good and Evil have been ridiculed for several centuries…. They’ve been replaced by political or class categorizations.” Crime and other ills supposedly result from readily amendable social arrangements and will inevitably give way to progress.

Like the Soviets, Westerners speak of being “on the right side of history,” as if progress were guaranteed and what comes later will be necessarily better. How readily such thinking seduced early-20th-century Russian (and Weimar German) intellectuals! And how vulnerable it leaves us to underestimating the evil that human beings can commit! “We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms only to find out that we are being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life” and our moral sense. People cannot even understand evil unless they recognize that it “resides in each individual heart before it enters a political system.”

“As for Progress,” Solzhenitsyn replied to self-styled progressives, “there can only be one true kind: the sum total of the spiritual progresses of individual persons, the degree of self-perfection in the course of their lives.” For the hedonist, death looms as the terrible cessation of pleasures, but for spiritual people it is proof that, as Pierre, the hero of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, enthuses as he points to the sky: “We must live, we must love, and we must believe not only that we live today on the scrap of earth, but that we have lived and shall live forever, there, in the Whole.” Or as Solzhenitsyn argued in his Harvard commencement address: “If as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not a search for the best way to obtain material goods. . . . It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life’s journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.”

People can accomplish such moral growth not by self-indulgence but by its opposite, self-restraint or, as Solzhenitsyn also called it, “self-limitation.” Without that, they remain mired in the world of things and unable to see beyond the present moment. Après moi le déluge.

“If we don’t learn to limit firmly our desires and demands, to subordinate our interests to moral criteria,” Solzhenitsyn insisted, “we, mankind, will simply be torn apart as the worst aspects of human nature bare their teeth.” Voicing the overriding lesson of the Russian literary tradition, Solzhenitsyn told Westerners: “if personality is not directed at values higher than the self, then it becomes inevitably invested with corruption and decay…. We can only experience true spiritual satisfaction not in seizing but in refusing to seize: in other words, in self-limitation.”

The spiritual malaise of hedonism fatally weakens a society by leaving it unable to defend itself. “The most striking feature that an outside observer discerns in the West today,” Solzhenitsyn asserted in the Harvard address, is “a decline in courage,” which “is particularly noticeable in the ruling and intellectual elites,” presumably including his Harvard audience. Amid an abundance of material goods, “why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good, and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as-yet distant land?” People naturally say, “Let someone else risk his life.” European powers “bargain to see who can spend least on defense so that more remains for a prosperous life.” (Thirty years later, few European countries not on the Russian border meet the agreed-upon defense expenditure of 2 percent of GDP.) America bases its security primarily on its formidable arsenal, Solzhenitsyn noted, but weapons are never enough without “stout hearts and steadfast men.”

One step beyond unwillingness to defend one’s country is actual hatred of it. I thought of Solzhenitsyn’s warnings when I learned of campus mobs this year shouting “Death to America!” For Solzhenitsyn, that is where the cult of individual happiness, sooner or later, is bound to lead. Facing the slightest frustration, forced to endure a modicum of adversity, or exposed to a world of contingency and misfortune, those educated to regard individual good fortune as their due seek someone to blame. They readily embrace any fashionable ideology that divides the world into oppressed and oppressors, the innocent good people and the implacably evil. But as Solzhenitsyn famously observed in The Gulag Archipelago, the line between good and evil runs not between groups but “through every human heart.”

Why worry about external enemies when the real threat supposedly comes from another group or party at home? “Or why restrain oneself from burning hatred,” Solzhenitsyn asked, “whatever its basis—race, class, or manic ideology?” As in the French and Russian Revolutions, such anger feeds on itself. “Atheist teachers are rearing a younger generation in a spirit of hatred toward their own society.” From the perspective of 2024, it is easy to verify Solzhenitsyn’s prediction that “the flames of hatred” against one another are bound to intensify.

Society tears itself apart. Turning all questions into a matter of absolute rights makes amicable com-promise impossible, and it is the most privileged peo-ple, shielded from life’s inevitable disappointments, who are the most inclined to such thinking. Those raised in gated communities and preparing for lucrative professions are the first to express resentment and complain they feel “unsafe.” As Solzhenitsyn anticipated, “the broader the personal freedoms, the higher the level of social well-being or even affluence—the more vehement, paradoxically, this blind hatred” of America.

The specter—or rather, the zombie—of Marxism has returned because it divides the world into the damned and the saved. They need not be “the bourgeoisie” and “the proletariat” but can be any pair that conveniently presents itself. To the amazement of those who only recently escaped such thinking, “what one people has already endured, appraised, and rejected suddenly emerges among another people as the very latest word.”

Solzhenitsyn asked: Why does one country blindly embrace another’s catastrophic mistakes? Why can’t those mistakes become a cautionary lesson? “This inability to understand someone else’s faraway grief,” he pleads, “threatens to bring on imminent and violent extinction.”

_____________

Surely there must be some way “to overcome man’s perverse habit of learning only from his own experience, so that the experience of others often passes him by without profit”! And in fact, there is: art, and especially literature.

Great literature has the power, he explained in his Nobel Prize lecture, to “impress upon an obstinate human being someone else’s far-off sorrows or joys” and to “give him an insight into magnitudes of events and into delusions that he’s never himself experienced.” He went on: “Making up for man’s scant time on earth, art transmits from one person to another the entire accumulated burden of another’s life experience … and allows us to assimilate it as our own.” Nothing else possesses literature’s “miraculous power” to overcome the barriers of language, custom, and social structure and thereby communicate “the experience of an entire nation to another nation that hasn’t undergone such a difficult, decades-long collective experience.” Literature “could save an entire nation from a redundant” and self-destructive course.

Solzhenitsyn’s audience must have wondered: But surely novelists can err, mislead, or even lie like everyone else! Isn’t that what Soviet socialist realist, “Party-minded” writers actually did? Here it is helpful to remember that in the Russian tradition not everything called a novel or poem qualifies as “literature.” Writing that lies or lacks compassion for those who suffer cannot belong to the canon. As Dmitri Likhachev, the foremost scholar of medieval Russian literature, explained:

Literature is the conscience of a society, its soul. The honor and merit of a writer consists in defending truth and the right to that truth under the most unfavorable circumstances…. Can you really consider literature literature, or a writer a writer if they side-step the truth, if they silence or try to falsify it? Literature which does not evoke a pang of conscience is already a lie. And to lie in literature, you will agree, is the worst kind of lying.

When the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, also a Nobel Prize winner, praised the Soviet government’s imprisonment of dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, the editor and poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky, joined by novelist Lydia Chukovskaia and others, expelled him from “Russian literature.” “Sholokhov is now a former writer,” Tvardovsky asserted.

The most that ordinary people can do when a totalitarian regime blankets them with lies, Solzhenitsyn explained, is not to participate: “Let that come into the world—only not through me.” But writers can do more: “It is within their power … to defeat the lie! …The lie can prevail against much in the world, but never against art.”

Why exactly can a genuine novel not lie? What prompts Solzhenitsyn to deem “the persuasiveness of a true work of art irrefutable” and declare that “it prevails even over a resisting heart”? The answer is that a novel tests ideas as political speeches, journalistic articles, and philosophical systems do not.

If an author implausibly makes a character assert or do something just because a political position requires it, readers will sense the falsity. They will recognize that the assertion comes from the author’s prefabricated ideology and does not arise from the character’s experience. It seems fake, forced, out of character. Analogous tests pertain to other artistic forms, which display their own kinds of proof and disproof. That is why “a true work of art carries its verification within itself: artificial or forced concepts do not survive their trial by image; both concept and image crumble, and turn out feeble, pale, convincing no one.”

Genuine works of art based on truth “attract us to themselves powerfully, and no one ever—even centuries later—will step forth to refute them.” They become classics. When Dostoevsky’s famously stated that “beauty will save the world,” he meant that even if regimes crush truth and goodness, “the intricate, unpredictable, and unlooked-for shoots of Beauty will force their way through… therefore fulfilling the task of all three.”

This view of art as something sacred made Solzhenitsyn highly impatient with the “falsely understood avant-gardism” of certain kinds of modernism and postmodernism. As he explains in his speech “Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness,” delivered in New York in 1993, cleverness alone ultimately proves trivial and, at times, destructive. “Before erupting on the streets of Petrograd, this cataclysmic [Russian] revolution had erupted on the pages of the artistic and literary journals of Bohemian circles. It is there we first heard…[of] the sweeping away of all ethical codes and religions.” Even the most talented “futurists,” ensnared by a false revolutionism, demanded the destruction of “the Racines, Murillos, and Raphaels, ‘so that bullets would bounce off museum walls’” while calling for the Russian literary classics to be “‘thrown overboard from the ship of modernity’.”

Decades later, some Russian writers of the Brezhnev era embraced postmodernist relativism: “Yes, they say, Communist dogma was a great lie—but then again, absolute truths don’t exist anyhow, and it’s hardly worthwhile trying to find them.” In this way, the masterpieces of Russian fiction became the object of condescending scorn.

And so, in one sweeping gesture of alienated vexation, classical Russian literature—which never disdained reality but sought the truth—is dismissed as next to worthless. Denigrating the past is deemed to be the key to progress. And so today it’s once again fashionable in our country to ridicule, debunk, and throw overboard the great Russian literature, steeped as it is in love and compassion.

Even more than Russia, Solzhenitsyn said, the West has embraced this shallow relativism. The most advanced theories teach that “there is no God, there is no truth, the universe is chaotic, all is relative, ‘the world as a text.’” Postmodern literature purports to “play,” but this is “not the Mozartian playfulness of a universe overflowing with joy—but a forced playing upon the strings of emptiness.”

In literature as in life, “nothing can be fashioned on a neglect of higher meanings.” No doubt about it, Solzhenitsyn maintained, the world is going through a profound and accelerating spiritual crisis, and its only hope—great literature—is betraying its mission. In a rare moment of hopefulness, Solzhenitsyn found it “hard to believe that we’ll allow this to occur.” He said, “Even in Russia, so terribly ill right now—we wait and hope that, after the coma and period of silence, we shall feel the reawakening of Russian literature, and witness the subsequent arrival of fresh new forces” that will spiritually uplift the world. But only if people return to “higher meaning.”

If Solzhenitsyn’s warnings about their society’s collapse irritated Westerners, his exalted view of literature struck them as too naive to take seriously. How many Americans regard novels as supremely important, let alone redemptive? Today, as literature departments “decolonize” the curriculum, fewer and fewer become acquainted with the greatest works at all.

More and more, students view literature as what they teach—or rather, used to teach—in required courses. Literature no longer has sufficient prestige to attract the best minds, and so the process of decline accelerates. Who reads contemporary poetry, and what timeless American novels have appeared in the past half century?

What’s more, young people increasingly lack the patience that great literature demands. They surf, they scan, they tweet. So how likely is it that, as Solzhenitsyn hoped, literature would transmit the experience needed to avoid a disastrous future?

When a country disparages the classics, it invites what Russians experienced as a “seventy-year long ice age.” People imprison themselves in the present moment and, in the name of freedom, enslave themselves to a single way of seeing the world. Wisdom earned by very different experiences seems increasingly irrelevant.

