monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

@Walter Hinteler,

Russia supports the USA, the arch-rival, in the corona crisis. This news made the headlines. "My country extends a helping hand to the people of the United States," wrote Anatoly Antonov, the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Russian state broadcasters showed how a military transport plane landed at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. On board: 60 tons of masks and other medical goods from Moscow, including respirators.

The "humanitarian aid" from Moscow was not in vain, as it has since turned out - and it probably also partly violates US sanctions. As the business online newspaper RBK reports, delivered "Aventa-M" ventilators are manufactured by the Russian company KRET. It belongs to the state corporation Rostec.

Pictures of the Russian state channels showed cartons with the inscription "Aventa-M", which were unloaded from the Russian transport plane in New York on April 1.

Small sensation
The Rostec subsidiary has been under US sanctions since July 2014. Citizens and organisations of the country are not allowed to conduct transactions with the Russian company - unless a special permit has been obtained. However, this has not yet been mentioned.

The State Department had already announced earlier that they had paid for the delivery from Moscow. Russia followed suit on Thursday: Half of the medical supplies were paid for by Washington, the other half by a state fund, the Russian State Department announced.
Neither the USA nor Russia disclosed the value of the freight and what was donated by the fund.
(Source: spiegel-online translated to English)

RBK report (in Russian)

1 Reply

Wake up, Check
login to work, Check
Look at email, Check
Go to A2K and make sure you guys still hate America, Check

2 Replies

@Walter Hinteler,

Meanwhile, there's a reuters report publish in English as well:

Russian ventilators shipped to U.S. made by firm under U.S. sanctions

Quote:

[...]
Russian state television footage of the plane’s unloading showed boxes of “Aventa-M” ventilators, which are produced by the Ural Instrument Engineering Plant (UPZ) in the city of Chelyabinsk, 1,500 km (930 miles) east of Moscow, RBC reported.

UPZ is part of a holding company called Concern Radio-Electronic Technologies (KRET), which itself is a unit of Russian state conglomerate Rostec.

KRET has been under U.S. sanctions since July 2014, with U.S. firms and nationals barred from doing business with it.

In a statement on Wednesday, the U.S. State Department said the United States had agreed to purchase medical supplies from Russia, but it made no mention of any company nor regarding sanctions.

“Both countries have provided humanitarian assistance to each other in times of crisis in the past and will no doubt do so again in the future. This is a time to work together to overcome a common enemy that threatens the lives of all of us,” said the statement, issued by State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus.

U.S. officials in Washington could not immediately be reached for further comment on Friday. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow said it had nothing to add beyond what Ortagus had already said.

0 Replies

@McGentrix,

True, I'm not enthralled with your shitty "city on a hill" but as a social construct it hardly warrants "hatred". Did you "hate" the USA when Obama was president?

4 Replies

@hightor,

Fascists always try to wrap themselves around the flag. In Nazi Germany loyalty to the state meant loyalty to the party. Heil Hitler became the required greeting, anyone not using it would be arrested.

1 Reply

@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

Fascists always try to wrap themselves around the flag. In Nazi Germany loyalty to the state meant loyalty to the party. Heil Hitler became the required greeting, anyone not using it would be arrested.

Loyalty doesn't have to be to a flag. The important thing for fascism is that dissent is suppressed. You could suppress dissent by implicitly or explicitly hating anyone who dissents from your party ideology, e.g. pro-choice, anti-Trump, pro-taxes, pro-unions, or whatever.

The thing that makes it fascist is how you respond to dissent. Do you listen and discuss differences of opinion, or do you goad and ridicule, shun, demonize etc. those who question or dissent from party authority, however that is determined?

I used to think that the US Pledge of Allegiance was fascist because it was a pledge to a flag, but then I started studying the words and I realized it is about a "republic," meaning the right of people to self-govern instead of submitting to central authority; then it mentions being "under God," which means the state is not considered the highest possible level of authority; and then it mentions, "liberty and justice for all," which is egalitarian.

