monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

@Setanta,

Thanks Set. I have to confess than I'm the worst student of current Canadian politics one might find.

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Of course

Quote:

In an interview with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on his War Room: Pandemic podcast on February 26, Brian Kolfage — a fake news peddler and Air Force veteran — claimed that Border Patrol agents have been sending him “pictures of Chinese nationals and just individuals from Asia in general who are coming across” the U.S.-Mexico border. (Kolfage “crowdfunded more than $25 million on GoFundMe” to build President Donald Trump’s border wall, but his organization is currently under criminal investigation.)

There are now some half million Chinese in Greater Vancouver (and this doesn't count individuals from other parts of Asia). Many are relatively recent arrivals. There is a constant flow between Asia and Vancouver's airport of visiting families and tourists many of whom cross the border at Blaine Washington every day to visit Bellingham, Seattle, Portland etc. This would be likely not hundreds but thousands most days (32,000 vehicles cross each day)

But these rightwing racist doucebags are concerned with the southern border.

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@blatham,

blatham wrote:

Quote:
I believe you have framed the issues below in accordance with your own point of view,
Not a matter of framing, george. I was challenging your claim that, for example, government involvement in medical delivery MUST lead to the reduction or erasure of individual choice . That's just not so here nor in many other provinces and nations. My choices are not limited. I'm not framing. I'm describing.

You are here inferring things I didn't say or write. I made no comment or assertion about your description of the NHS in Canada, how it works, or whether one's fee choice is limited there. I did, however note that here in Northern California it is very hard to find a medical provider who will accept our government's Medicare program. Even there I stopped short of saying that it is "axiomatic) that such limitations will occur. Instead I noted the facts that prevail here and the apparent causes for so many medical practitioners opting out of Government programs and even many private insurance programs. Finally I noted my own personal preferences here and my preference for programs that do not interpose a third party (government or otherwise) between myself and the doctor I choose.

blatham wrote:

You begin with your premise as axiomatically true - government involvement MUST limit individual choice therefore it will be/must be an infringement of liberty. That premise is false and you're trapped by it. Counter evidence, counter examples have to be found wanting and disregarded.

A mandatory government program to manage all medical care (and exclude private practices if this is done) would indeed be a serious infringement on liberty . However, I didn't address that. Instead I noted accurately that the government health programs here (and I suspect in Canada as well) do indeed place limits on the services that will be provided and limits on the access of patients to specialists of various types. These are merely the intrinsic, inescapable consequences of government managements of budgets , total costs and procedures made available - much of it is based on sound statistical analysis of cost, average outcomes, and the raw political facts of government funds available. However, they are generally applied limits nonetheless.

I did observe that I value my liberty in choosing my own practitioners and the character of the relationship that results from it. That is simply my own preference, and I was very clear about that.

blatham wrote:

Or you begin with a related axiom that government involvement in anything must necessarily result in reductions in quality.

Quote:
I wouldn’t buy a government-produced automobile
Would you buy an automobile which has been produced by some entrepreneur who has designed and manufactured it totally outside of any government mandated set of safety and engineering standards?

Nonsense. I merely indicated that I (and likely very many people) would not choose a government manufactured automobile or a government operated restaurant. I didn't address the reasons for it, though I did suggest that such preferences are likely very common, and generally for obvious reasons. Government safety and engineering standards are ubiquitous and for the most part inescapable - the question simply doesn't arise. However it is a fact that such standards have become very politicized, as illustrated by the ongoing struggle between California and the Federal government.

blatham wrote:

I'm going to leave it there. We've been through this many times before. Your premises re government establish your conclusions.

That statement could very clearly apply to you as well. The only difference here is that, unlike you, I limited my judgments to my own preferences and made no effort to see them forced on others.

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Supreme Court Considers Writing Itself Out Of Speedy Deportation Cases

Quote:

In a potentially historic case, the Supreme Court heard arguments Monday on the Trump administration's policy of speeding deportations of asylum seekers without them ever having a chance to have their cases heard by a judge.

At the heart of the case is the right of habeas corpus, embedded in the Constitution, which guarantees that people who are held by the government have the right to go to court asking to be released. A long line of Supreme Court cases protects that right — including for people who are in the United States illegally and even for those detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after 9/11.