At the end of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn directly addressed those elites most resistant to his warning:

All you freedom-loving “left-wing” thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it someday—but only when you yourselves hear “hands behind your backs there!” and step ashore on our Archipelago.

Footnote 1: We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ed. Ignat Solzhenitsyn (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2024).

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, July 21, 2024 6:42 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


We Have Ceased to See the Purpose

By Peter Augustine Lawler | February 11, 2015 6:41 PM

https://www.nationalreview.com/postmodern-conservative/we-have-ceased-
see-purpose-peter-augustine-lawler/

On the question of whether America is worse off after its victory in the Cold War, I will deploy what I think is the great Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s most penetrating speech — “We Have Ceased to See the Purpose” — which he gave before the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein 1992.

I sure have “sampled” a lot from this speech, sometimes without remembering that was what I was doing, in my various writings on education.

1. Solzhenitsyn writes of “the howl of existentialism” that lurks just below the surface of our happy-talk pragmatism about our material pursuits. We howl because we lack the words that correspond to our truest and deepest personal experiences. We howl because the foundation of said pragmatism really is loneliness all the way down.

2. “Man has lost a sense of himself as a limited point in the universe, albeit one possessed of free will. He begins to deem himself the center of his surroundings, adapting not himself to the world but the world to himself. And then, of course, the thought of death becomes unbearable: It is the extinction of the entire universe at a stroke.” Think here, of course, of the anti-extinctionism of the transhumanists, which is an extreme form of the general tendency of our autonomy freaks to identify being itself with me. It’s my indefinite sustainability that’s the real issue here!

3. Certainly, “nothing so bespeaks the current helplessness of our spirit, our intellectual disarray, as the loss of a clear and calm attitude toward death.” It’s impossible to really know or love without accepting — without subconsciously raging — against death. And it’s impossible, as the dissidents Solzhenitysn and Havel say, to truthfully separate intellectual freedom from courageous deeds, from the willingness to surrender one’s own life to that which gives life meaning.

4. “There can be only one true Progress; the sum total of the spiritual progress of individuals; the degree of self-perfection in the course of their lives.” So political, economic, and technological progress must be judged according to how they contribute to or detract from “true Progress.” Certainly, “all hope cannot be pinned on science, technology, or economic growth.”

5. So: “It is time to stop seeing Progress (which cannot be stopped by anyone or anything) as a stream of unlimited blessings, and to view it rather as a gift from on high, set down for an extremely intricate trial of our free will.” Technological progress can be understood to be, most of all, as a demanding “gift” that might contribute to our true progress as an “intricate trial,” a test that we may or may not pass in subordinating the “how” of technology to the “why” of properly human purpose, of being free and relational beings living in the truth under God.

6. For now: “The victory of technological civilization has also instilled in us a spiritual insecurity. Its gifts enrich, but enslave us as well.”

7. The main cause of the enslavement? We think “All is interests, we must not neglect our interests . . . ” The result: “We have ceased to see the purpose.” It’s not that we don’t have interests, but each of us is so much more than a being with interests. Thinking of oneself as being with interests and nothing more is, for some, a way bragging about one’s individual freedom from spiritual illusions and aristocratic despotism. But it’s actually an affirmation of the slavish denial of free will in favor of material determination. No one who lives in the truth thinks primarily in terms of interests.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, July 21, 2024 11:21 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You've already shown everybody many times what a piece of gutter trash you actually are.

Nobody takes your judgement about anybody else seriously when it's clear that you are incapable of self-reflection. It doesn't matter how many times you repeat these non-truths.



--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
6ixStringJack, do you remember being an alcoholic? Then, almost instantaneously, you stopped. After decades, you figured out that alcohol was bad and saved yourself, but you lost years of life and your teeth. Perhaps you will eventually see what is wrong with Trump and Fascism (so many things more than wrong with alcohol) and will stop sooner than decades.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Shut the fuck up, retard.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Sunday, September 8, 2024 6:26 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Shut the fuck up, retard.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
Hitler Would Have Been Astonished

The German dictator would not have recognized his description on The Tucker Carlson Show.

By Thomas Weber | September 6, 2024, 12:50 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/09/tucker-carlson-darry
l-cooper-hitler-churchill-propaganda/679730/

In some ways, Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, would have been impressed by the podcaster Darryl Cooper’s appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show earlier this week. Hitler and Goebbels were masters of disinformation and demagoguery, and Cooper’s tirade against Winston Churchill and his whitewashing of Nazi Germany’s crimes reflected several of their insights. As the author of books on Hitler’s radicalization and Nazi disinformation campaigns, and as the historical consultant for Goebbels and the Führer, the first major Hitler feature film in 20 years, I found it eerie to watch the conversation between Cooper and America’s best-known political-talk-show host.

As Hitler put it in Mein Kampf, “The task of propaganda is to attract followers”; Cooper has been boasting that his podcast is now ranked first on iTunes. Goebbels used provocation as a tactic to achieve that goal, trying to trigger reactions from his opponents that would make headlines. Or, as Cooper said on X, “I like posting provocative shit, seeing how close I can step up to various lines with[out] going over them.”

Yet had Hitler lived to hear Cooper insist that after 1940, he had tried to achieve a comprehensive peace only to be foiled by Churchill, the German dictator would have been astonished. Hitler had, in fact, long favored a peace settlement with Britain. In Hitler’s view of the world, however, a peace deal with Britain on its own would have been insufficient to secure Germany’s future. Only grabbing more territory to the east and eliminating Jews and Jewish ideas, he believed, could deliver enduring security. Hitler saw Jews as the originators and agents of the greatest existential crisis that Europe had experienced for hundreds of years. Churchill wasn’t the obstacle to peace; without Churchill, Hitler would have had an even freer hand to implement a program of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Eastern Europe.

The focus of Cooper’s provocations, though, was not whitewashing Nazi Germany but, rather, lashing out at Britain’s wartime leader as the “chief villain” of World War II. Seconded by Carlson, Cooper assailed Churchill, arguing that he was “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.” And he charged that “the psychopath” was motivated by a quest for “redemption.”

In keeping with his focus on “sacred symbols” and his affinity for national “redemption,” Cooper attacked Churchill as the embodiment of what is most sacred to American conservatism. Churchill is revered by the GOP establishment, which Cooper and Carlson disdain. During President George W. Bush’s years in the White House, he placed a little statue of Churchill in the Oval Office. Hillsdale College, the Christian liberal-arts school, hosts a Churchill Project to secure his legacy. Churchill is also, as Cooper stressed, a symbol of the Western world order established after 1945; he added that today, only those parts of Europe that experienced American and Western indoctrination after 1945 are rotten. Attacking Churchill, then, is Cooper’s means of attacking that postwar order.

And Cooper attacked these values in another way. Perhaps unsurprisingly for the host of a show called Martyr Made, he exhibits, at the very least, an acceptance of violence in the service of political goals. Unprovoked, for example, he stressed that he would “refuse to judge” the mob violence directed at Britons of color this summer.

There is nothing surprising about the flourishing of extremist ideology at times when people believe that their individual and collective survival are at stake. Just as in the interwar years, people of many nations no longer believe that the political establishment has what it takes to steer them out of a permanent and life-threatening crisis. In such conditions, false prophets and conspiratorial thinking can take hold of people’s minds, particularly when aided by new technologies of mass communication.

The ideas propagated on Carlson’s show go well beyond those expressed by former President Donald Trump, and their dissemination on his show should be read as an attempt to see how far Carlson can change Trumpism. His decision to air these views of Cooper’s forms part of an extremist challenge to the postwar order. The response from American conservatives will test whether they are now willing to break with the legacy of Ronald Reagan and successive Republican administrations, and betray conservative understandings about the ideas that advance freedom.

In that sense, Monday’s show poses a threat, not just to the GOP establishment, but also to Trump himself. The response to Carlson’s challenge will help determine the future of American conservatism.

About the Author

Thomas Weber is a professor of history and international affairs at the University of Aberdeen and a visiting fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of a forthcoming book about Nazi disinformation and foreign interference in 1930s Britain, as well as the historical consultant on Goebbels and the Führer, to be released in the U.S. in October.

Download Thomas Weber’s books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Thomas+Weber+ghetto and

https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Thomas+Weber+hitler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Weber_(historian)

Tucker Carlson / Darryl Cooper: The True History of the Jonestown Cult, WWII, and How Winston Churchill Ruined Europe



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, September 10, 2024 12:09 PM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.



tick tock

T

TRUMP FADING AWAY



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Wednesday, September 11, 2024 4:16 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Harris Exposed How Easy Trump Is to Manipulate. Dictators Have Known This for a Long Time. She homed in on a dangerous weakness.

By Fred Kaplan | Sept 11, 2024 1:24 PM

Tuesday night’s debate devoted little time to foreign policy, but a few key moments revealed—more dramatically than half an hour of dedicated discussion might have—just how much a renewed Donald Trump presidency could weaken the United States and make the world a more dangerous place.

Many noted, after the debate, how readily Vice President Kamala Harris lured the ex-president into traps. All she had to do was push one of his buttons—to remark that the crowds at his rallies are bored, or that he inherited all of his wealth (then blew it in successive bankruptcies), or that world leaders laugh at him—and he exploded in paroxysms of fury, ranting over grievances, rambling down ratholes of conspiracy theories, thrown off course from the issues at hand.

What we were seeing was the flip side of how easily foreign heads of state, especially tyrants, manipulate Trump to their favor. All they have to do is call him “Sir” (as he often recites them doing in stories, some possibly true, most clearly fictitious), and he will eat poison right out of their hands.

After showing how deeply she could rattle him with the slightest personal insult, Harris turned the tables and spelled out how deeply others can win him over with the slightest compliment. “It is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again,” she said, “because they’re so clear they can manipulate you with flattery and favors.”

Harris said all this while looking straight at Trump. Many people who have dealt with Trump know this about his vulnerability to flattery, his envy of strongmen, his puzzlingly desperate need for approval and praise. Some of his aides have recounted this compulsion in books they’ve written after leaving office. But it’s quite possible that Harris is the first person ever to say these things straight to his face.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/09/presidential-debate-kamala
-harris-donald-trump-dictators-orban-foreign-policy.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 12, 2024 6:16 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


I Examined Donald Trump’s Ear — and His Soul — at Mar-a-Lago

By Olivia Nuzzi | Sept. 9, 2024

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-ear-campaign-assa
ssination-attempt.html

The Afterlife of Donald Trump

At home at Mar-a-Lago, the presidential hopeful contemplates miracles, his campaign, and his formidable new opponent.

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

Pink. An ovular rose. Big and smooth. A complex commonplace instrument. And, as far as these things go, a rather nice one. Isolated from the head and all that roils therein, and to which it is, famously and miraculously, still attached, you have to admit, if you can: It is beautiful. In Palm Beach, sunlight streamed through the window to find its blood vessels, setting the whole device aglow. Auris Divina, Divine Ear, protector of The Donald, immaculate cartilage shield, almighty piece of flesh.

