363 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. Anti-Trump Burnout: The Resistance Says It’s Exhausted

      I would only say - FU NYT - you can find what you want out there. Finding people who thought this was a sprint and have burned out does not mean you have found "the Resistance" Why print your demoralizing headline?

    1. for - 2nd Trump term - 2nd Trump presidency - 2024 U.S. election - existential threat for climate crisis - Title:Trump 2.0: The climate cannot survive another Trump term - Author: Michael Mann - Date: Nov 5, 2023

      Summary - Michael Mann repeats a similiar warning he made before the 2020 U.S. elections. Now the urgency is even greater. - Trump's "Project 2025" fossil-fuel -friendly plan would be a victory for the fossil fuel industry. It would - defund renewable energy research and rollout - decimate the EPA, - encourage drilling and - defund the Loss and Damage Fund, so vital for bringing the rest of the world onboard for rapid decarbonization. - Whoever wins the next U.S. election will be leading the U.S. in the most critical period of the human history because our remaining carbon budget stands at 5 years and 172 days at the current rate we are burning fossil fuels. Most of this time window overlaps with the next term of the U.S. presidency. - While Mann points out that the Inflation Reduction Act only takes us to 40% rather than Paris Climate Agreement 60% less emissions by 2030, it is still a big step in the right direction. - Trump would most definitely take a giant step in the wrong direction. - So Trump could singlehandedly set human civilization on a course of irreversible global devastation.

    2. The GOP has threatened to weaponize a potential second Trump term

      for - 2nd Trump term - regressive climate policy

    3. other nations are wary of what a second Trump presidency could portend,

      for - 2nd Trump presidency - elimination of loss and damage fund - impact on global decarbonization effort

      • While we have seen renewed leadership on climate by the Biden administration,
      • other nations are wary of what a second Trump presidency could portend,
      • particularly on climate
        • where they fear he will refuse to honor our commitments to the rest of the world
      • and derail four years of progress on climate.
    4. we face an American election unlike any other. It will determine not only the course of the American experiment but the path that civilization collectively follows.

      for - quote - Michael Mann - quote - 2024 U.S. elections - future of civilization - quote - existential threat of 2024 Trump win - polycrisis - politics - inequality - climate

      quote - Michael Mann - date: May 11, 2023 - source: The Hill - Op Ed - https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/4290467-trump-2-0-the-climate-cannot-survive-another-trump-term/ - (see below)

      • It is not an overstatement to say, one year out, that
        • we face an American election unlike any other.
      • It will determine
        • not only the course of the American experiment
        • but the path that civilization collectively follows.
          • On the left is democracy and environmental stewardship.
          • On the right is fascism and planetary devastation.
      • Choose wisely.
  2. Jan 2024
    1. “A second Trump term is game over for the climate — really!”

      for - quote - Michael Mann - quote - a Second Trump presidency - polycrisis - politics and climate crisis - climate mitigation strategy - voting in 2024 U.S. election - adjacency - Michael Mann - 2nd Trump presidency - exceeding planetary boundaries - exceeding 1.5 Deg C - Gen Z voting

      adjacency - between - Michael Mann - 2nd Trump presidency - exceeding planetary boundaries - exceeding 1.5 Deg C - Trump's presidency is existential threat to humanity - Gen Z voting - 2024 election - adjacency statement - Michael Mann's quote " A second Trump term is game over for the climate - really" applies to the 2024 election if Trump becomes the Republican nominee. - Trumps dismal environmental record in his 2016 to 2020 term speaks for itself. He would do something similiar in 2025 if he were the president. G - Given there are only 5 years and 172 days before we hit the dangerous threshold of burning through all the carbon budget for humanity, - https://climateclock.world/ - It is questionable whether Biden's government alone can do enough, but certainly if Trump won the 2024 election, his term in office would create a regression severe enough to put the Paris Climate goal of staying within 1.5 Deg C out of reach, and risk triggering major planetary tipping points - A Biden government is evidence-based and believes in anthropogenic climate change and is already taking measures to mitigate it. A Trump government is not evidence-based and is supported by incumbent fossil fuel industry so does not have the interest of the U.S. population nor all of humanity at heart. - Hence, the 2024 U.S. election can really determine the fate of humanity. - Gen Z can play a critical role for humanity by voting against a government that would, in leading climate scientists Michael Mann's words, be game over for a stable climate, and therefore put humanity and unimaginable risk. - Gen Z can swing the vote to a government willing to deal with the climate crisis over one in climate denial so voting activists need to be alerted to this and create the right messaging to reach Gen Z - https://hyp.is/LOud7sBBEe6S0D8itLHw1A/circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/41-million-members-gen-z-will-be-eligible-vote-2024

    1. In the next presidential election, 40.8 million members of Gen Z (ages 18-27 in 2024) will be eligible to vote,

      for - Gen Z influence on 2024 US election - Trump 2024 win - an existential threat to humanity - stats - Gen Z - 2024 U.S. election

      comment - Gen Z can play a role in determining the future of human civilization. How? Their vote in the upcoming 2024 U.S. election. If Donald Trump wins, it can pose an existential threat to human civilization - https://hyp.is/mwqwpsA-Ee6bAd9C2MLeKg/www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-2024-presidency-climate-change-rcna131928

      stats - Gen Z - 2024 U.S. election

      • In the next presidential election, 40.8 million members of Gen Z (ages 18-27 in 2024) will be eligible to vote,
        • including 8.3 million newly eligible youth (ages 18-19 in 2024)
        • who will have aged into the electorate since the 2022 midterm election.
      • These young people have tremendous potential to
        • influence elections and to
        • spur action on issues they care about
      • if they are adequately reached and supported by parties, campaigns, and organizations.
    1. for - interview - author - Tristan Snell - book - Taking down Trump - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/756546/taking-down-trump-by-tristan-snell/

      summary - Snell is a lawyer who successfully prosecuted Trump, representing a class action lawsuit by the former students of Trump University - The book documents how he was able to successfully prosecute Trump and the challenges him and his team had to overcome - It provides a fascinating picture of how pathological elites operate, and how a perversion of power allows elites to effectively by silence, until the damage inflicted is so severe that - It sheds light on how corruption cultivated in business can scale to become political fascism. This is how fascism develops, silently and incrementally, until it becomes too late and entire society then pays - In the age of elites, Donald Trump, who comes from the elite class himself, is able to distort truth to such an extent that the very class that his class (elites) exploits the most (the working class) are convinced that he is their savior. - It also shows the dynamics of how power corrupts. Ideological synergy enables his allies to look the other way and ignore the extreme ethical baggage he carries, reinforcing the cliche - "the means justifies the ends"

    1. Last time, I decided to examine the question of Donald Trump’s disqualification by starting with the important stuff and working down to the minutiae (unlike a court of law, which goes the opposite direction). I started with the most important question of all: is it even legitimate to consider declaring a candidate disqualified? Should you ever take that decision away from the voters themselves? I answered yes, if the law includes qualifications, because we live in a republic, not a democracy.
  3. Dec 2023
    1. When the Keynesian settlement was nally put into eect, afterWorld War II, it was oered only to a relatively small slice of theworld’s population. As time went on, more and more people wantedin on the deal. Almost all of the popular movements of the periodfrom 1945 to 1975, even perhaps revolutionary movements, couldbe seen as demands for inclusion: demands for political equality thatassumed equality was meaningless without some level of economicsecurity. This was true not only of movements by minority groups inNorth Atlantic countries who had rst been left out of the deal—such as those for whom Dr. King spoke—but what were then called“national liberation” movements from Algeria to Chile, whichrepresented certain class fragments in what we now call the GlobalSouth, or, nally, and perhaps most dramatically, in the late 1960sand 1970s, feminism. At some point in the ’70s, things reached abreaking point. It would appear that capitalism, as a system, simplycannot extend such a deal to everyone

      How might this equate to the time at which Rome extended its citizen franchise to larger swaths of people and the attendant results which came about? particularly the shift towards an empire versus a republic?