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

I did observe that I value my liberty in choosing my own practitioners and the character of the relationship that results from it. That is simply my own preference, and I was very clear about that.

Exactly that's what we do here, too, with our mandatory insurance.

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

Quote:

Finally I noted my own personal preferences here and my preference for programs that do not interpose a third party (government or otherwise) between myself and the doctor I choose.

Well, if you are merely saying you have a particular preference for the arrangements where you live, that's fine. But it would then mean that your use of "choice" and "liberty" are subjective, applicable only to you and have no broader or objective application.

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@Walter Hinteler,

The only people who have choice are the very rich. Poor people can choose which finger gets sewn back on because their insurance can't cover all three.

It's not choice, it's the illusion of choice.

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TPM Reader RS sends in this dispatch from Kirkland, Washington:

Quote:

Thought you might be curious to hear from someone who lives about 500 yards from the nursing care facility and down the street from the hospital at ground zero.

People here are actually quite calm and normal. There are grocery store runs on staples and you can’t get any hand sanitizer. As parents we feel doomed that open schools will mean inevitable spread to everyone.

The scandal is that no one is offering our community coordinated testing. We are totally in the dark about how widespread this is going to be. We are being given advice to avoid contact but go about our normal days, which is useless because it is contradictory and also it is advice given without any knowledge of the extent of the spread.

The national press briefings are clownish when people are dying a football field away from you. To hear every briefing kick off with a celebration of the President is insulting beyond belief to people living in an outbreak zone. Everyone should be hammering the administration for community wide testing and should be asking Trump right to his face when it will begin. Over and over and over again.

I assume this will pass and we’ll be fine but not because of our elected government but in spite of it. That is the shame of living under incompetency and sycophancy of this administration. It would give me hope if the press was angrier and more aggrieved at being bathed in lies about this very real crisis.

Demand testing. It’s what matters. Take it from people in an outbreak zone.

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@izzythepush,

Quote:

The only people who have choice are the very rich.

That's certainly a relevant aspect in this.

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@blatham,

I believe you are being excessively categorical here, and, once again, trying to put your words in the mouths of others. When I addressed my own preferences for certain things I meant exactly that. They are indeed subjective, however I would strongly object to the imposition, on me or on others, of any scheme that might prohibit the expression or realization of those preferences for me and those of everyone else as well.

A good illustration might involve the absurdities in Bernie Sander's loud and repeated declarations that "health care is a human right", then followed by Sanders ' own prescription for just what that would entail; who would pay for it and what everyone would get, and not get. In effect he is saying "everyone has a "right" to do exactly as he requires or instructs them to do' - a truly laughable absurdity.

The truth is that in a free society people have a right to do exactly what they wish in any matter, except for explicit prohibitions established in law in a system, such as ours, which is Constitutionally constrained to the protection of enumerated human rights and the government of which is limited to powers Constitutionally assigned to it.

Progressives peddle this nonsense frequently, and usually in the name of "liberating" people from this or that challenge. The Marxist doctrine for the socialist paradise of the late, unlamented USSR proclaimed that the party was the "vanguard of the people" and it (alone) knew what was good for everyone. It allowed no one and nothing to stand in the way of its plans for this paradise, and exterminated millions of people in the process. It also promised that, as the proclaimed nirvana was approached, the state would merely "whither away", while in fact the state became a totalitarian monster that presumed to govern every aspect of the lives of the people it enslaved, and whose only priority was the preservation of the state itself. It also turned out that the promised socialist paradise was merely a bureaucratic tyranny that delivered only poverty to everyone, but its governing elite.

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

The Marxist doctrine for the socialist paradise of the late, unlamented USSR proclaimed that the party was the "vanguard of the people" and it (alone) knew what was good for everyone.

"Socialist paradise" is actually a slogan coined by Vladimir Lenin 1917 in his The State and Revolution , noting that Social Democracy couldn't achieve a revolution to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and thus the "paradise".

In Europe, the GDR was one of the best examples of a "socialist paradise" (elsewhere, it's China),

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@Walter Hinteler,

I'm aware of that. However Social Democracy is, like socialism, not a particularly well defined term in ordinary usage. Moreover, as history amply confirms. Lenin wasn't particularly good at forecasting the real outcomes of the policies he advocated. Indeed he was wrong (or merely lying) in nearly every particular.