Donald Trump raised his right hand and grabbed hold of it. He bent it backward and forward. I asked if I could take a closer look. These days, the former president and current triple threat — convicted felon, Republican presidential nominee, and recent survivor of an assassination attempt — comes from a place of “yes.” He waved me over to where he sat on this August afternoon, in a low-to-the-ground chair upholstered in cream brocade fabric in the grand living room at Mar-a-Lago.

“Let’s see,” he said. He tapped the highest point of the helix. “It’s a railroad track.” He tapped it again. “They didn’t need a stitch,” he said. “You know, it’s funny. Usually, something like that would be considered a surreal experience, where you sort of don’t realize it, and yet there was no surrealism in this case. I felt immediately that I got hit by a bullet. I also knew it was my ear. It’s just a little bit over here — ” He used his hand to wiggle the ear. “Right next to — ” He gestured at the side of his head, at his brain, and raised his eyebrows. “It’s amazing.” He shook his head in disbelief. “And the ear, as you know, is a big bleeder.”

It did not feel surreal. Trump kept mentioning that. How unexpected it was, the matter-of-fact way in which he managed to process the attack as it unfolded. But on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, he was tethered to the Earth as if by cosmic cord. He could not be pulled into the void. He was so clear about each moment of that afternoon. At Butler Memorial Hospital, he said, he asked the doctor, “?‘Why is there so much blood?’” This was due to the vascular properties of cartilage, the doctor told him. “These are the things you learn through assassination attempts.” He laughed. “Okay, can you believe it?”

He can never fully see his own ear. He can never fully see himself as others do. I inched closer and narrowed my eyes. The particular spot that he identified with his tap was pristine. I scanned carefully the rest of the terrain. It looked normal and incredible and fine. Ears do not often become famous, and when they do, it is because they have suffered some sort of misfortune. Van Gogh’s self-mutilation. Mike Tyson’s cannibalistic injury to Evander Holyfield. J. Paul Getty III, whose kidnappers cut the whole thing off and put it in the mail. And now this, the luckiest and most famous ear in the world. If you were the kind of person inclined to make such declarations, which Donald Trump is, you might call it the greatest ear of all time.

An ear had never before been so important, so burdened. An ear had never before represented the divide between the organic course of American history and an alternate timeline on which the democratic process was corrupted by an aberrant act of violence as it had not been in more than half a century. Yet an ear had never appeared to have gone through less. Except there, on the tiniest patch of this tiny sculpture of skin, a minor distortion that resembled not a crucifixion wound but the distant aftermath of a sunburn.

This is, of course, part of the legend. When Ronny Jackson, the White House physician for Barack Obama and then for Trump, who now represents one of the most conservative congressional districts in Texas, described the injury, even the words he chose were delicate. The wound was “kind of a half-moon shape,” he told me. “There was nothing to stitch.” The bullet had “scooped” a small amount of “skin and fat” off the top of the ear. (By which he did not mean to imply that Trump has especially fat ears. “Everybody has fat and skin on top of their ears,” he said. “He’s got good ears.”)

Jackson admitted he was responsible for the funny-looking bandage Trump sported at the Republican National Convention. Because the ear was inflamed and easily irritated, and because irritation caused it to start bleeding again, and because the shape of any ear makes it unwieldy to dress, his solution was to apply antibiotic ointment, then gauze to absorb blood, and then he secured the whole system with the envelopelike bandage that inspired so much derision and a brief niche fashion craze. “I thought that was pretty cool … I should’ve patented it,” he said. “I’m an emergency medical physician. I’m not a nurse,” he added. “I did the best I could.”

It had been three weeks since the rally. Since the bullet had launched from the barrel of an AR-15 and pierced the Pennsylvania sky. Since God’s hand had moved Trump’s head, as he had come to see it, sparing his temporal lobe, the part of the brain directly behind the top of the pinna, the medical term for the region of the outer ear that directs sound waves into the ear canal, responsible for functions related to emotions, memory, language, and visual perception. Since he had been tackled to the ground. Since he rose up, disheveled and defiant, to negotiate with his armed guards the terms of his exit from the stage. He wanted first to put on his shoes, which had been knocked off by the force of his defensive detail. He looked down at his feet. “Not these,” he said. “But ones like these. They were pretty tight. They weren’t loafers or anything.” And then he wanted to lead. That is how he saw what he did next. It was just what a leader would do. He recalled that when he looked into the crowd, he saw confusion spread across the faces of his fans. “They thought I was dead,” he told me. As a performer, he knew how to calibrate his actions onstage to address the needs of his audience. Blood running down his face, he raised his fist and punched the air. “Fight, fight, fight!” he said.

His iPhone, on the wooden table a few feet away, interrupted his story with the sound of Apple’s Reflection, its default ringtone. An aide got up to retrieve it for him. “Unless that’s important, I’ll just call back. Let me see — ” He took the phone and squinted at the screen. “Uh … Oooh!” His face curled into an expression of intense interest. He ignored the call but fixated on something else he had seen on the screen. “That was a big — that was a big day for us, today.” He was referring to Kamala Harris picking Tim Walz as her vice-presidential nominee. He asked to go off the record.

It was hurricane season, the offseason at Mar-a-Lago, and throughout our conversation, thunderclouds darkened the living room and then parted to reveal the light again. The historic estate is where Trump decamped a sore loser at the end of his one-term presidency three and a half years ago, having first failed in his campaign against Joe Biden (though he insists, still, that he won) and then failed in his efforts to overturn the results of that election through harebrained legal schemes and firing up a mob that attacked the United States Capitol and threatened to hang his vice-president. But that was all so long ago. Cocooned in this palace between the moats of the Intracoastal and the Atlantic Ocean, as he was impeached a second time and charged with 91 crimes and embroiled in many lawsuits, he became more convinced than ever of his invincibility. He plotted his return to power.

The “deep state” and its lawfare could not trap him. Members of his inner circle might be indicted, too, and some sent to jail, but he was different. He was an escape artist, better than El Chapo — who, unlike Trump, had been captured. Meanwhile, the Republican primary field turned out to be a joke, even easier to level than it had been in 2016. And best of all, Biden was weak and getting weaker. It had all been going so well, as he saw it. The day of the shooting, things could not have been going better.

The whole world finally agreed with what he had been saying for years: His opponent did not appear fit to serve. Compared to Biden, Trump looked practically like Zeus. And after his brush with death, his political future seemed all but secure. In the days that followed the attack, the Democratic Party panicked. The race was now a contest between undeniable strength and undeniable frailty. “Game over,” read one representative text from a party operative at that time. For so long, he had played the role of tough guy, and now he had finally done something so tough that he never had to pretend again. Even liberals had to admit that his response to the attack went pretty hard.

Trump was running for another term in the White House on the explicit pledge to do what he had not been empowered or wise enough to do the first time. The first campaign had been about promises and the second campaign about excuses. The third campaign was a threat. He would do what he wanted. He would be not just more powerful than he had ever been but more powerful than any president in American history. There would be tax cuts for the rich, regulation cuts for big business, mass deportations, a greater retreat from global commitments, and on and on — everything his opponents hated last time, just more and worse. Through a massive expansion of executive authority, independent agencies would enter his possession, most important of all the Justice Department, through which he vowed to exact revenge on his enemies in politics, law enforcement, and the media. For a while, all of this had seemed, to the roughly half of the country that would never support him, irrelevant. He was a fool and a felon, a disgrace to the office he had held and lost and now sought again. They didn’t want to hear about him or think about him again. Then, almost overnight after the shooting, the specter of another four years of MAGA set in.

In response, Trump received his belated prize for winning the debate, insult added to literal injury: a coup, as he saw it, that replaced the man he would almost certainly beat with the woman whose defeat was much less certain.

“Think of it,” he said. “So I went out and focused all this energy and talent and money and everything else on defeating him and then he starts going down very — you know, I was up by 16, 17 points in some polls. That’s when they went to him and said, ‘You can’t win.’ They told him, ‘You can’t win, and we want you out.’ It’s sort of never happened before. They took him out, and they put somebody else in. You know, they put a new candidate in, a candidate that we didn’t focus on at all. We never even got the — we had this big convention, and we were all focused on Biden, and now, now you take a look at it, and we were focused on a person that wasn’t running anymore. So it’s quite an unfair situation — but it’s okay.”

The fish rots from the head down, and Trump campaign, like Trump White House, had never been a phrase that suggested order. Yet for the nearly two years it had been in business, since the candidate made the unorthodox decision to start running in the fall of 2022, the chaos that plagued the effort had been for the most part external. The campaign itself, headquartered in West Palm Beach, hummed along quietly compared to the 2016 and 2020 organizations, which had not hummed so much as blared like car horns in the night. Knifing, leaking, fuckups, general incompetence, firing and rehiring, outright regime change, scandal after scandal — those had been the subplots bubbling beneath whatever Trump himself had said or done at any given moment to upend whatever plan had been in place just the moment before. By this standard, Trump 2024 is a monastery (with the exception of that reported recent fistfight at Arlington National Cemetery).

In between rallies and media appearances, the candidate holds court on South Ocean Boulevard and casts about for ideas and advice, then, as usual, does whatever he was going to do in the end anyway, which looks like genius when it works and madness when it doesn’t. He is not exactly the kind of principal who can be staffed.

Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, who run the show on paper, are not veterans of either prior national campaign. Trump insists he’s happy with them, and he insists that recent personnel decisions, like bringing back known chaos agent Corey Lewandowski, are not corrective measures. “I just like him. Corey’s a character,” Trump said. “But I’m very happy with everybody.” There is nothing to correct, in his estimation, because he did not really lose the 2020 election, and in fact he performed better in 2020 than he had in 2016. “We got millions more votes in 2020,” he said. The whole thing, he maintained against all evidence, was rigged, and if he lost again in 2024, he would only commit to accept the results if he could be convinced that this contest was not rigged, too. “It’s a lot easier to concede than to say that you won and go and prove it when the system is against you,” he said. “All I’m asking for is an honest election.”

For all his marketing and manifestation prowess, it had been a strange fact of Trump’s political career that it sometimes took him a while to acclimate to a new nemesis. For much of the 2020 campaign, he struggled to engage with the character of Joe Biden. He could not decide even how to caricature him. Sleepy Joe? Crooked Joe? Glorified corpse or criminal mastermind? At his rallies — usually in airport hangars, a function of the pandemic — he devoted more time to campaigning against Hunter, who was not the correct Biden family member, or Hillary because, boy, did he miss her, or Obama, that all-time classic. A similar problem afflicts him now. When he referred recently to Obama as “Barack Hussein Obama,” a senior member of his campaign staff told me, “We’re so back.” More seriously, the candidate felt that he was supposed to be running against Biden. He had wanted to run against Biden. He was still, more often than not, running against Biden.

I asked him about an early nickname for Harris, Lyin’ Kamala. It was the same one he’d used before, most insistently against Ted Cruz, or Lyin’ Ted, during the 2016 primary cycle. It worked with the Texas senator because it had the benefit of both seeming and being true. I didn’t get a chance to formulate a question about why he would recycle material so closely associated with another politician before Trump interjected with a prideful bulletin.