      These seem to have been happening in the case of America with Donald Trump attempting to become a modern day Julius Caesar. To whom is Trump indebted?

  4. Nov 2023
      • for: commented on - Trump and failings of political system, poem - Trump a symptom of failing political system

      • commented on

        • I wrote a poem in the comment section of this video:

          • Oh what a web we weave, when we practice to deceive
          • What a distance Trump will fall, when Jack Smith and the other upholders of truth disentangles it all!
          • What lesson have we learned, what has hindsight allowed us to see
          • about the fragility of this gift called democracy?
          • Whose ideal is that men and women are all equal another way of saying we are all sacred?
          • We pay a heavy price for not taking care of our disenfranchised sisters and brothers
          • for without job and pay they may seem powerless but the minions of poor left behind,
          • not lifted by the rising tide of unequal prosperity
          • at least have a vote to vent their anger and victimhood of being forgot
          • and comes along the next power-hungry, fork-tongued, snake-oil salesman
          • who recognizes the strength in the weakness of the minion
          • enough to exploit for personal gain the aggregate vote of the disenfranchised many
          • plunging democracy and its constitutions into crisis
          • Not only in the US, but all around the world
          • we witness the same phenomena
          • as the failings of liberal democracies that have left masses behind,
          • unintentional failings of democracy,
          • is exploited by the opportunist to seize power
          • and institute intentional forms of non-democracy

          • The bottom line (below):

          • Regardless of political ideology,
          • genuine empathy for all
          • not just in theory, but in practice
          • is the path to a just, stable and thriving society
    1. It would seem that people who spend too much time online experience more anxiety. Could it be that we've evolved to only be able to manage so many inputs and amounts of variety of those inputs? The experiencing of too much variety in our environments and the resultant anxiety may be a result of the limits of Ross Ashby's law of requisite variety within human systems.

      This may also be why chaos machines like Donald Trump are effective at creating anxiety in a populace whose social systems are not designed to handle so many crazy ideas at once.

      Implications for measurements of resilience?

      • for: Deep Humanity, DH, Jessica Denson, David Rothkopf, ethno-nationalism
      • summary
        • good interview with writer David RothKopf exploring the ethno-nationalist parallels between ethno-nationalist authoritarian leaders, in particular Trump and Netenyahu and the continuous attempt to subvert democracy. The discussion also explores the dangers of attempts to inject religion into government and the historical background and reason why the founders of the United States explicitly separated church from state.
        • it's important to understand all perspectives, and how people define "right" and "good" from their perspective
        • EVERYONE wants a good life, but these definitions may vary greatly. We need to map out the nuances
        • adjacency between
          • Trump
          • Israel-Hamas conflict and Benjamin Netenyahu
  5. Oct 2023
    1. But sometimes Alter’s comments seem exactly wrong. Alter calls Proverbs 29:2 “no more than a formulation in verse of a platitude,” but Daniel L. Dreisbach’s Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers devotes an entire chapter to that single verse, much loved at the time of the American Founding: “When the righteous are many, a people rejoices, / but when the wicked man rules, a people groans.” Early Americans “widely, if not universally,” embraced the notion that—as one political sermon proclaimed—“The character of a nation is justly decided by the character of their rulers, especially in a free and elective government.” Dreisbach writes, “They believed it was essential that the American people be reminded of this biblical maxim and select their civil magistrates accordingly.” Annual election sermons and other political sermons often had Proverbs 29:2 as “the primary text.” Far from being a platitude, this single verse may contain a cure to the contagion that is contemporary American political life.

      Ungenerous to take Alter to task for context which he might not have the background to comment upon.

      Does Alter call it a "platitude" from it's historical context, or with respect to the modern context of Donald J. Trump and a wide variety of Republican Party members who are anything but Christian?

    1. There was former Ohio congressman Anthony Gonzalez (R) — a former professional football player — who deemed the hostility he faced after opposing Trump too much of a risk for his family. Former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney (R) described similar fears from other legislators, as did former Michigan representative Peter Meijer (R). That these three are all former legislators is not a coincidence: They resigned or were beaten in primaries largely because they saw how the party had turned against them. See also: Romney, Mitt.

      The threat of physical violence is silencing those in power even on the right. We're already at war except for the bullets.

  6. Sep 2023
    1. This is one of the challenges of being reactive to the public mood, rather than shaping it. Donald Trump, too, launched his first presidential campaign by elevating arguments and rhetoric from right-wing media, but he also shaped what the media was talking about. DeSantis has largely followed the trends, and the trends shift.

      While Donald J. Trump seemed to hold say over what was trending and the media was discussing, Philip Bump notices that Ron DeSantis seems to be trailing or perhaps riding the trends rather than leading them.

      Is this because he's only tubthumping one or two at a time while Trump floats trial balloons regularly and is pushing half a dozen or more at time?

  7. Aug 2023
    1. Adam Smith stated the case long ago: "A man withoutthe proper use of the intellectual faculties of a man, is, ifpossible, more contemptible than even a coward, and seemsto be mutilated and deformed in a still more essential part ofthe character of human nature."

      This seems apropos to the situation in which I view Donald J. Trump.