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@georgeob1,

There were English socialists more than a generation before Marx came along. Owesian socialists were s prime moving force in the earliest stages of the Industrial Revolution. Lenin was an aberration on socialism on socialism as rigid social control rather than socialism as the peoples control. He's in no sense the model for social democry.2

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

However Social Democracy is, like socialism, not a particularly well defined term in ordinary usage.

Actually, it is, especially in "ordinary usage" ((here in Germany since 1863).

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@MontereyJack,

When you name Robert Owen, you could also point to Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, and Henry George.
The term utopian socialism used for their theories was, by the way, defined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels first.

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Trump at CPAC

Quote:

"[T]hey like to say, 'All right, so he's building the wall, but Mexico is not paying for it.' Yes, they are, actually. You know what I mean, right? They are paying for it. They're paying for it.... They're paying for it. And they're okay with it because they understand that's fair. But, no, Mexico is paying for it."

And last night in North Carolina

Quote:

"We're building the wall, we're building the wall, we're building the wall, we're building the wall. Mexico's paying for the wall, by the way."

Aside from the ridiculous lie he expects those audiences to believe, I want to point to how he speaks. What's with this brainless repetition? It's like a Neanderthal male advertising himself to a female, shouting... "Me strong. Me strong. Me strong. Me strong"

Much of Trump's speech in news conferences is just filler. He uses this technique to hold the floor, to dominate the conversational space, to prevent others from talking or asking questions. His common use of repetition functions similarly, as a sort of filler, because he almost never knows much about the subjects he speaks on but must pretend that he does as cover for that lack of knowledge. Have you ever heard him admit a lack of knowledge/expertise? Or admit that others know more than he does? Or that others are smarter than him?

In pedagogy and advertising, it is understood that repetition has value in aiding an audience to recall a brand name or motto or lesson. But this is something rather different. The repetition Trump wields as in the cases above also serves as something like a club that he hits his audience with over and over and over. It's a form of bullying. Imagine a mate saying to you, "Take out the garbage. Take out the garbage. Take out the garbage. Take out the garbage". Or a professional wrestler standing in the center of the ring shouting, "I am the King. I am the King. I am the King. I am the King."

The guy is a sociopath, certainly. But he's also a ******* barbarian.

1 Reply

@blatham,

In Sects and Death by William Burroughs some time is spent on the cult leader's voice and the repetition of certain words and phrases.

And it's starting to feel like a cult, his followers believe him because he tells them what they want to hear, and anything contrary can be dismissed as deep state fake news.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

trying to put your words in the mouths of others.

I'm really not, george. I am trying to sort through your sentences to divine your claims and your logic supporting them and then to work out whether they are consistent and supportable.

Quote:

They are indeed subjective, however I would strongly object to the imposition, on me or on others, of any scheme that might prohibit the expression or realization of those preferences for me and those of everyone else as well.

Yet how could it be that insisting on realization of your preferences does not have negative consequences for others' preferences being realized?

You place government-established limitations on citizens' possession of weapons based on your preferences. Me too. And others will have their preferences. In community, we work these things out and form some rough but adequate consensus at any point in time. These things are always an on-going process.

At least that's so in a majoritarian-organized system. Authoritarian systems tend to ignore consensus and over-ride it based on some notion of unique or superior access to "truth" (or simply because domination of others is their notion of how to live a life in community). Access to abortion is a pretty obvious example here. I don't limit women's choice. The church does and works towards that end. That's a very real and contemporary liberty issue.

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@izzythepush,

Interesting. I haven't read that book. And your use of "cult" certainly has resonance here. As I wrote that post, another notion came to mind that I left by the wayside. That's the use of repetition in chants and other such "religious" (for lack of a better term) practices. There's a mesmerizing quality to that which tunes out other cognitive activity. Oddly, it was only a couple of months ago that I twigged on the connection between "chant" and "enchant". Should have caught that one a lot earlier.

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Following the suit Trump launched against the NYT, today he launched two suits against the WP. Key topic: Russia. Two named reporters, Paul Waldman and my friend Greg Sargent
Here

A free press is Trump's enemy. So he plays the game he has always played, sue to harass and suppress. Well **** him.

If you aren't subscribing to these two papers, please consider doing so.

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