“Well, I have a name. You saw the new name?” I had not seen it. “Kamabla,” he said. His communications director, Steven Cheung, who had said almost nothing for 57 minutes, piped up to say it too. “Kamabla.” Trump nodded. He gave me an expectant look, but I was confused. He repeated it again. “Kamabla.”

What did it mean? “Just a … mixed-up … pile of words. Like she is,” Trump said. I tried to pronounce it myself. Kah-mah-bla? I was still struggling. “She is — she is — ” Trump stopped what he was saying and stared at me with a look of grave concern and disappointment. “Well,” he said, “You have to see it to really understand.” This was perhaps a nickname meant for cyberbullying, not for conversation. “There are those that think it’s good … ” he said a bit uneasily. He nodded in Cheung’s direction. “You like it?” he asked. “It’s a good troll,” Cheung said. I asked Trump if he had come up with this one. He laughed a deflated kind of laugh, as if to minimize the importance of the answer. “Yeah,” he said, “I come up with a lot of things.” The name was soon retired.

As a first resort, Trump had called into question Harris’s racial identity. At a recent rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a screen the size of a swimming pool projected a headline overhead for several hours about the historic nature of her election to the U.S. Senate, where she was the first Indian American woman to serve (she was not the first Black woman to serve). The stunt was supposed to imply that Harris was not Black enough and that she was, more generally, a fraud. Trump said he did not, in fact, talk about Harris’s race. “No. Not much,” he said. I began to raise the subject of the rally. He cut me off. “She is what she is. She has to determine that,” he said. He did not want to discuss the matter further. He launched into a riff about the economy (which is doing badly).

The whole subject of the vice-president annoyed him greatly. Actually, that was true for all vice-presidents, including his first one, whose theoretical assassination he endorsed, and his new one, whom he did not want to discuss much at all. “I think J.D. Vance is really — he’s really stepping up like I thought he would. I mean, he has been fantastic over the last few days.” He praised his book, Hillbilly Elegy, which he claims to have read. “It’s, uh, an opinion. A strong opinion,” he had told me in 2022.

I asked about the palace-intrigue stories that claimed now, just as they had in 2015 and 2016 and 2017 and 2018 and 2019 and 2020, that his advisers were struggling with a principal who lacked discipline. “We have been disciplined,” he said. “And they say ‘Don’t get personal,’ but remember, they’re personal with me. I mean, they call me weird. I’m not weird. I’m the most not-weird person.”

I asked if he would agree that he is an extraordinarily unusual person. “Unusual, but not weird. I think a very solid person. I mean, a solid person,” he said. Whom would he characterize as weird? “I think Tim Walz is weird. That guy’s the weird one,” he said. “And she’s Marxist, and that’s, that’s strange in this country because this country will never be a Marxist country. She’s actually — you know, her father is a big promoter of Marxism.” I was pretty sure Harris had been raised by her mother and does not maintain a relationship with her father, I said. “I don’t know …” Trump said. “Maybe that’s true, yeah. I just don’t know anything about it. I just know that he’s a Marxist professor.”

Later, when I asked one of his longtime advisers how it could be possible that the candidate did not appear to have received a very thorough briefing about his opponent, the adviser scoffed and related a story about the Friday afternoon in July when Biden taped his big postdebate interview with George Stephanopoulos. “I called and said, ‘I know a little about what happened in the interview. Do you want me to read it to you?’ He said, ‘What interview?’ He didn’t even know about it. I’m like, ‘Mr. President, there’s absolutely no possibility that you don’t know?’” He asked the adviser what network it was airing on so that he could make sure to TiVo it.

Donald Trump and the people who hate Donald Trump are in rare agreement on one thing: He has not changed. Now as ever, the very qualities and behaviors that result in his failures are the same as those that result in his successes. Why would he change a thing? About all matters relating to self, he thought this way. That his will alone determined his nature. That his nature determined his reality. That his reality — he was particularly proud of this — determined reality for everyone else. Change was an act of will, then, and an admission that something could be perfected, which was an admission that it had not been perfect to begin with, which was weakness.

“When I got hit, everybody thought I would change,” he told the crowd in Harrisburg in late July. “Trump is going to be a nice man now. He came close to death. And I really agreed with that — for about eight hours or so and then I realized that they wanted to put me in prison for doing absolutely nothing wrong.” In the end, he joked, he “was nice” for “three, four, or five hours.” Niceness was weakness, too.

In his RNC address, five days after the shooting, Trump announced that he would talk about it that night and then he would not talk about it again. It was “too painful,” he said. He needed to move on. But he kept talking and talking. He talked the way that he moved. Constantly, as a ritualistic exercise that would transform the events of that day into material, yet more rhythmic beats in the anti-hero’s journey he had been writing out loud for more than 40 years.

As narrator, he was in charge of his own life. In our conversation, he said he thought of himself as a kind of artist. And his life, his identity, was his art. “I’m a conceiver,” he said. “I’ve always designed things that worked.” He cited his buildings, his clubs, his books, his television shows — success had not visited him by chance, he said. “A lot of imagination goes into those things.”

When we talk about Donald Trump, we are often really talking about Donald Trump’s ears. Keeping Donald Trump focused on a single topic, even when that topic is related directly or indirectly to his favorite topic, Donald Trump, has long been a riddle so great that it has stumped some of the world’s most sophisticated and powerful minds. Even as his body idled, with the exception of his golf swing or his oddball bursts of movement inspired by the rhythms of the Village People, his monkey mind pinged and ponged, reacting to whatever information he absorbed through his hyperreceptors.

He is, more than most men, an animal. When he uses that term, animal, what he means to say is “subhuman.” He is referring, ordinarily, to undocumented immigrants and violent criminals. He does not like animals. Especially sharks, which he hates. He doesn’t like dogs. Dog, like animal, is a word he applies to others disparagingly. When he says “dog,” he means “pathetic.” What I mean when I say that Trump is an animal is that he operates, quick and pure, on instinct, driven by heightened sensory capabilities by which he absorbs information, processes it through a kaleidoscope, and spits it back out as only Trump can.

You can see him working when you look him in the eye. He is scanning, calculating what exactly he needs and how best to secure it through providing you with what he determines you want or need. The effect is at once prehistoric and futuristic. An intelligence that feels unevolved and artificial in equal measure. Part caveman, part computer. A regression and a leap forward.

It is popular to say that he does not have any beliefs, but what people mean when they say this is he has no principles. His greatest belief, the essential thing to understand about him, is his belief in his own mind. In its power to conceive and then to actualize. And he was unwilling to accept or admit that his mind was vulnerable to the influence of his emotions. He had never been comfortable being that human.

When I asked if he had been afraid in those moments when he heard the gunshots, when he felt the smack, when he saw the blood, he said, “I didn’t think of fear. I didn’t think of it.” In Trump’s understanding, fear is not a feeling but an idea that you may choose to entertain — or not. He moved right along to an idea he preferred to think of. “You know, I got so many nice calls from people I really don’t know. Jeff Bezos called. He said, ‘It is the most incredible thing I’ve ever watched.’ And he appreciated what I did, in the sense of getting up and letting people know,” he said. “I said, ‘Despite the fact that you own the Washington Post, I appreciate it.’ He couldn’t have been nicer. Mark Zuckerberg called up and said, ‘I’ve never supported a Republican before, but there’s no way I can vote for a Democrat in this election.’ He’s a guy that, his parents, everybody was always Democrat. He said, ‘I will never vote for the people running against you after watching what you did.’ So I mean, people really appreciated it. I don’t — I think it was very natural what I did. I think it was natural.” (Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson at Meta said, “As Mark has said publicly, he’s not endorsing anybody in this race and has not communicated to anybody how he intends to vote.”)

Had Trump dreamed about the shooting? “No, I haven’t,” he said. “It hasn’t had that kind of impact on me, and maybe that’s what’s good about being so busy.” The question activated a particular reflex, and he told me about his rallies, how he had held “numerous” events since Butler and how “successful” and “big” they were. “You know,” he said, “it would affect some people. I could understand how it would affect some people. Because you’re an eighth of an inch from really bad things happening. And no, I haven’t. I like not to think about it because I think that’s positive. You don’t want to think about it too much. But it was pretty amazing.” Did he ever remember his dreams? “A little. I think little sections of them, yes,” he said. “Sometimes, the concept of dreams, not as vividly, maybe, as some, some can tell you everything, but more of a dream concept or something sometimes. Generally, I don’t have too many of those dreams. It’s an interesting question because usually you don’t remember, like, the details of it, but you remember the concepts.”

Conceptually, he allowed that the shooting had proved to him the existence of an interventionist God. “Prior to this, I believed in God, but one — ” He jumped from his own thoughts to the lower-stakes thoughts of others. “This is actually an interesting situation,” he said. “I’ve had people that didn’t believe in God that said now they do because of this. No, this is divine intervention. And look, this is something.” He added, “It’s like the hunters were saying: If the deer bolts, you know, you’re ready to shoot. And sometimes the deer bolts and they miss. In a way, I bolted. You know, I guess my sons told me that sometimes you’re ready to end the deer. As you squeeze in the trigger, the deer is bolting. I sort of bolted. Yeah, it was an act of God, in my opinion.”

His mind turned to the image of the bullet shooting through the air. He was, still, more comfortable talking about himself than talking about God. “You saw the New York Times photo? The Doug Mills? The bullet’s red,” he said. “It’s got blood on it, and you see the blood being taken out with it. That’s an amazing photo. There’s so many different views. The one picture became iconic.” He was referring to the photo, by Evan Vucci, of his fist raised in the air with blood streaming down his face. “But are there numerous pictures that are iconic, or is it just that one specific one? Were there other pictures that were as good as that?” There was the photo of him on the ground, his bloodied face angled down and his profile cast in partial silhouette. He was familiar with the image. “Who took that one?” he asked. “Anna Moneymaker. She’s amazing,” I said. Trump nodded. “He did great,” he said.

But among those who have spent time with him in the wake of the attack — advisers and allies and people who qualify as friends, though most people who know him say he does not really have friends — there is a consensus: Whether or not he wants to, whether or not he can admit it, whether it seems outrageous to believe it yourself, Donald Trump, who has always been exactly who he is, who was not changed when his tabloid celebrity became reality-TV celebrity became political celebrity, who was not changed even by the office of the presidency of the United States, is nevertheless being dragged forward to the next phase of his evolution.

A longtime friend put it this way: “The religious stuff has always freaked him out, but maybe less now. I don’t know. All I know is I talked to him the night he got shot, and the first thing he said to me was, ‘The people in the audience were so brave.’ He didn’t talk about himself at all. Not at all. And I thought that was really interesting. In subsequent conversations, he’s mentioned God to me. I think it’s to be expected that he would be thinking about the world in a slightly different way.” This person added, “In some sense, he actually did turn his cheek, didn’t he? There’s something there, this idea of Trump starting to understand Christianity.” Another longtime adviser described his religious curiosity: “He has questions about resurrection and eternal life, good and evil, right and wrong and the afterlife and what happens. How does God decide who lives and who doesn’t during experiences like that?”