    1. What if, early in the morning on Election Day in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg had used Facebook to broadcast “go-out-and-vote” reminders just to supporters of Hillary Clinton? Extrapolating from Facebook’s own published data, that might have given Mrs. Clinton a boost of 450,000 votes or more, with no one but Mr. Zuckerberg and a few cronies knowing about the manipulation.
      • for: Hiliary Clinton could have won, voting, democracy, voting - social media, democracy - social media, election - social media, facebook - election, 2016 US elections, 2016 Trump election, 2016 US election, 2016 US election - different results, 2016 election - social media
      • interesting fact
        • If Facebook had sent a "Go out and vote" message on election day of 2016 election, Clinton may have had a boost of 450,000 additional votes
          • and the outcome of the election might have been different
    1. when you when you sort of take a step back and look at that part of the distraction and the 00:14:47 chaos that Trump and these GOP trolls deliver it's it's a wonderful Boon for the oil and gas industry and the Koch brothers and the guys that fund these campaigns and the federal Federalist 00:14:59 Society you know that's owning the Supreme Court they want to keep doing business as usual and the easiest way to do that is to have this big chaotic GOP that ignores climate change and to play 00:15:11 into what they want is the mainstream media not focusing more on climate change let alone making those two connections and a lot of mainstream media is scared to make that connection because oil companies are paying the bills 00:15:23 and CNN and every other network
      • for: polycrisis, Trumpism, Chaos, distraction, climate crisis, climate communication, complexity, adjacency climate change fossil fuel industry, adjacency climate change big oil, adjacency climate change politics big oil, quote adjacency climate change fossil fuel industry, quote adjacency climate change big oil
      • key insight
        • claim
          • One big reason that big oil is funding GOP to keep the chaotic Trump story as the main headline is to foster distraction from climate change impacts
          • big news story in the US is Donald Trump and the election, climate change impacts of extreme weather is minimized
          • the distraction of politics from a chaotic GOP is perfect distraction for the masses to ignore climate change and for big oil to continue BAU
      • paraphrase
      • quote
        • when you take a step back and look at that part of the distraction and the chaos that Trump and these GOP trolls deliver
        • it's it's a wonderful Boon for the oil and gas industry and the Koch brothers and the guys that fund these campaigns and the federal Federalist Society that's owning the Supreme Court
        • they want to keep doing business as usual and the easiest way to do that is
          • to have this big chaotic GOP that ignores climate change and
          • to play into what they want
            • the mainstream media not focusing more on climate change let alone making those two connections
          • a lot of mainstream media is scared to make that connection because oil companies are paying the bills of CNN and every other network
      • author
        • Noel Casler
  8. Jun 2023
    1. evangelicals are just so threatened their religious Liberties and so what 00:40:59 choice did they have but to run into the arms of somebody like Donald Trump
      • Evangelical Christian Patriarchy
        • naturally gravitates to Donald Trump based on their own fear and persecution complex
    1. evangelicals are just so threatened their religious Liberties and so what 00:40:59 choice did they have but to run into the arms of somebody like Donald Trump
      • Evangelical Christian Patriarchy
        • naturally gravitates to Donald Trump based on their own fear and persecution complex
  9. Apr 2023
  10. Mar 2023
  11. Feb 2023
    1. i think that that kind of support is huge uh you can look specifically at charlottesville and see the reason that that march was so big 00:08:29 was because they saw themselves as fulfilling the promise of donald trump the reason why they were so public the reason why i we we can look at the manifestos of many 00:08:41 of the shoot mass shooters both in the united states and abroad over the last few years who named donald trump as part of their motivation and part of that is pr part of that is trying to get press 00:08:53 but part of it is real that if the presidency is held by somebody who holds a lot of the most extreme beliefs that they do it demonstrates to them that there is widespread mainstream support for those 00:09:05 beliefs and in the same way donald trump losing with those campaign platforms i expect will be a real blow to organizing far-right extremists and 00:09:16 anti-immigration groups and they'll still exist they will still keep organizing but it is going to be a lot less energy it is going to be more underground and it is going to wait until there's 00:09:28 another moment of political eruption when they'll come back again this has been the history for decades that this movement as i mentioned in the beginning goes back decades uh at least to the 1960s as a pretty 00:09:40 consistent movement with the same heroes and figures continuously over time and it has had moments where it went underground and has had moments where it was out in public with thousands of people 00:09:52 marching in the streets and whatever happens next it's still going to be there it's still going to be a concern it's still going to be recruiting people talking to people on the internet and in person and that's what we need to be watching 00:10:04 out for
      • organized racism has always been there
      • where there is a public figure that supports it (ie. Donald Trump),
      • it grows larger
      • and by the same token, when that figurehead is gone
      • the movement dies down, but doesn't die
      • it waits for the next public figurehead to relight the flame
  12. Jan 2023
    1. Much of what they do can be done without eliciting the ire of nation-states. Bike shares, pedestrian zones, insulated buildings, renovated port facilities, congestion fees, car emission limits, furnace specifications, fuel upgrades (from oil to gas to alternative energy) and white paint roofs, for example, are only some of the innovations city officials can promote to effect significant reductions in emissions and pollutants.

      !- cities actions : can be done without eliciting ire of nation state - bike shares - pedestrian zones - insulated buildings - renovated ports - congestion fees - car emission limits - furnace specifications - fuel upgrades - white paint roofs - cities are the right level for focusing on effective global climate action

    2. here states have grown dysfunctional and sovereignty has become an obstacle to global democratic action—as when the United States (or China, France, or Canada) refuses to compromise its sovereignty by permitting the international monitoring of carbon emissions on its soil—cities have increasingly proven themselves capable of deliberative democratic action on behalf of sustainability, as they have actually done in intercity associations like the C-40 or ICLEI. If presidents and prime ministers cannot summon the will to work for a sustainable planet, mayors can. If citizens of the province and nation think ideologically and divisively, neighbors and citizens of the towns and cities think publicly and cooperatively.

      !- claim : cities can mitigate corrupted democracy and foster global cooperation - ie. C40 or ICLEI (also Covenant of Mayors) - cities are not plagued by the problems of state actors who cannot reach any meaningful agreement at COP conferences

  13. Dec 2022
    1. Musk appears to be betting that the spectacle is worth it. He’s probably correct in thinking that large swaths of the world will not deem his leadership a failure either because they are ideologically aligned with him or they simply don’t care and aren’t seeing any changes to their corner of the Twitterverse.

      How is this sort of bloodsport similar/different to the news media coverage of Donald J. Trump in 2015/2016?

      The similarities over creating engagement within a capitalistic framing along with the need to only garner at least a minimum amount of audience to support the enterprise seem to be at play.

      Compare/contrast this with the NBAs conundrum with the politics of entering the market in China.

  14. Nov 2022
  15. Oct 2022
    1. laudator temporis acti

      laudator temporis acti translates as "a praiser of times past"

      Calls to mind:

      Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod quaerit et inventis miser abstinet ac timet uti, vel quod res omnis timide gelideque ministrat, dilator, spe longus, iners avidusque futuri, difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti se puero, castigator censorque minorum. —Horace's Ars Poetica (line 173)

      Many ills encompass an old man, whether because he seeks gain, and then miserably holds aloof from his store and fears to use it, or because, in all that he does, he lacks fire and courage, is dilatory and slow to form hopes, is sluggish and greedy of a longer life, peevish, surly, given to praising the days he spent as a boy, and to reproving and condemning the young. (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough)

      In Horace's version he's talking about a old curmudgeon and the phrase often has a pejorative tinge. It generally is used to mean someone who defends earlier periods of history ("the good old days") usually prior to their own lives and which they haven't directly experienced, as better than the present.


      Compare this with the sentiment behind Donald J. Trump's "Make America Great Again". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again

      The end of the passage also has historical precedent and hints of "You kids get off my lawn!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_kids_get_off_my_lawn!

  16. Sep 2022
  17. Aug 2022
    1. Sean Illing I do want to at least point to an apparent paradox here. As you’ve said, because of the internet, there are now more voices and more perspectives than ever before, and yet at the same time there’s a massive “herding effect,” as a result of which we have more people talking about fewer subjects. And that partly explains how you get millions of people converging on something like QAnon. Martin Gurri Yeah, and that’s very mysterious to me. I would not have expected that outcome. I thought we were headed to ever more dispersed information islands and that that would create a fragmentation in individual beliefs. But instead, I’ve noticed a trend toward conformism and a crystallizing of very few topics. Some of this is just an unwillingness to say certain things because you know if you said them, the internet was going to come after you. But I think Trump had a lot to do with it. The amount of attention he got was absolutely unprecedented. Everything was about him. People were either against him or for him, but he was always the subject. Then came the pandemic and he simply lost the capacity to absorb and manipulate attention. The pandemic just moved him completely off-kilter. He never recovered.

      Martin Gurri holds that there's an emergent herding effect in the public conversation, driven by the internet, which leads us to have conversations clustered in relatively few different topics.

    1. We might learn something new, if we understood both sides.

      Allosso is using "both sides" in a broadly journalistic fashion the way it had traditionally meant in the mid to late 21st century until Donald J. Trump's overtly racist comment on Aug. 15, 2017 "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides." following the Charlottesville, VA protests.

      Perhaps it might be useful if people quit using the "both sides" as if there were only two perspectives on an issue (for or against), when in reality there is often a spectrum of thoughts and feelings, not all mutually exclusive, about issues?