Early this year, Dr. Phil interviewed Trump. Trump told him, “?‘I’ve watched your show. You’re not gonna get me to cry.’” Dr. Phil laughed. When the two men met again in late August for their second interview, he said, tears were no closer to Trump’s eyes but he displayed a new capacity and willingness to reflect and to entertain existential and religious questions. “It takes a dramatic event to change the course of someone’s personality and value systems,” Dr. Phil told me. He compared the process to “rerouting a river” or diverting the path of a bowling ball. “He’s certainly been different than I’ve seen him before, and he was different with me the second time than he was the first.”

From my perspective, it was true. He really did seem different. I have been interviewing Trump for almost ten years, and the Trump I have been speaking to since August is like no Trump I have ever encountered before. In person, it was impossible to ignore that even his face was different. He did not quite look like the same person. In a dark suit and dark tie slashed with thin red stripes, he was thinner than he had been during his springtime New York criminal trial. His hair was a paler shade of blond. His eyes were more feline. He wore an expression of perma-awe. He looked, in fact, like he had just been born. He sounded different, too. He spoke in a slower and more considered way.

Which is not to say that his consideration yielded the kind of results that might convert those who loathe him into admirers — or even change his grudge-motivated approach to politics. But it was the case that where there was once only action, there was now some effort, conscious or not, to relate. He had a softer presence. He laughed a lot. When others spoke, he listened carefully and with interest. He asked questions. The public saw this during his interview with podcaster Theo Von. Trump asked him about his experiences using drugs before he was sober. He seemed absorbed in what Von had to say. A longtime adviser said he was “more docile.”

His campaigns and presidency had been one long and unbroken series of complaints. His slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was a passive complaint in itself. Why wasn’t America great anymore? In power, his behavior had fueled an entire genre of stories about how he “seethed” and “fumed” and “stewed” on any given day over any given catastrophe or annoyance. According to just about everybody in close enough proximity to know, to be near him was to risk being bullied and blamed. It didn’t matter if you deserved it. He didn’t think that way. For Trump, something going wrong, or things just not going well enough, meant someone — though never him — had to pay.

But on the subject of his actual victimization, the biggest fuckup ever visited upon him, he was all grace. He focused now almost exclusively on everything that had gone right to conspire for his survival. The police had done an “amazing job.” The crowd was “amazing.” Everything was like that. “Amazing.” “Incredible.” “Amazing.” “Unbelievable.” “Amazing.” “I have to say, the Secret Service was very brave. I know they’re taking a lot of heat because they didn’t have somebody on that building, but when the bullets were flying, they came rushing. There was nobody that said, ‘Oh, let me stand back.’ And they were truly in the way of danger.” “The hospital was fantastic, Butler Hospital.” “The hospital was unbelievable.” “The doctors were unbelievable. You know, these are local doctors. They were unbelievable, unbelievable doctors. So it was amazing.”

Most of all, I wanted to know how he felt about a God that would intervene to spare his life but take the life of another man — Corey Comperatore, 50, husband and father of two children — and seriously wound two others. Had he thought about it? “Yeah,” he said. He talked for a while about Corey and what a big fan of his he was. And he talked about how a friend of his had given a million dollars to Corey’s wife, and how they had set up a fundraiser for the families, and how they had raised $5 million or $6 million. He kept talking and talking about the money. “I already gave the wife a million dollars, and she was great. I mean, look, she couldn’t believe it, but she would rather have her husband.” The check, he said for the second time now, was for a million dollars. “I don’t care how successful, it’s a check for a million dollars,” he said. “And I gave it to her. She was — she couldn’t believe it.”

I tried again. Had he wondered why he was spared and Corey Comperatore was not?

“No, I haven’t wondered why. I should wonder why,” he said. He looked off and he seemed to really be thinking. “I’ve been so — I’ve been working very hard on the campaign, and I also run a business during the time that I’m here, you know, with my family. It’s a great business. It’s an incredible business. But I am involved in running that, but mostly it’s the campaign because, you know, you have to do that. That’s got to be the focus. And my children run the business now and do a good job. Eric runs it, and Don helps him and runs it, also different aspects of it.” He was still looking off. “But no, I’ve never asked myself that. I’ve never thought of it. I don’t like thinking about it too much, because it’s almost like you have to get on with your life. So I don’t really like thinking about that too much.”

There’s definitely more work to do,” another person close to Trump said about efforts to get him ready for the September 10 debate that is potentially make-or-break for both candidates. “His study habits and willingness to prep in depth always has been challenging, but I would not expect an unprepared Trump for the debate. If she doesn’t piss him off, he can stay on message.” Although he was different after the shooting — “It’s impacted him in a really good way and in a really weird way,” this person said — “there are moments where he’s still him and he gets pissed off. I think this switcheroo, if you will, has been more difficult. He felt like he would have walked away with this easily, and I think he would have also, but I’m like, ‘You deal with the hand you’re dealt. Not the one you wish you’re dealt.’ And I think he’s come to terms with that reality and he’s dialing in to win.”

According to national polling averages, Trump is now down by roughly two points against Harris. And it’s one or two or three percentage points that will determine the winner in the swing states that will determine the presidency. In the absence of outright infighting, there were still oppositional factions in the campaign — the insiders versus the outsiders, the MAGA diehards versus the more practical professionals — and their disagreements came down to perceptions of purity and its value as a means to win.

There is one view that the MAGA movement is big enough on its own and that the campaign should be an effort to appease and energize the base. There is the other view: that victory will require a more accessible pitch that redefines MAGA as more generally anti-Establishment, a catchall movement for anyone unhappy with the existing system and the official narrative, whatever that means to them.

This is where Democrats turned independents Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, who have each endorsed Trump and been named co-chairs (alongside Vance, Don Jr., and Eric) of his presidential transition, come in. The campaign is now referring to MAGA as a “unity party.” Kennedy was drawing between 4 and 5 percent in some swing states before he pledged to “Make America Healthy Again,” a coup for Trump, whose leadership during the pandemic raised suspicions and inspired contempt among vaccine skeptics and big-government opponents on the alternative left and right of the political divide.

In speeches now, in between his meals from McDonald’s and his compulsive consumption of Diet Coke, Trump is talking about food quality and public health and forever chemicals — subjects of huge interest to Kennedy’s eclectic base. He doesn’t have to live it; he just has to convince those concerned about these issues that he now sees them as part of his general challenge to the power structures that he did not challenge the first time he was in charge of the government. It’s an uncomfortable sell, but the campaign is making a bet that voters — younger, politically alienated or inactive ones especially — might find themselves MAGA-pilled, if they weren’t before, after experiencing a more human-seeming Trump on one of the hugely popular podcasts he has appeared on recently, including with Von, Jake Paul, and Lex Fridman. If the campaign succeeds, Trump will appear by November to be the king of broader anti-Establishment, anti-woke culture, hip to the wisdom of bitcoiners and biohackers, tradwives and cybertruck drivers, naturalists and futurists, UFC fighters and stoic philosophers. “If he can just get a little groovy, he wins,” his longtime friend said. “And Trump is the only person alive who still says groovy. He’s a ’70s guy.”

Trump was telling me how much people prefer to watch his speeches and attend his events compared to his opponent. He filled arenas, he reminded me, “and don’t forget: I don’t call an entertainer like she did.” His crowds were there for him, he said. “I don’t have a guitar, but I’m the entertainer.”

There is only so much room for either candidate to grow their support. And if these appeals aren’t enough for victory in the face of the Democratic Party’s historically successful fundraising efforts and still-improving poll numbers, Trump’s only hope may be another divine intervention. Not that he’d admit it. “We’re leading in many of the polls,” he said. “I think most of the polls, despite the honeymoon period, which is soon going to be ending, I think. I hope.” He did not say he was praying for it. But others in his world of informal advisers and supporters are openly doing so. “He’s not going to win unless it’s the same forces that turned his head when the sniper fired — that’s kind of my view,” said the longtime friend.

A few weeks later, during the Democratic National Convention, we were talking on the phone. He still sounded and seemed different. But was he? I’m a big-time believer that people can change, though I know they rarely do. It was in this spirit that I mentioned to Trump that recently I had seen for the first time the modest home where he was raised in Jamaica Estates, Queens. What did he think when he considered his journey from there? “I’m honored. I’m honored, and I’m honored that, you know, it’s such a big subject. It’s like they don’t talk about anything else. Olivia, you watch, like, their convention, all they talk about is me. You know, all of these other networks, all that. This is going on for eight years now. You know, more than eight years. It’s like they don’t talk about anybody, anything else or anybody else. It’s a whole thing. It’s Trump. And it’s been that way for, really, nine years now. I’m honored by it. I used to be angered by it. By, you know — that’s why, like, you look at MSDNC, you look at Fake News CNN, all they talk about is Trump. Every show, they go, ‘Look at us!’ That they go from one thing to another thing to another thing. The only thing is, Trump’s involved in every one of them. And I started to say that I’m actually honored by it. It’s an honor. It’s never happened before. There’s never been anything like this before.”

I Examined Donald Trump’s Ear — and His Soul — at Mar-a-Lago

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 12, 2024 8:57 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK




--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Thursday, September 12, 2024 9:03 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:


--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
The debate could have only gone better if Trump said the most efficient solution to the illegal migrant problem means resurrecting Hitler and the Holocaust. Then Trump winks and says, "Kidding! I'll deport the migrants." Sure you will, Fatso.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 12, 2024 10:29 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


We'll see what the polls say.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Thursday, September 12, 2024 3:28 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We'll see what the polls say.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
The polls say Trump has a 50% chance, but at any moment after the election, Biden could have Trump's brains splattered all over to show the world that Trump is 100% dead meat. Maybe Trump should hire his own security since Biden's Secret Service serves Biden, not Trump.

Trump lied his head off about abortion during the debate. What are the facts?

How late can abortions be performed in the US? A few facts:

• There are only seven states where abortion is legal in the third trimester.

• There are only 14 clinics in those states that perform abortions in the third trimester. They are expensive and time consuming.

• Based on extrapolations of CDC surveillance data, there are probably only about 1,000 third-trimester abortions performed each year. The vast majority of these are between 24-28 weeks.

• There are no records for this, but the number of abortions performed in the last two months of pregnancy is almost certainly close to zero and exclusively done in cases of severe fetal abnormality or danger to the mother.

• Needless to say, no abortions are performed after birth anywhere in the country.

Now you know.



https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-late-abortions-in-the-us/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, October 21, 2024 2:30 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The progressive era is over. Again.

By Kevin Drum | October 21, 2024 – 10:57 am

https://jabberwocking.com/the-progressive-era-is-over-again/

What happened to the confident march of progressivism that inspired lefty politics for the past couple of decades? It seems to have died out, replaced by a budding rightward movement in American politics.

The explanation is simpler than most observers think: This is what always happens. Episodes of progressivism are rare in American history and usually produce a backlash after a decade or two because they overreach and finally get too far ahead of public opinion.