  18. Jul 2022
    1. Democrats must prioritize federal legislation that clarifies how Congress should certify the outcome of future elections and minimizes partisan meddling in the process.Democrats must move back into the cultural mainstream. While they should full-throatedly defend the rights of minority groups, the party’s top leaders must strongly distance themselves from the excesses of the identitarian left. Democrats must demonstrate to the American people that they hear their concerns about inflation and the surge in violent crime. And while the tools that the White House has at its disposal to address either crisis are limited, Biden must use them as best he can, putting himself in a position to claim partial credit if there are genuine improvements by 2024.Democrats must pass the imperfect legislation for which they have the votes rather than holding out for the more ambitious deals that have proven elusive. If the White House was willing to compromise with moderates on issues like Build Back Better, the administration would have some genuine accomplishments to tout.Finally, Democrats who have a better chance of beating Donald Trump in 2024 than either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris should seriously explore a primary challenge, and fast. To protect themselves against bad faith attacks, candidates who wish to succeed would probably be well-advised to announce that they are running before Biden makes his own intentions clear.
    1. Gone, for now, are the big rallies, with their open calls for violence and ostentatious displays of military-style kit, and many of those who organized them. Gone, too, are most of the election audits and other inquiries into the results convened by Republican-controlled state legislatures and local governments, investigations that failed to produce evidence of meaningful fraud. What is left in their place is an insistence — a belief, a lie or an act of motivated reasoning, depending on whom you’re talking to — that the election was stolen, which has fed a new wave of post-Trump activism on the right.
    1. So in total, Bannon predicted Trump’s premature victory declaration, which came true. He predicted that all hell would break loose on Jan. 6, which came true. He predicted that uncertainty about election results spurred by a bunch of lawsuits would force Congress to decide the election, which wound up essentially being Trump’s plan. And he suggested that unrest was perhaps desirable and/or could be of some utility in all of this, which evidence suggests Trump might well have agreed with on Jan. 6.

      Did he just predict or was he tactically planning this?

  19. Jun 2022
    1. For Jerome Bruner, the place to begin is clear: “One starts somewhere—where the learner is.”

      One starts education with where the student is. But mustn't we also inventory what tools and attitudes the student brings? What tools beyond basic literacy do they have? (Usually we presume literacy, but rarely go beyond this and the lack of literacy is too often viewed as failure, particularly as students get older.) Do they have motion, orality, song, visualization, memory? How can we focus on also utilizing these tools and modalities for learning.

      Link to the idea that Donald Trump, a person who managed to function as a business owner and president of the United States, was less than literate, yet still managed to function in modern life as an example. In fact, perhaps his focus on oral modes of communication, and the blurrable lines in oral communicative meaning (see [[technobabble]]) was a major strength in his communication style as a means of rising to power?

      Just as the populace has lost non-literacy based learning and teaching techniques so that we now consider the illiterate dumb, stupid, or lesser than, Western culture has done this en masse for entire populations and cultures.

      Even well-meaning educators in the edtech space that are trying to now center care and well-being are completely missing this piece of the picture. There are much older and specifically non-literate teaching methods that we have lost in our educational toolbelts that would seem wholly odd and out of place in a modern college classroom. How can we center these "missing tools" as educational technology in a modern age? How might we frame Indigenous pedagogical methods as part of the emerging third archive?

      Link to: - educational article by Tyson Yunkaporta about medical school songlines - Scott Young article "You should pay for Tutors"


      aside on serendipity

      As I was writing this note I had a toaster pop up notification in my email client with the arrival of an email by Scott Young with the title "You should pay for Tutors" which prompted me to add a link to this note. It reminds me of a related idea that Indigenous cultures likely used information and knowledge transfer as a means of payment (Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power). I have commented previously on the serendipity of things like auto correct or sparks of ideas while reading as a means of interlinking knowledge, but I don't recall experiencing this sort of serendipity leading to combinatorial creativity as a means of linking ideas,

    1. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/patrick-henry-virginia-ratifying-convention-va/

      While gerrymandering isn't brought up explicitly here, the underlying principles are railed against heavily.

      Some interesting things applicable to the rise of Donald J. Trump hiding in here.

      Interesting to read this in its historical context versus our present context. So much can be read into his words from our current context, while others can extract dramatically different views--particularly by Constitutional originalists.

  20. May 2022
  21. multidimensional.link multidimensional.link
    1. D*nald Trump

      Donald Trump's second impeachment came as a result of the physical attacks on Congress and Capitol Police on Jan 6, 2021.

  22. Apr 2022
    1. Peter Navarro. (2021, August 23). This is what caving to political pressure looks like. Pfizer vaccine is leady and non-durable and risks are mounting. If we had tried to pulled this kind of sh**T in the Trump White...fill in blank. F.D.A. Grants Full Approval https://t.co/6r10euQPus [Tweet]. @RealPNavarro. https://twitter.com/RealPNavarro/status/1429833643808145408

    1. imitation more generally. Emmanuel Roze hasfound that the experience of imitating patients makes the young doctors he trainsmore empathetic

      Imitation can potentially help one become more empathetic.

      Is there a relationship between this effect and one's mirror neurons?

      Donald J. Trump is well known for is sad impersonation of impaired and disabled people. Obviously he has no empathy for them and it's unlikely that his re-enactments will create empathy for him. Is this a result of a neurological deficit on his part?

  23. Mar 2022
    1. Gesturing also increases as afunction of difficulty: the more challenging the problem, and the more optionsthat exist for solving it, the more we gesture in response.

      When presented with problems people are prone to gesture more with the increasing challenges of those problems. The more ways there are to solve a particular problem, the more gesturing one is likely to do.


      What sort of analysis could one do on politicians who gesture their speech with relation to this? For someone like Donald J. Trump who floats balloons (ideas--cross reference George Lakoff) in his speeches, is he actively gesturing in an increased manner as he's puzzling out what is working for an audience and what isn't? Does the gesturing decrease as he settles on the potential answers?

    1. Each highlighted statement expresses political talking points aligned to induce trump-like support.

      Trump introduced new marketing and strategy, formulated using concepts and metrics mastered by Reality TV and Hollywood and then paired with advertising propaganda and "selling" techniques to create a "Brand". This is after-all Donald Trump, this is what he does, has done and is the only way he has found to make money. Trump built the "brand" (just barely) while teetering on self destruction.

      His charismatic persona became "the glue" that allowed creative narratives to stick to certain types of people in-spite of risk. Trump learned OTJ how to capture a specific type of audience.

      The mistake people make about Trump is assuming his audience to be "Joe Six-Pack", redneck's with limited education! This assumption does not have merit on its own.<br /> * There is a common "follower" theme among his audience that is exploited by those who: * Bought the "licensing rights" to the master-class Trump "how-to" course.

  24. Feb 2022
    1. Glenn Youngkin, the newly elected governor of Virginia, created a tip line that parents can use to report teachers whose classes cover “inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory.”

      Critical thinking can provoke people into "divisive" considerations. Such a tip line makes it pretty easy to disrupt any attempt to 'teach kids to think [critically]'

      Just one or two such efforts aren't too worrisome, but this might portend a broad change in the mission of education, from humanistic flourishing to the production of a compliant populace.

    1. We also know that theaverage length of TV soundbites has steadily declined over the lastseveral decades (Fehrmann, 2011). During the U.S. presidentialelection in 1968, the average soundbite — that is, any footage of acandidate speaking uninterrupted — was still a little more than 40seconds, but that had fallen to less than 10 seconds at the end of the80s (Hallin 1994) and 7.8 seconds in 2000 (Lichter, 2001). The lastelection has certainly not reversed the trend. Whether that meansthat the media adjust to our decreasing attention span or is causingthe trend is not easy to say.[17]

      Ryfe and Kemmelmeier not only show that this development goes much further back into the past and first appeared in newspapers (the quotes of politicians got almost halved between 1892 and 1968), but also posed the question if this can maybe also be seen as a form of increased professionalism of the media as they do not just let politicians talk as they wish (Ryfe and Kemmelmeier 2011). Craig Fehrman also pointed out the irony in the reception of this rather nuanced study – it was itself reduced to a soundbite in the media (Fehrman 2011).