1. New Deal progressivism was weakened by the war and finally collapsed afterward thanks to perceptions of destructive union activism; softness on communism; and hardline desegregation.

2. The counterculture of the '60s eventually broke on the shoals of good intentions that went too far for most Americans: busing as a way of fighting racism; a continued obsession with "root causes" in the face of rising crime; and a humiliating retreat from Vietnam. Combined with a failing economy it killed progressivism for a generation.

3. The same thing has happened this time but with different issues: the transformation of anti-racism into wokeness; trans activism taken to extreme levels; "defund the police"; and immigration softness that's become indistinguishable from open borders.

The American public welcomes the thrill of progressivism every few decades — but only just so much and only for a short while. Then they retrench. But the good news is that progressive gains are generally permanent. Our most recent surge of progressivism was modest by historical standards but still produced Obamacare, gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and, with an assist from the Supreme Court, growing support for abortion.

Now we're suffering through the usual backlash and politics is moving slightly rightward. Mainstream Democrats can either fight this or accept it. The former guarantees irrelevance while the latter delivers public acceptance at a modest price — thanks to the growing lunacy of the Republican Party.

It seems like the choice should be easy, right? But it never is.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, October 21, 2024 2:38 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


That's because you burn all your goodwill on bullshit and make everyone hate you.

And this time you became the pro-war party that represents the elites in the meantime.

I said it years ago...

FIX YOUR FUCKING PARTY.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Monday, October 21, 2024 8:59 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's because you burn all your goodwill on bullshit and make everyone hate you.

And this time you became the pro-war party that represents the elites in the meantime.

I said it years ago...

FIX YOUR FUCKING PARTY.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
If the Democrats start pushing for America to do something new, such as go metric (kilometers, liters, kilograms) Trumptards would be enraged that the Democrats are taking away their freedom to be dumbasses who don't use the same units of measurement as the rest of the world. I don't blame Trump for your dimwittedness. All he did is find you idiots and exploit you.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, November 5, 2024 1:32 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump’s Followers Are Living in a Dark Fantasy

MAGA adherents deny and dismiss what they are a part of, but they believe Trump’s lies, and will support him until the end.

By Adam Serwer | November 4, 2024, 12:51 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/trump-campaign-cr
uelty/680498/

At a rally just outside Atlanta in late October, thousands of Donald Trump supporters lined up in the punishing southern sun to see their hero; some had driven hours from out of state. Vendors hawked T-shirts with slogans such as Say no to the ho, and Roses are red, Hunter smokes crack, Joe Biden has dementia and Kamala isn’t Black, sometimes chanting the phrases out loud to amused onlookers.

Hundreds of people still standing in the winding queue shuffled off into a disappointed crowd when told that the venue was now full. Many hung around outside, browsing the vendors’ wares or grabbing a bite at one of the nearby food trucks. They were there to see Trump, but also to enjoy the sense of belonging that comes from being surrounded by the like-minded. They were there to see and be seen, dressed in MAGA hats, MAGA shirts, MAGA tights. Service dogs decked out in stars and stripes, men in silk shirts printed with an image of a bloodied Trump raising his fist. As “Y.M.C.A.” blared from inside the venue, Trump supporters stopped their conversations to sing along and shape their arms with the chorus.

The first time Trump ran for president as a Republican, when I spoke with his followers I encountered a superficial denial of Trump’s prejudice that suggested a quiet approval of it. They would deny that Trump made bigoted remarks or proposed discriminatory policies while also defending those remarks and policies as necessary. What I found this time around were people who were far more deeply embedded in an unreality carefully molded by the Trump campaign and right-wing media to foment a sense of crisis—and a belief that they were being exploited by a shadowy conspiracy that Trump alone could vanquish. Whereas many supporters I spoke with at rallies in 2016 rationalized or dismissed Trump’s yarns as exaggerations or bombast, in 2024 they would repeat them solemnly and earnestly, as gospel.

The conspiracy theories, particularly surrounding immigration, are significant because they justify extreme measures—Trump’s promises to strip critical news outlets of their broadcast licenses, prosecute political rivals, and purge the federal government of “the enemy within.” Yet some supporters I spoke with also seemed either unaware or disbelieving of the plans that Trump and his allies have for a second administration. There is a disconnect between what Trump and his allies intend to do in power and what many of the people who would vote him in believe he would do.

This disconnect was apparent earlier in the 2024 campaign, when Democrats began attacking Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation “blueprint” for a second Trump administration. The agenda contemplates not only a political purge of the federal government, and a president who can order the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies, but drastic limits on abortion; drastic cuts to education, the social safety net, and efforts to fight climate change; and using federal powers to discriminate against LGBTQ people. Although Project 2025 was not affiliated with the campaign, it was largely a Trumpworld project, conceived by former Trump aides. Trump surmised that his own followers would not support what was in Project 2025 and distanced himself from it, posting late one night in July that he knew “nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.” (CNN reported that at least 140 people who worked for Trump were involved in the project, including six of his former Cabinet members.) Its architects were left to quietly reassure their fellow travelers that he was saying this for political reasons. “He’s running against the brand,” Russell Vought, a Project 2025 contributor and potential future Trump chief of staff, told an undercover reporter. “He’s very supportive of what we do.”

I noticed a particular disconnect on immigration; people I spoke with emphasized their support for legal immigration and, unlike Trump, did not single out particular ethnicities or nationalities for scorn. They said they would welcome anyone as long as they came legally. It’s possible that this was merely something they were telling themselves they believed so as not to interrogate their own motives further. They were ultimately also in thrall to Trump’s narrative about how Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were conspiring to repopulate the country with undocumented immigrants living on the dole at their expense. That fiction was not just a source of rage but a predicate for whatever radical action might be needed to rectify it.

One Trump voter I met among the cheerful crowd of supporters milling around outside a packed rally outside Atlanta, who identified himself only as Steve and said he worked in telecommunications, managed to touch on virtually every immigration conspiracy theory put forth by the Trump campaign in about 30 seconds. Yet even Steve told me the issue was people coming in illegally, not that they were coming in at all. “You’re not coming in legally; you’re not pledging to the country; you’re not saying you’re going to support that country,” Steve said.

Another Trump supporter named Rebecca Cruz told me, “We need immigration in this country, but we need safe, safe immigration.” Referring to the Biden administration, she explained that “they take them from other countries, bringing them. They’re going into certain countries, and they fly them in here … because they want to destroy America. They hate what America stands for.”

A few days earlier, at another Trump rally, in Greenville, North Carolina, the crowd cheered when Trump demanded that news outlets be taken off the air for criticizing him or for giving positive coverage to Harris. They laughed when Trump played a bizarre video mocking trans people in the military. They cheered for the death penalty. They booed when Senator Ted Budd warned that Harris would let “the illegals who are here … use your taxpayer dollars for transgender surgeries.” Trump insisted that “Kamala Harris has imported an army of illegal-alien gang members and migrant criminals from prisons and jails, from insane asylums and mental institutions all around the world, from Venezuela to the Congo, not just South America.” Trump repeated “the Congo” three times, in case the audience didn’t understand that the immigrants he was attacking were Black. He would occasionally pay lip service to legal immigration, or vow to defend Americans of “any color and creed,” but this was only after invoking a litany of stereotypes designed to justify state violence against whichever marginalized group he had just finished demonizing.

When I spoke with people one-on-one, they reflected back to me Trump’s rhetoric, occasionally with a somewhat more human touch. A retired English teacher who did not want to give her name emphasized that “I believe in immigration, but do it legally. Don’t make your first act of coming to America be coming illegally … We’re taking away from servicing children who don’t even get to eat because you’re giving housing to the people coming in.” Another retiree in North Carolina, named Theresa Paul, gave me a hard look and said she was supporting Trump because “when you take illegals over our citizens, that’s treason … We’re being worked to death, taxed to death, and for what? So we can put up people that’s coming in illegally, and putting them up way superior to us.” I asked her why she thought the Biden administration would want to do that. She grasped my arm lightly and said, “To replace us, right?”

I began to realize that these Trump fans—diehards though they may be—represent a distinct space in the MAGA landscape. They enjoy his cruelty, seeing it as righteous vengeance for the constellation of wrongs they have been told they are the victims of, but they aren’t the architects of these conspiracy theories, and neither do they stand to profit from them. Their conspiracism serves to distract them from Trump’s actual policy agenda and his authoritarian ambitions.

There are, I’ve come to see, three circles of MAGA that make up the Trump coalition. The innermost circle comprises the most loyal Trump allies, who wish to combine a traditional conservative agenda of gutting the welfare state and redistributing income upward while executing by force a radical social reengineering of America to resemble right-wing nostalgia of the 1950s. Trump’s advisers and other conservative-movement figures understand Trump’s populism as a smoke screen designed to conceal their agenda of cutting taxes for the wealthy, banning abortion, eviscerating the social safety net, and slashing funding for education, health care, and other support for low-income people. All of this is consistent with how Trump governed when he was in the White House, although many people seem to have forgotten what he was actually like. This faction wants a government that works to preserve traditional hierarchies of race, gender, and religion, or at least one that does not seek to interfere with what it sees as the natural order of things.

This innermost circle includes legislative allies such as House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act; policy aides such as Vought, who has spoken of mass deportation as a means to “end multiculturalism”; and elite backers such as Elon Musk, who hopes to use his influence to inflict hardship on Americans by dramatically cutting the welfare state so that he can reduce his own tax burden. It is no coincidence that Musk has transformed the social network formerly known as Twitter into a haven for racist pseudoscience that he himself consciously amplifies.

This faction also includes those far-right figures who are not official members of Trumpworld but who see the reality-show star as a champion of a resurgent white-nationalist identity. These people understand what Trumpism’s goals are, and most of them also understand that, absent the particular devotion Trump inspires, their plans would not be politically viable.

There is a second, slightly larger circle around this first one, comprising devoted Trump fans. These fans are the primary target for a sanitized version of the “Great Replacement” theory, which holds that American elites have conspired to dispossess them of what they have in order to give it to unauthorized immigrants who do not belong. They are not ideologically hostile to the welfare state—indeed, many of them value it—but they believe it is being wasted on those who have no claim to it. People in this circle are acting rationally in response to conspiracy theories they have chosen to believe, and are bewildered by those who refuse to acknowledge what they are certain is true. This bewilderment serves only to further cement their feeling that they are the victims of an elite plot to take from them that which they deserve. This is the group you might refer to as true believers.

In a different political and informational environment, many of these true believers would be unlikely to support the Project 2025 agenda—or at least not much of it—but here they are so isolated from mainstream news sources that they believe Trump’s claims that he has no ties to it, and that he has their best interests in mind because “he cannot be bought” by the same elites they believe are responsible for their hardships.

Then there is the outer circle: Americans with conservative beliefs who may be uneasy about Trump but whose identification with conservative principles and the Republican Party mean they wish to persuade themselves to vote for the Republican candidate. They may be ardently anti-abortion, or small-business owners, or deeply religious. They do not believe everything Trump says; in fact, their approach to the man is dismissiveness. These are voters who fall into what my colleague David Graham calls the “believability gap.” They don’t like Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric but also don’t think he will follow through with it. This is the “What’s the downside for humoring him?” faction.