      Soundbites have decreased in length over time.

      What effects are driving this? What are the knock on effects? What effect does this have on the ability for doubletalk to take hold? Is it easier for doubletalk and additional meanings to attach to soundbites when they're shorter? (It would seem so.) At what point to they hit a minimum?

      What is the effect of potential memes which hold additional meaning of driving this soundbite culture?

      Example: "Lock her up" as a soundbite with memetic meaning from the Trump 2016 campaign in reference to Hilary Clinton.

    1. Stephan Lewandowsky. (2022, January 15). This is an extremely important development. The main vector for misinformation are not fringe websites but “mainstream” politicians who inherit and adapt fringe material. So keeping track of their effect is crucial, and this is a very welcome first step by @_mohsen_m @DG_Rand 1/n [Tweet]. @STWorg. https://twitter.com/STWorg/status/1482265289022746628

  25. Jan 2022
    1. “Once Trump normalized discourse that was hateful, xenophobic, conspiratorial and sexist, he made it more mainstream. People who previously self-censored those thoughts felt free to not only think them, but say them – particularly on social media, where anonymity removes accountability. That hasn’t really changed.”
    1. The Secret Life of “Political Correctness” In his campaign speeches, including Trump’s New Hampshire speech following the June 2016 massacre of 49 people at an Orlando, Florida nightclub, Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked “political correctness”. “I refuse to be politically correct”, Trump told his New Hampshire audience. “I’m so tired of this politically correct crap,” he complained to South Carolina business leaders back in September 2015. “This country, political correctness is killing us,” Trump charged in a February 2016 interview on NBC’s Today show. Throughout the primary season Donald Trump has attacked “political correctness” so much, it might have raised the question – was he aware of the dark new conspiracy theory association that the term “political correctness” has taken on, over the past decade and a half, for many on the American right ? If he wasn’t, he probably is now.

      .corrección_política .microfascismos .trump .antecedentes .fascismo

  26. Dec 2021
    1. the really insidious part about it is not the idea of the noble savage actually there is no noble savage in Russo's 00:54:51 discourse because his state of nature involves creatures which are like humans but actually lack any sort of philosophy at all because what they call do is project their own lives into the 00:55:05 future and imagine themselves in other states they're constantly inventing things and chasing their own tails or rushing headlong for their own chains as he puts it they invent agriculture but 00:55:18 they can't see the consequences they invent cities but they can't see the consequences so we're talking about no imagination

      Rousseau was perfectly describing the intelligence and politics of Donald J. Trump when he described creatures which are like humans, but are "rushing headlong for their own chains". Trump was able to govern, but completely lacked the ability to imagine the consequences of any of his actions.


      Not sure what name Rousseau gave these creatures. Which book was this in? Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men?

  27. Nov 2021
    1. Parallels between fascism & trumpism.

      But for me it's hard to fail to identify that fascist ideology was structured to deplete communist & class-war ideology of any credibility.

    1. https://danallosso.substack.com/p/help-me-find-world-history-textbooks

      Dan Allosso is curious to look at the history of how history is taught.

      The history of teaching history is a fascinating topic and is an interesting way for cultural anthropologists to look at how we look at ourselves as well as to reveal subtle ideas about who we want to become.

      This is particularly interesting with respect to teaching cultural identity and its relationship to nationalism.

      One could look at the history of Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War to see how the South continued its cultural split from the North (or in more subtle subsections from Colin Woodard's American Nations thesis) to see how this has played out. This could also be compared to the current culture wars taking place with the rise of nationalism within the American political right and the Southern evangelicals which has come to a fervor with the rise of Donald J. Trump.

      Other examples are the major shifts in nationalism after the "long 19th century" which resulted in World War I and World War II and Germany's national identity post WWII.

    1. “(T)he 2020 election revealed that, at least with respect to an administration’s senior most officials, the Hatch Act is only as effective as the White House decides it will be. Where, as happened here, the White House chooses to ignore the Hatch Act’s requirements, then the American public is left with no protection against senior administration officials using their official authority for partisan political gain in violation of the law,” it reads.
  28. Oct 2021
  29. Sep 2021
    1. “From the culture’s point of view, Adler was a dead white male who had the bad luck to still be alive.”

      This is a painful burn by the writer Alex Beam.

      Perhaps worth modifying for Donald J. Trump?

      From the perspective of the American experiment and the evolution of democracy, Donald J. Trump was a dead white male who had the bad luck to still be alive."

  30. Aug 2021
    1. Imitation did not mean exact reproduction; rather, words could be added or substracted, and a passage reworked in order to express the same or a contrary view (52)

      Tangential to my particular study, but consider the idea of Donald Trump as being an imitator within this framing. He would frequently float ideas at rallies (cf. George Lakoff) to see what would get a rise from the crowed and riff off of that. In some sense he's not leading, yet imitating the mobs.

  31. Jul 2021
    1. Among white people, 38 percent of college graduates voted for Trump, compared with 64 percent without college degrees. This margin—the great gap between Smart America and Real America—was the decisive one. It made 2016 different from previous elections, and the trend only intensified in 2020.

      Trumps margin.

      How can this gap be closed in the future?

    2. Because with her candidacy something new came into our national life that was also traditional. She was a western populist who embodied white identity politics—John the Baptist to the coming of Trump.

      Re: Sarah Palin

      I can definitely see his point here about the rise of (white) populism here in America which pre-figured Trump.

    1. Trump had led the country to the brink of its own “Reichstag moment,” viewing him as a potential threat to American democracy.

      -- Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

    1. Ha! This is almost exactly what I expected it to be about.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Alan Jacobs</span> in re-setting my mental clock – Snakes and Ladders (<time class='dt-published'>07/01/2021 14:58:05</time>)</cite></small>

  32. Jun 2021
  33. May 2021
    1. Whether Trump can return to Facebook (and Instagram) will be determined on Wednesday morning, when Facebook’s Oversight Board offers its ruling on the company’s indefinite ban. Check TheWrap.com around 6:15 a.m. PT on Wednesday for an update.

      Let's hope that the answer is a resounding "NO!"

    2. You can check out the new platform — which is essentially a short-form blog — by heading to www.DonaldJTrump.com/desk.

      Apparently he's invented the idea of a microblog? And he's got a /desk page?

      What comes next?

      But let's be honest, he was posting these short status updates like this just a few days after he got kicked off of Twitter. He's just got a slightly better UI now.

  34. Apr 2021
    1. Όποιος δεν θέλει έναν στενό ορισμό του gaslighting τον παραπέμπω στην ταινία του Netflix “Death to 2020” και στον εξαιρετικό ρόλο της Λίζα Κούντροου (η Φοίβη από τα Φιλαράκια) όπου ενσαρκώνει εξαιρετικά την Αριστοτελία Πελώνη του Τράμπ.

      Documentary: Death to 2020

  35. Mar 2021
    1. This has taken off hugely.

      hugely used in context

      Apparently Donald Trumpisms are leaking into broader society, though even here it seems to be used ironically, thus also making fun of Trump himself.

    1. Brian Stelter. ‘One Year Ago Tonight, in Front of Millions of Loyal Viewers, Fox’s @SeanHannity Accused the Media of “Scaring the Living Hell out of People” about the Coronavirus and Said “I See It, Again, as like, Let’s Bludgeon Trump with This New Hoax.”’ Tweet. @brianstelter (blog), 10 March 2021. https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1369460806367199232.

    1. The US is trapped in a post-Trump hate and rage, cultivated by FOX news and right-wing militias.

      It seems the Americans have no antibodies to he right-wing propaganda, as Europeans do.

    1. An interesting look at critical thinking applied to the example of Donald Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis and severity.

      Interesting take on metaepistemology and the idea of "authoritarian muscle memory".