This group of Trump voters treat his authoritarianism as mere bombast or as exaggerations from the media, seeing this election as an ordinary one in which a party with a bad economic record should be replaced by a party with a better one, not an election in which a man who tried to destroy American democracy is running for a chance to finish the job.

Denial is the mortar that holds the three MAGA circles together. The innermost circle denies the radicalism of its agenda to the middle ring of fervent Trump supporters, presenting any criticism as the lies of the same liberal elites responsible for dispossessing real Americans of what is owed them. The outer circle treats Trump’s authoritarianism and racism as regrettable and perhaps too colorful, but equivalent or similar to other common character defects possessed by all politicians. To acknowledge the liberal critique of Trump as correct would amount to a painful step away from a settled political identity that these outer-circle members are not willing to take—they would have to join the Never Trumpers in exile.

As different as some of the people I spoke with at these Trump rallies could be, when they went into the crowd, they experienced the ecstasy of the cruelties they would perhaps not allow themselves to indulge in alone. The rationalizations and explanations and denial melted away. They understood that they were there to mock and condemn those they hate and fear, and to listen to all of Trump’s vows to punish them.

A person, alone in conversation, can be rational. People, in a crowd, become something else.

Conspiracism is not an inherently right-wing indulgence. After September 11, many in liberal circles fell for nonsense alleging that the Bush administration was secretly behind the attacks. After George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, some liberals indulged absurd theories about voting machines in Ohio switching votes and thus delivering the state to Bush. More recently, conspiracy theories about the assassination attempt on Trump being staged spread in certain liberal circles online.

Political leaders, intellectuals, and public figures can play a crucial role in containing such conspiracism. Democratic leaders shamed 9/11 truthers out of the party. John Kerry conceded the election rather than champion baseless allegations about voter fraud. Unlike Trump, who gleefully promoted conspiracy theories around the violent assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, no prominent Democrats embraced any of the conspiracy theories that emerged about the attempt on Trump’s life. But when elites cultivate and indulge conspiracism—when they exploit it—they can create the conditions for authoritarianism and political violence.

“In social movements … conspiracy theories that may be absurd and specious on their face nevertheless contain valid information about the motivations, grievances, insecurities, and even panics among their promoters, so they cannot be simply dismissed,” the historian Linda Gordon wrote in The Second Coming of the KKK. “Among Klan leaders, conspiracy theories also did a great deal of organizing work: they provided identifiable and unifying targets, supplying a bonding function that explanations based on historical analyses do not deliver.” Political and national identities of any ideology can be forged by the sense that some part of your identity is under assault. When that assault does not truly exist, conspiracism can provide it.

Trumpist conspiracy theories perform a similar function. In his stump speeches, the former president calls the United States an “occupied country” that will be “liberated” from criminal migrants when he retakes power. He tells his audience that crime by undocumented immigrants is not simply a social problem that might be solved with more restrictive immigration policy but a deliberate plan by those in office. “Kamala is importing millions of illegals across our borders and giving them taxpayer benefits at your expense,” Trump declared in Greenville.

Humiliation is an essential part of the Trumpist style. Trump appeals to his audiences’ pride by telling them they have been hoodwinked by their adversaries, but that he has the power to avenge this injustice. Invoking that sense of humiliation is part of how he primes his audiences to be manipulated, knowing that their sense of shame will make them both angry and eager to reassert that pride. It is one of the most obvious con-man tricks in history—you got scammed, you paid too much, but if you give me your money, I’ll get you a better deal—and it has worked on tens of millions of Americans for a decade.

These conspiracy theories create communities that are hostile to dissenters, and they legitimize radical, even violent actions. This is how thousands of Trump supporters ended up ransacking the Capital on January 6, 2021, hoping to overturn an election on the basis of a conspiracy theory about voting machines, spread by elite figures who knew it to be false. The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News and the congressional inquiry into January 6 revealed that although much of the right-wing leadership class understand they have created a monster they cannot control, they lack the courage to confront it. Trump and his closest aides, by contrast, are well aware of the hold they have on their audience and see it as useful for their own purposes.

“Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.” Trumpism is neither Nazism nor Stalinism, but Arendt’s observation about people living in a universe of complete unreality still applies.

All of us navigate the world on the basis of information sources we trust, and millions of people trust Donald Trump. Understanding his longevity is perhaps impossible absent an information environment in which people come to passionately believe things that are not true. This is not a false-consciousness argument. If banning abortion matters more to you than raising the minimum wage, and you make your choice with that in mind, that is your right as a voter. But that decision should be based on values, not on a universe of unreality.

The former president and his surrogates have woven a totalizing conspiracy theory in which virtually every problem facing the nation can be laid at the feet of immigration. Violent crime is rising because of immigrants (it isn’t). Democrats are chartering planes from other countries to bring in illegal immigrants (they aren’t), whom they are paying to come (it’s not happening) and who are smuggling in fentanyl (it’s overwhelmingly citizens who are doing the smuggling, actually), in the hopes that these illegal immigrants will vote for them (they can’t vote, and they wouldn’t necessarily vote for Democrats if they could). Immigrants are the main reason for the housing crisis (they aren’t—it’s a lack of supply); they’re getting FEMA money meant for citizens affected by the hurricanes in the South (wrong); and none of this would have happened if Biden and Harris hadn’t opened the border (the Biden administration is on pace to match Trump’s border deportations) to undocumented immigrants who don’t pay taxes (false). There really was a rise in illegal border crossings after the pandemic, but the response of the Democratic Party was to move closer to Trump’s positions on immigration.

Nor will mass deportation, framed as a means to fight crime, resolve any of these issues. Mass deportation will not raise wages. It will not make housing less expensive. It will not create jobs. It will not make the welfare state more generous to those who need its assistance. And indeed, during Trump’s term as president, his administration shirked prosecuting undocumented criminals in favor of destroying families and removing as many people as possible, regardless of what roots they might have established. Trump aides are planning an attack on the kind of legal immigration that supporters at his rallies repeatedly told me they wanted—an attack that, if prior experience holds, will take precedence over enforcing the law against criminals.

But for some today, just as in the past, the presence of immigrants threatens a “dominance” that, as Gordon wrote of the 1920s, “many white native-born Protestants considered a form of social property.” It is an odd but insufficient sign of progress that such status anxiety is no longer confined to white, Protestant, or native-born people—the irony is that America is such a powerful machine of assimilation that the ascendant reactionary coalition includes millions of people descended from those once deemed unassimilable aliens by their predecessors movements. Unfortunately, lies and conspiracy theories directed at those we see as unlike us are far more likely to be believed.

Like Trump’s lies about voter fraud in 2020, the conspiracy theories about immigration are important not because there is truth to them but because they forge a political identity that is not amenable to fact-checking or correction. It does not matter if the “voter fraud” in 2020 did not happen; believing that it did expresses the symbolic view that the opposing coalition should not be considered truly American. To point out that very little of what Trump and his allies say about immigration is factual cannot dispel the worldview that causes one to embrace it: that the America you know has been stolen by people who have no claim to it.

The workings of American immigration policy are complicated, though, and any sufficiently complicated process can appear to someone who doesn’t understand it as a conspiracy—if you don’t understand the weather, for example, you might think the U.S. government has a hurricane gun it can aim with pinpoint accuracy at Republican-majority districts. If you don’t understand something—and if understanding it might leave your conception of your own identity teetering, Jenga-like—it is much easier to believe what the people you love and trust are telling you, even if that thing is untrue.

Perhaps most important, the breadth of the conspiracy and the power of the conspirators place any solutions beyond the reach of ordinary politics. At the rally prior to the storming of the Capitol, Trump warned the audience that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Then he retreated to the safety of the White House and watched the mob attack Congress, hoping that by some miracle his supporters would succeed in keeping him in power by force. In such dire circumstances, only a messianic figure will rescue the virtuous from the corrupt. The logic of grand conspiracy thus elevates the strongman.

In the conspiracist mind, Trump is not simply the only logical solution but the only hope, the only man not compromised by the grand cabal that opposes him and its puppet politicians. Trump’s followers are convinced that Trump’s wealth means he cannot be bought. Few politicians have ever been more clearly for sale.

Doubtlessly, many liberals would deny a distinction between the devotion of Trump supporters who flock to his rallies and the ideological vanguard that aims to use him as a vehicle to remake the country. While I was out reporting this story, The Atlantic published an account of how, according to Trump’s former chief of staff General John Kelly, Trump spoke admiringly of Adolf Hitler and his generals. Typically, when I go out to rallies, I do not argue with voters or offer my own views, because I am there to find out what they believe and why. But because of my affiliation with The Atlantic, several people I spoke with asked me to explain my views—occasionally referring to the story as “fake news” or “Democrats calling Trump Hitler,” having heard the story wrongly characterized this way.

In one exchange, I mentioned that as a man married to a woman born to a West African immigrant father, I did not appreciate Trump’s remarks about Black immigrants, and recounted the story of Trump complaining about not wanting immigrants from “shithole countries.” The Trump supporter had not heard of the 2018 incident and refused to believe that it had occurred as I relayed it.

In two other conversations, when asked about my views, I explained that, as a Texan, if I choose to have another child, I have to worry that if something goes wrong, doctors may refuse to treat my wife because of the state’s abortion ban. Doctors in Texas are afraid to provide lifesaving medical care to mothers with pregnancy complications because the Republican-controlled state government has passed laws that punish abortion providers with steep fines, loss of their medical license, and jail time. The Texas courts have repeatedly refused to clarify or expand the exceptions to the ban—these exceptions are simply meant to ensure sufficient political support for those bans. Because of this, Texas parents have to roll the dice with a pregnancy, knowing that their existing children may end up without a mother.

Not only did the people I spoke with react in disbelief that an abortion ban would be so strict; they did not believe that a doctor would refuse to treat a woman until she was at death’s door. Last week, ProPublica reported that a Texas mother, Josseli Barnica, died after doctors thought it would be a “crime” to treat her while she was having a miscarriage. ProPublica also reported that in 2023, a pregnant teenager from Vidor, Nevaeh Crain, died after three emergency rooms refused to treat her. Texas has fought the Biden administration’s attempt to set federal rules allowing emergency abortions. Last month, the Supreme Court let a ruling siding with Texas remain in place.

There is a distance between the views of many of the most ardent Trump fans and the policy goals of the people they would put in power. The innermost MAGA circle understands this, even if many of the people whose votes they rely on don’t. This is why the role played by Fox News and other conservative media outlets is so crucial—not only in maintaining a sense of conspiracism and emotional siege but in ensuring that stories about women like Barnica and Crain never reach the eyes and ears of their audience.

This is an observation, not an excuse. In a democracy, citizens are responsible for knowing the consequences of their votes. They are responsible for not being enthralled by a jumped-up con man who tells them flattering lies. They are responsible for knowing the difference between fact and fiction. And yet few of us would find it easy to extract ourselves from a social universe in which belief in those fictions is a requirement for good standing.