    2. When his medical team held a press conference, one detail stood out: he had been given dexamethasone—a steroid that has been shown to greatly reduce mortality, but only when the patient was severely ill. In the early stages of the disease, the result was the opposite: it increased risk and negative outcomes. 

      I don't recall seeing/hearing reporting on this tidbit at the time.

    1. In the United States, with its misinformer in chief, all this occurred last year in the context of political interference with the C.D.C. and the Food and Drug Administration.

      I'm not sure if I've seen the phrase "misinformer in chief" as a reference to Donald J. Trump before, but it's apt.

  36. Feb 2021
    1. I oppose the banning of Donald Trump and his non-violent believers/content from social media platforms such as Facebook Twitter, YouTube and Amazon. I feel (irrationally?) Trump is arrogant and disgusting as a person. I like some of his anti-CCP policies, but not sure I'd vote for him. The "USA First" stance is particularly damaging as it scares USA allies away. I don't think there's enough evidence for the electoral fraud allegations, but I haven't researched the court cases extensively. However, banning him opens a very dangerous precedent, making the US more like a dictatorship... more like China. Also it's not effective. Those who were silenced will only have more motivation, and the risk of terrorism is greatly increased. The people must decide what is true. Not big companies. Individuals must be able to express their beliefs. Bot accounts must be banned, but real individuals must not. If you think a group of people is a bunch of idiots who believe fake news, then, tough, that's democracy for you. Maybe it means that your government is not investing enough in education and welfare to properly educate and give hope to those people. I'm against violence.
    1. Interesting topic. On the surface there is an Investigative Reporter in a common activist role. He had a Heroin problem and hacktivist ties which certainly did not help his situation.

      • Stratfor gets hacked by Jeremy Hammond ,
      • Hammond, a part of LulzSec leaks all to Wikileaks
      • Brown, with ties to LulzSec most likely combs through the leaked data
      • Brown is subjected to what appears to be excessive LE abuse and manipulation
      • Brown is reported to have threatened an FBI Agent via YouTube.....ok.....and this is the reason for additional charges and outrageous sentencing recommendations.
      • WHY...is Brown subjected to this type of treatment and President Donald Trump gets away with far worse?
  37. Jan 2021
    1. While he is well known for his unique speaking style and his once-frequent social media posts, in official settings his language has been quite similar to that of other presidents.

      Keep in mind, however, that in official settings, he's more often reading from a teleprompter and reading words which have been written for him by someone else.

      For exploration: consider Trump's "test balloon" language in front of crowds where he seems to be attempting to see what will get a rise out of his audience and supporters. What effect do these "what-about-isms" have over extended periods of time.

    1. President Trump rescinded an executive order early Wednesday morning that had limited federal administration officials from lobbying the government or working for foreign countries after they leave their posts, undoing one of the few measures he had instituted to fulfill his 2016 campaign promise to “drain the swamp.”

      He failed on so many of his campaign promises that it's incredible. The fact that he actively killed one of the few he could have actually upheld is just keeping in line with his lies, lack of transparency, and lack of honor.

    1. “The members of the House of Representatives, the members of the United States Senate, those of you who are feeling weak tonight, those of you that don’t have the moral fiber in your body, get some tonight,” he said. “Because tomorrow, we the people are going to be here and we want you to know we will not stand for a lie.”
    1. The insurrection isn’t just being televised. It’s being orchestrated, promoted, and broadcast on the platforms of companies with a collective value in the trillions of dollars.
  38. Dec 2020
    1. While SoulCycle was promoting a culture of community and belonging, it was also serving privileged adults indulging their worst impulses.

      Sounds like rule by a petty tyrant or maybe a current sitting president.... is it something in our culture that lets us do this? Whatever happened to the idea of meritocracy?

    1. For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.

      Underlying emotional drivers of Trump supporters, conspiracy theorists, and Republican psychology

    2. You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.

      Solutions to divided political landscape -- it can't be done head-on just by winning arguments through logic -- but instead will require community work, personal relationships, and educational policies

    1. This is why there are fewer opportunists in sensitive areas like security and infrastructure.

      And a solid reason why we can't have Trumps in power, because eventually a crisis will occur and it could be lethal at scale. See COVID-19 death toll in America.

    2. This is why there are fewer opportunists in sensitive areas like security and infrastructure.

      And a solid reason why we can't have Trumps in power, because eventually a crisis will occur and it could be lethal at scale. See COVID-19 death toll in America.

  39. Nov 2020
    1. The Trump team (and much of the GOP) is working backwards, desperately trying to find something, anything to support the president’s aggrieved feelings, rather than objectively considering the evidence and reacting as warranted.

      What do you expect after they've spent four years doing the same thing day in and day out?

    1. One way of looking at it is that Trump was simply “lucky” in 2016, winning the crucial states of PA/WI/MI by <1%, and unlucky in 2020, losing those same states by higher though still modest margins.

      Anatoly offers this way of looking at the 2020 election:

      Trump was simply “lucky” in 2016, winning the crucial states of PA/WI/MI by <1%, and unlucky in 2020, losing those same states by higher though still modest margins.

    1. If this is populism, it’s an aggressive strain. Left-leaning historian Rick Perlstein calls Trump’s general appeal “herrenvolk democracy.” It’s not conservatism at all. It’s big government, and big government programs, but only for the deserving.
    1. What happens when the next would-be autocrat tries this strategy — and what if they are smoother, more strategic, more capable, than this one? This is not a story happening elsewhere. It is a story happening here, now.
    2. “Democracy works only when losers recognize that they have lost,” writes political scientist Henry Farrell. That will not happen here.
  40. Oct 2020
    1. Kommentar in der NYT zu den mörderischen Folgen der Trump'schen Anti-Wissenschaftspolitik. Wir sollten uns nicht zu sehr darüber erheben: Auch die europäischen Regierungen ignorieren konsequent die Erkenntnisse zu den planetaren Grenzen.

    1. President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden will compete for TV audiences in dueling town halls on Thursday night instead of meeting face-to-face for their second debate as originally planned.

      Finally the sort of competition that Trump can understand: it's a ratings race!

    1. A 2016 Lancet study found that universal breast-feeding would prevent 800,000 child deaths a year across the globe and yield $300 billion in savings from reduced health care costs and improved economic outcomes for those reared on breast milk.

      Pure corruption here. Protectionism to prop up profits of approximately 630 million versus major benefits and savings of 300 billion. Even if you look at the calculus of the entire industry of 70 billion it becomes a no brainer.

    1. mmentary. It also includes many annotated newspaper and magazine articles.An articMaha Bali2 weeks agowould be nice to include a screenshot. Also, I feel like I need to read up on Cambodian history to understand the significance of this particular royal - you don’t explicitly talk about how he is using power here. Was he trying to influence public opinion, was he just annotating for his own knowledge and learning, what kind of power is at play here?(I also wonder if the whole leaders having “right to express freely their view” does not work to anyone’s favor in the case of Donald Trump, so I would contest this strongly. That freedom of expression for political leaders maybe should be weighted differently than for the general population, no? As it has broader consequences for the entire country or even the world…

      I nearly added it above in the opening, but Maha’s comment reminds me of it again. In a countercultural way, a web developer created a browser plugin that will re-format all of Donald Trump’s tweets to appear as if they were written in crayon by an eight year old: http://maketrumptweetseightagain.com/

      While not technically annotation in a “traditional” form discussed in the text so far—though close from the perspective of the redaction technique mentioned above—, by reformatting the font of Trumps tweets, it completely changes their context, meaning, and political weight.

    2. And would a hip hop fan question, much less downvote, a “verified” Genius annotation authored by Kendrick Lamar that explains the meaning behind his music?

      But if we're going to consider music as art, isn't a lot of the value and power of art in the "eye of the beholder"? To some extent art's value is in the fact that it can have multiple interpretations. From this perspective, once it's been released, Lamar's music isn't "his" anymore, it becomes part of a broader public that will hear and interpret it as they want to. So while Lamar may go back and annotate what he may have meant at the time as an "expert", doesn't some of his art thereby lose some power in that he is tacitly stating that he apparently didn't communicate his original intent well?

      By comparison and for contrast one could take the recent story of Donald Trump's speech (very obviously written by someone else) about the recent mass shootings and compare them with the polar opposite message he spews on an almost daily basis from his Twitter account. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/teleprompter-trump-meets-twitter-trump-as-the-president-responds-to-mass-slayings/2019/08/05/cdd8ea78-b799-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html

    3. and annotation can tell us why that alternative view matters..d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) !important; }1Troy Hicks With this potential social function, we are reminded that annotation is not neutral as it helps those who add notes to texts produce new discourses and knowledge.

      I wonder how better, big data being overlaid on virtual reality may be helpful to the currently marginalized in the future? Would it be useful to have shared data about businesses and practices that tend to marginalize people further? I recall an African-American comedian recently talking about the Confederate Flag in a (Netflix?) comedy special. They indicated that the flag actually had some worthwhile uses and reminisced driving on rural highways at night looking for a place to stay. When they saw that flag flying over a motel, they knew better to keep driving and stay at another hotel further down the road. In this case, the flag over the hotel not-so-subtly annotated the establishment itself.

      I perceive a lot of social slights and institutionalized racism as being of a marginal sort which are designed to be bothersome to some while going wholly unnoticed by others. What if it were possible to aggregate the data on a broader basis to bring these sorts of marginal harms to the forefront for society to see them? As an example, consider big companies doing marginal harms to a community's environment over time, but going generally unnoticed until the company has long since divested and/or disappeared. It's hard to sue them for damages decades later, but if one could aggregate the bigger harms upfront and show those annotated/aggregated data up front, then they could be stopped before they got started.

      As a more concrete example, the Trump Management Corporation was hit with a consent decree in the early 1970's for prejudicial practices against people of color including evidence that was subpoenaed showing that applications for people of color were annotated with a big "C" on them. Now consider if all individuals who had made those applications had shared some of their basic data into a pool that could have been accessed and analyzed by future applicants, then perhaps the Trumps would have been caught far earlier. Individuals couldn't easily prove discrimination because of the marginal nature of the discrimination, but data in aggregate could have potentially saved the bigger group.

    1. It has become banal to point out that almost any of these would have constituted a monumental scandal under any other president, but it remains true and important.
    2. The most important takeaway Tuesday is that the president’s own former personal attorney pleaded guilty to breaking campaign-finance laws at his alleged direction.
    1. Both books belong to one of today’s most important genres: the Not-About-Trump-But-Also-Sort-Of-About-Trump, or N.A.T.B.A.S.O.A.T., book.
    1. The President's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.

      So the better judgement of others has apparently kept Trump out of trouble?

    2. if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

      TL;DR

      This summary is not what Trump or even Barr have been indicating in their communications.

      Barr's statement on the day of the release of the redacted report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aHPFh2HfSM

    3. Under OLC's analysis, Congress can permissibly criminalize ce1tain obstructive conduct by the President, such as suborning perjury, intimidating witnesses, or fabricating evidence, because those prohibitions raise no separation-of-powers questions. See Application of 28 U.S.C. § 458 to Presidential Appointments of Federal Judges, 19 Op. O.L.C. at 357 n.11. The Constitution does not authorize the President to engage in such conduct, and those actions would transgress the President's duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." U.S. CONST. ART IT, §§ 3. In view of those clearly permissible applications of the obstruction statutes to the President, Franklin's holding that the President is entirely excluded from a statute absent a clear statement would not apply in this context.

      Since the DoJ won't indict a sitting president, here's a direct suggestion of what Congress could do.

    1. During her confirmation hearing she did not discuss her family’s extensive ties to the Chinese maritime industry, and she did not disclose the various Chinese accolades she had received. The Senate’s written questionnaire requires nominees to list all honorary positions.
    1. Trump’s online and email fundraising generated a record $239 million in small-dollar donations, far more than Hillary Clinton’s and more than two-thirds of his donation total, according to the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute. This made Trump competitive in a race where he was outspent nearly 2 to 1.

      Not to mention the free media he was getting from the mainstream media who covered the spectacle.

    2. One previously unreported example: Since Trump’s election in 2016, critical “voter scores” — sophisticated polling-based analytics that the RNC provides to party committees and candidates — have conspicuously omitted an essential detail for any down-ballot race: how voters in specific states and congressional districts feel about Trump. Republican insiders believe these analytics are being withheld to try and prevent GOP candidates from publicly distancing themselves from the president or leaking unfavorable results that embarrass Trump.

      I'm curious if the DNC would provide these numbers to those candidates? Is there potentially other sources for this data?

    3. More conspicuously, since Trump’s election, the RNC — at his campaign’s direction — has excluded critical “voter scores” on the president from the analytics it routinely provides to GOP candidates and committees nationwide, with the aim of electing down-ballot Republicans. Republican consultants say the Trump information is being withheld for two reasons: to discourage candidates from distancing themselves from the president, and to avoid embarrassing him with poor results that might leak. But they say its concealment harms other Republicans, forcing them to campaign without it or pay to get the information elsewhere.
    1. He lost to New York billionaire Donald Trump,

      Is he really a "billionaire"?! I thought the Times' own reporting had refuted this pretty soundly?

    2. He negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, a measure that was ratified by the Senate in President Bill Clinton’s first term.

      Interesting that he dies on the same day that Trump declares victory over the death of NAFTA.

    1. what a great job you are doing

      As pointed out in this sister article (https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/05/trump-isis-losers/527925/) Trump only seems to be able to put things into perspective by either winners or losers. He doesn't seem to be able to see any of the other subtleties.

    1. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.

      Has it started again with nationalism, racism, and Trump?

    2. anomie

      I feel like this word captures very well the exact era of Trumpian Republicanism in which we find ourselves living.

    1. Fact Check: Despite White House claims, PAW Patrol and police LEGO have not been canceled

      So now the White House is lying about children's television shows? Where does it end?

    1. A lot of Democrats believe in what is called Enlightenment reasoning, and that if you just tell people the facts, they’ll reach the right conclusion. That just isn’t true.
    2. I take your point, but I wonder if Trump is just kryptonite for a liberal democratic system built on a free press.

      The key words being "free press" with free meaning that we're free to exert intelligent editorial control.

      Editors in the early 1900's used this sort of editorial control not to give fuel to racists and Nazis and reduce their influence.Cross reference: Face the Racist Nation from On the Media.

      Apparently we need to exert the same editorial control with respect to Trump, who not incidentally is giving significant fuel to the racist fire as well.

    1. there must be other factors that got us Trump

      Primarily people not really knowing how racisit and horrible he really was in addition to his inability to think clearly, logically, or linearly. He espoused a dozen or so simple aphorisms like "Build the wall," but was absolutely unable to indicate a plan that went beyond the aphorism. How will it be implemented, funded, what will the short and long term issues that result. He had none of those things that many others presumed would be worked out as details by smart and intelligent people rather than the "just do it" managerial style he has been shown to espouse.

      Too many republicans, particularly at the end said, "he's not really that bad" and now that he's in power and more authoritarian than they expected are too weak to admit their mistake.

    1. Responding to Axios' reporting, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders emailed this statement: "President Trump has a different leadership style than his predecessors and the results speak for themselves."