Trump rallies are where the mask usually comes off. At the rallies, the different circles of MAGA lose their distinctiveness; in the anonymity and unity of the crowd, they can indulge the feelings of anger and hatred without the oversensitive, judgmental liberals of the outside world making them feel ashamed. Here, they can be themselves.

This is why the insult comedian Tony Hinchcliffe thought he was in the right place to call Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in late October. “These are the kind of jokes that normal people tell,” the conservative media figure Matt Walsh declared. Hinchcliffe was hardly an outlier. Other speakers that night called Harris a prostitute, “the anti-Christ,” “the devil.” The disgraced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked Harris as “the first Samoan Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

The big mistake made by Hinchcliffe was that, in wrestling parlance, he broke kayfabe. The Trump campaign has fine-tuned its line-stepping over the years, invoking racist stereotypes with just the thinnest veneer of deniability, the better to cast liberal criticism as hypersensitive hysteria. In 2016, Trump campaigned on banning Muslims writ large, not just jihadist terrorists. In 2020, he publicly vowed to meet the nationwide Black-rights protests with violence. In 2024, Trumpism remains a politics of bullying marginalized groups and framing those unwilling to do so as possessing a lack of virtue. Do you want to coddle murderous illegal aliens? Do you want men in women’s sports? Why are you okay with gangs taking over our cities?

Trump’s agenda of using state power to maintain traditional American hierarchies of race, religion, and gender has not changed. But for much of his 2024 run, the sweeping generalizations of previous outings resembled more traditional dog whistling with superficially plausible connections to actual policy concerns. The shift can be imperceptible to people who have paid close attention to politics—Trump’s personality and ideology have not really changed—but to those who have not, his racial animus and misogyny are less obvious. About two-thirds of Hispanic voters in one recent poll said that Trump’s attacks on immigration were not directed at them.

The rightward shift of some Hispanic and Black voters seems to have persuaded the Trump campaign to tone down the explicit racial stereotyping of his previous campaigns, though not the promises to use state power to crush his political enemies. But when you put a guy in front of a Trump campaign sign to warm up the crowd with hacky jokes about Black people liking watermelon, it gets harder to suspend disbelief.

Amid the comedian’s insult to Puerto Rico and the barrage of racist stereotypes—not only about Black people and Puerto Ricans, but about Jews being cheap and Palestinians being terrorists—the word routine takes on another meaning: dull, tedious, boring. Yet the line about Puerto Rico broke through, and a growing list of Puerto Rican celebrities are now endorsing Harris, and perhaps moving crucial Hispanic votes in key swing states to her column.

The crisis caused by Hinchcliffe’s routine and remarks by other speakers that night is that they troubled voters in that outer MAGA circle by briefly revealing what Trump’s entourage actually believes—that when Stephen Miller says “America is for Americans and Americans only,” he is referring to a very limited number of people. The event pierced the veil of denial for those who are otherwise inclined to dismiss such criticisms as the tedious whining of an oversensitive age.

The Puerto Rican Reggaeton singer Nicky Jam renounced his support for Trump after the rally, saying, “Never in my life did I think that a month [after I appeared at a rally to support Trump] a comedian was going to come to criticize my country and speak badly of my country and therefore, I renounce any support for Donald Trump, and I sidestep any political situation.” Those people who renounced their support for Trump after realizing that the contempt he has expressed for others also applies to people like them must understand: He was always talking about people like you, even when you didn’t want to believe it.

At Trump rallies, the denial and the dismissal cease, and the nature of Trumpism is revealed. This is why, despite the fact that the Puerto Rico “joke” bombed at a comedy club the night before, Hinchcliffe thought everyone at the rally would love it. His set was not a divergence from Trumpism. It was … Well, it was routine.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, November 6, 2024 8:33 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Matthew Yglesias | Oct 29, 2024

The most important context for this race is what’s happening internationally. The UK Conservatives got thrashed recently. The Canadian Liberals are set to get thrashed soon. The incumbent center-left party lost its first post-Covid election in New Zealand, and the incumbent center-right party lost its first post-Covid elections in Australia. The incumbent coalition in Germany is hideously unpopular. This means that if you’re asking “How did Democrats blow it?” or “Why is this even close?” you’re asking the wrong question.

The question of why all post-Covid electorates are grumpy and miserable is more interesting and hasn’t been the subject of as much work as it deserves.

Back when Obama was president and I was floating various slightly inflationary schemes to engineer a more rapid labor market recovery, some of the older people on his team would tell me I was underrating how much people hate inflation.

Looking at countries that didn’t have an election in November 2020, incumbents who were popular during the pandemic almost all became unpopular during post-pandemic inflation — the fairly obvious logical relationship between pandemic relief programs and pandemic savings and post-pandemic inflation doesn’t seem to get through to anyone, anywhere.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/27-takes-on-the-2024-election

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, November 6, 2024 6:28 PM

JAYNEZTOWN


they party RFK and Tulsi no longer recognize

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Saturday, November 9, 2024 7:56 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Bernie Sanders perfectly sums up Trump’s 2024 game plan in decades-old video

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/bernie-sanders-perfectly-sums-
up-trump-s-2024-game-plan-in-decades-old-video/vi-AA1tLwOb

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, November 9, 2024 12:35 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Heather Cox Richardson | Nov 08, 2024

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-8-2024

Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil.

. . .

In a social media post, Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”

In the 1850s, white southern leaders made sure that voters did not have access to news that came from outside the American South, and instead steeped them in white supremacist information. They stopped the mail from carrying abolitionist pamphlets, destroyed presses of antislavery newspapers, and drove antislavery southerners out of their region.

Elite enslavers had reason to be concerned about the survival of their system of human enslavement. The land boom of the 1840s, when removal of Indigenous peoples had opened up rich new lands for settlement, had priced many white men out of the market. They had become economically unstable, roving around the country working for wages or stealing to survive. And they deeply resented the fabulously wealthy enslavers who they knew looked down on them.

In 1857, North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper wrote a book attacking enslavement. No friend to his Black neighbors, Helper was a virulent white supremacist. But in The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, he used modern statistics to prove that slavery destroyed economic opportunity for white men, and assailed “the illbreeding and ruffianism of the slaveholding officials.” He noted that voters in the South who did not own slaves outnumbered by far those who did. “Give us fair play, secure to us the right of discussion, the freedom of speech, and we will settle the difficulty at the ballot-box,” he wrote.

In the North the book sold like hotcakes—142,000 copies by fall 1860. But southern leaders banned the book, and burned it, too. They arrested men for selling it and accused northerners of making war on the South. Politicians, newspaper editors, and ministers reinforced white supremacy, warned that the end of slavery would mean race war, and preached that enslavement was God’s law.

When northern voters elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 on a platform of containing enslavement in the South, where the sapped soil would soon cut into production, southern leaders decided—usually without the input of voters—to secede from the Union. As leaders promised either that there wouldn’t be a fight, or that if a fight happened it would be quick and painless, poor southern whites rallied to the cause of creating a nation based on white supremacy, reassured by South Carolina senator James Chesnut’s vow that he would personally drink all the blood shed in any threatened civil war.

When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, poor white men set out for what they had come to believe was an imperative cause to protect their families and their way of life. By 1862 their enthusiasm had waned, and leaders passed a conscription law. That law permitted wealthy men to hire a substitute and exempted one man to oversee every 20 enslaved men, providing another way for rich men to keep their sons out of danger. Soldiers complained it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

By 1865 the Civil War had killed or wounded 483,026 men out of a southern white population of about five and a half million people. U.S. armies had pushed families off their lands, and wartime inflation drove ordinary people to starvation. By 1865, wives wrote to their soldier husbands to come home or there would be no one left to come home to.

Even those poor white men who survived the war could not rebuild into prosperity. The war took from the South its monopoly of global cotton production, locking poor southerners into profound poverty from which they would not begin to recover until the 1930s, when the New Deal began to pour federal money into the region.

Today, when I received a slew of messages gloating that Trump had won the election and that Republican voters had owned the libs, I could not help but think of that earlier era when ordinary white men sold generations of economic aspirations for white supremacy and bragging rights.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, November 9, 2024 3:04 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK




I have a hand-me-down PS3. I still haven't bought a PS4. I think I can survive a PS5 costing $1,000.

The difference between Joe Biden*'s shit economy and the 2008 market crash is that all the essentials went up. I didn't even notice the 2008 crash because none of the essentials raised in price beyond regular inflation. Rich Democrats will never understand their loss on Tuesday because they just don't get it than the cost of living has raised nearly 40% on essential goods you need just to survive in this country.

For those living at the bottom already, that is untenable.

Fuck your Playstation 5, and fuck you Mrs. Cox-Richardson.



P.S. Pick a last name, you self-important bitch.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.

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Wednesday, November 20, 2024 7:50 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Fuck your Playstation 5, and fuck you Mrs. Cox-Richardson.



P.S. Pick a last name, you self-important bitch.
The only thing Trumptards have got that holds them together is hatred of Democrats. Too bad Democrats keep thinking that Trumptards can be persuaded or reasoned with or bought off with more goodies.

Trump’s coalition is a mess of contradictions — and they’re about to be exposed

There’s a brewing fight over what Trumpism really stands for, one that pits Trump’s top allies against each other.

by Zack Beauchamp | Nov 20, 2024, 6:00 AM CS

https://www.vox.com/politics/386299/trump-administration-coalition-eco
nomic-foreign-policy

There is not one contradiction at the heart of the incoming Trump administration’s political project. There are two.

The first centers on economic policy — or, more fundamentally, the role of government itself.

One camp, exemplified by Elon Musk and traditional big business, sees Trumpism as a celebration of individual greatness and unfettered capitalism. The second camp, including economic nationalists and RFK Jr.’s crunchy hippy types, believes Trumpism has a mandate to try to transform American society, including by attacking the practices of large corporations that do not fit their nationalist vision.

The second centers on foreign policy — or, more fundamentally, the purpose of America in the world.

One camp, exemplified by Secretary of State pick Marco Rubio, sees the United States as the world’s rightful leader, one that has not only a right but an obligation to assert its will across the globe. Another camp, exemplified by Secretary of Defense pick Pete Hegseth, sees the United States as a more ordinary country whose interests are served by being less involved in other countries’ issues like the Ukraine war, but being more violently involved when core American interests are at stake.

Of course, there are areas of overlap between these groups. Both sides of the role-of-government divide believe that America will be well-served by a mass deportation campaign; both sides of the foreign policy divide support aggressively confronting China and waging a global war on jihadist groups like ISIS.

Yet these overlaps are limited and partial points of convergence between deeply divided ideological currents. The real connective tissue between the various Trump 2.0 factions is disdain for the cultural left and the “deep state” in Washington. The anti-left culture war has become, more or less, the central ideological principle of the modern Republican Party.

On the campaign trail, it’s easy for Trump’s diverse set of allies to join together based on this shared animosity. But when governing, the administration will be forced to make choices in areas where its leaders disagree at a fundamental level, leading not only to internal conflict but potentially even policy chaos.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, November 20, 2024 8:17 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Nah...

Democrats are an afterthought now. We don't think of you at all.



--------------------------------------------------

Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.

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