      They just don't say very much or anything very good.

    1. When people do inexplicable things, it’s always tempting to project qualities onto them that would offer a more innocuous explanation of their behavior than bad judgment, fecklessness, or stupidity. And this particular bias has infected contemporary political analysis with a virulence that rivals Ebola. Even when the subject’s motives are as transparent as Donald Trump’s, there will always be a class of pundit who insists that Trump is playing 3-D chess, when, as one anonymous staffer put it, “more often than not he’s just eating the pieces.” 
    1. Rather than a complete totalitarianism based on fear and blocking of information the newer methods include demonizing online mediums, and mobilizing armies of supporters or paid employees who muddy the online waters with misinformation, information glut, doubt, confusion, harrasment, and dis-traction, making it hard for ordinary people to navigate the networked pub-lic sphere, and sort facts from fiction, truth from hoaxes.

      Sometimes it seems like Trump does this as a one man band.

    1. That they are defending a person who is fundamentally malicious, even if he makes judicial appointments of which they approve, is too painful for them to admit.

      But surely in the multi-millions of Republicans, they could find someone who could also appoint those judges, but not have the myriad moral failings that Trump does. For surely if they can't, then they're doomed to failure and misery sooner or later.

    1. Finally it is worth noting that trust, through the theory of social capital, has been connected with long-term economic growth—even though these results are based on regressions using extremely sparse datasets.

      And this is an example of how Trump is hurting the economy.

    1. People claiming that Trump said nothing racist may not be exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer on questions of sociology, and Trump himself is, on that score, a plastic spoon.

      This could make a great political cartoon... a Republican drawer full of sharp knives and a pitiful Trump plastic spoon.

    2. We can’t get into Trump’s head here. He may be feigning numbness to the nuances of racist as a power ploy. Or he may genuinely not perceive the racism in his current rhetoric. I suspect he may not, for the simple reason that to imagine how he would feel about a straight-talking Finn in Congress would require a thought experiment, and nothing the man has ever said or done suggests the remotest inclination or ability to process layers, hypotheticals, or subtlety. A man clueless enough to accidentally give away to a national television reporter that he fired James Comey to detract from the investigation of his ties to Russia doesn’t do intersectionality.

      just searing!

    1. Take a look at the overlap of this philosophy with early Norman Vincent Peale's philosophy which apparently heavily influenced the Trump family.

    2. It’s difficult to say that the prosperity gospel itself led to Donald Trump’s inauguration. Again, only 17 percent of American Christians identify with it explicitly. It’s far more true, however, to say that the same cultural forces that led to the prosperity gospel’s proliferation in America — individualism, an affinity for ostentatious and charismatic leaders, the Protestant work ethic, and a cultural obsession with the power of “positive thinking” — shape how we, as a nation, approach politics.

      Power of Positive Thinking is a book by Norman Vincent Peale and provides the direct link to influence on Trump here.

      Also interesting to note the 17% number which can potentially be a threshold level for splitting a community or society from a game theoretic perspective. (Note: I should dig up the reference and re-read it.)

    1. Firms should not be owned and managed by people who survive because of their connections to government or their privileged birth: Capitalism is dynamic when owners or managers succeed because they are good at delivering high-quality goods and services at a competitive price. This is more likely to be a failure when the other two factors above are not working well.

      Here is where we're likely to fail in the United States by following the example of Donald Trump, who ostensibly has survived solely off the wealth of his father's dwindling empire. With that empire gone, he's now turning to creating wealth by associating with the government. We should carefully follow where this potentially leads the country.

    1. In February, a friend pointed out to me that years ago Donald Trump lied about the size of Trump Towers, claiming he lived on the 66th to 68th floors. Here’s the thing: Trump Tower has only 58 floors, according to New York City documents. So Trump lied about even this, as he lies about virtually everything else. (In fact, Trump has lied about the height of several of his buildings, including Trump World Tower, which he claimed has 90 floors. In fact, it has 70.)If Biden were to use this story at the beginning of a debate, perhaps even before Trump’s first lie, the former vice president, when hearing a lie, could simply say, “Donald, we’re at the 66th floor again.” This response would certainly be more effective than repeatedly calling Trump a liar and serving as a fact-checker for the entire debate. Biden has to find a way to quickly name what’s happening and move on.

      This sort of framing is fascinating to me.

      "We're on the 66th floor again."

    1. Critics, including Sarah Posner and Joe Conason, maintain that prosperity teachers cultivate authoritarian organizations. They argue that leaders attempt to control the lives of adherents by claiming divinely-bestowed authority.[63] Jenkins contends that prosperity theology is used as a tool to justify the high salaries of pastors.

      This would seem to play out in current American culture which seems to be welcoming of an authoritarian president.

    1. An NSC official confirmed the existence of the playbook but dismissed its value. “We are aware of the document, although it’s quite dated and has been superseded by strategic and operational biodefense policies published since,” the official said. “The plan we are executing now is a better fit, more detailed, and applies the relevant lessons learned from the playbook and the most recent Ebola epidemic in the [Democratic Republic of the Congo] to COVID-19.”

      If this is the case, then where is this "new" playbook? And can they point to specific pieces on that timeline that indicate that they're actually performing better than the prior playbook? Let's see the evidence here.

    1. When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.

      Searing words.

    1. Gradually, we begin to conflate visibility with value. If something is being talked about and seen, we assume that it must be important in some way. – An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’

      And in an over-saturated media space, this is exactly the sort of thing that lands us a narcissistic and incompetent president.

    1. Abandoning democracy and social solidarity, the Californian Ideology dreams of a digital nirvana inhabited solely by liberal psychopaths.

      And nearly twenty years later, isn't that roughly what we've got? (aside from the digital nirvana, which didn't work out so well.)

    1. Dow swings 600 points after Trump rejects stimulus plan

      Given his past history of insider trading and stock market manipulation, I can't help but think that Trump makes statements and does activities like this to influence the markets directly like this.

      The question is who is colluding with him and where is the money going? How is it being hidden? Is it foreign (Russian) investors? Is he dumb enough to be doing it from within his own company?

    1. Whom exactly were we trusting with our care? Why did we decide to trust them in the first place? Who says that only certain kinds of people are allowed to give us the answers?

      Part of the broader cultural eschewing of science as well? Is this part of what put Trump and celebrities in charge?

    1. “every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués. If we cannot abandon fatalism and indifference in the face of deficiencies of our own society, Moscow will profit.”

      Perhaps the best defense against active measures is a little bit of activism of our own

  41. Sep 2020
    1. Ich würde das, was du hier diagnostizierst, als Epistemic Crisis bezeichnen. Ich nehme sie genauso wahr wie du, und ich bin auch darüber entsetzt. Das erste Warnsignal, das ich ernst genommen habe, war der Brexit, das zweite die Wahl von Trump. Beide habe ich vorher nicht erwartet, weil sie jenseits des Horizonts waren, in dem ich Entwicklungen erwartet habe. ich muss also auch an der Art und Weise zweifeln, in der ich politische Entwicklungen verstanden habe.—Später kam dann für mich der Aufstieg der Freiheitlichen hier in Österreich, bis hin zur Regierungsbeteiligung, und die rechtspopulistische Welle (wenn man es so nennen will) in Frankreich und Italien.

    1. On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a short drive from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit by John Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, and who would, a short time later, be named the White House chief of staff. The two men were set to visit Section 60, the 14-acre area of the cemetery that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars. Kelly’s son Robert is buried in Section 60. A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. He was 29. Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members. But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.
  42. Aug 2020
    1. Über den weiß-nationalistischen Diskurs im Trump-Lager, maßgeblich promoted von Stephen Miller. Einiges zu dessen früheren Aktivitäten bei Breitbart