Now you could say that people might not ever give the slightest thought to the meaning of the pledge of allegiance even while they fight over whether to stand for it or not, and that might be fascist, but when they are avoiding independent thought, humans are fascist anyway by nature, so in that case it's better for authority to make them stand for and recite a pledge that actually contains anti-authoritarian meanings than to just be free to organize themselves around whatever symbols or meanings they do in the absence of anti-authoritarianism, i.e. because pop-culture symbolism and brand-worship, etc. are all variations on the same flag-worship theme that is central to fascism.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

Quote:

I used to think that the US Pledge of Allegiance was fascist because it was a pledge to a flag...

It was written by a socialist. The "under god" part isn't original and was tacked on during the rampant paranoia of the McCarthy era.

Interestingly it was originally recited with what later became the Nazi salute:

http://listverse.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/3-bellamy.jpg

1 Reply

@Walter Hinteler,

Quote:

Only this sociopath of a president

Though it has been too slow in coming, I am deeply gratified by the increasing number of political writers and news entities who are not shying away from use of a term which is so evidently accurate.

1 Reply

@McGentrix,

Quote:

Wake up, Check
login to work, Check
Look at email, Check
Go to A2K and make sure you guys still hate America, Check

This might lead one to question whether you've really logged in, checked your email with any care at all and even whether you did wake up.

0 Replies

Quote:

The Navy captain relieved of command after ringing alarm bells over the spread of COVID-19 on his ship got a hero’s farewell Thursday night from the hundreds of sailors previously under his command.

The acting secretary of the Navy announced Thursday that Captain Brett Crozier was being relieved of command due to showing “extremely poor judgement” in the form of a memo alerting Navy higher-ups to the dire COVID-19 infection rate on his ship.

Chants of “Captain Crozier!” rang through the USS Theodore Roosevelt as hundreds of sailors bid farewell to their erstwhile leader.

TPM
Right on. It's like a reverse mutiny.

0 Replies

@MontereyJack,

MontereyJack wrote:

If the people who disagree with progressives commit crimes or violate the law or the constitution, and they do, it's not a witch hunt but justice. You and trump hate justice when republican and Trumpian misdeeds are exposed.

You've made at least two errors here.

First, even if a witch hunt uncovers an actual crime, that does not change the fact that it is a witch hunt. That is why when an illegal search by the police uncovers actual criminal activity, courts refuse to allow that evidence to be presented in court.

Second, the Democrats have a history of framing innocent people for imaginary crimes. Note Scooter Libby for example. There is no reason to believe that any accusations against the Trump Administration have any truth to them.

0 Replies

@blatham,

blatham wrote:

There is a clear correspondence between profligate use of cliches and the abandonment of actual thinking.

It is pretty hypocritical for you of all people to falsely accuse someone of not thinking.

Which one of us is always quoting other people and yelling "Look everyone! I think what that person thinks!" in a desperate attempt to pretend to be an intellectual?

1 Reply

@hightor,

hightor wrote:

Interestingly it was originally recited with what later became the Nazi salute:

During the 1920s, Italian fascists and then the Nazis adopted this salute, creating controversy over the use of Bellamy' Salute in the United States. It was officially replaced by the hand on the heart when the U.S. Congress amended the Flag Code on December 22, 1944.

The Nazi salute was officially ordered by the party in 1926 and called Deutscher Gruß ("German Greeting"), later colloquially Hitlergruß ("Hitler Greeting").
At first it was the greeting of the NSDAP members, which became the official greeting of all Volksgenossen ("comrades among the people"/"racial comrades") after the seizure of power in 1933.

1 Reply

@hightor,

Yes he did. And still does.

0 Replies

@blatham,

Quote:

I am deeply gratified by the increasing number of political writers and news entities who are not shying away from use of a term which is so evidently accurate.

Name one sociopathic thing Trump has done. Keeping in mind you are not a person who understands sociopathy and most likely has no medical background.

1 Reply

@oralloy,

Quote:

Which one of us is always quoting other people and yelling "Look everyone! I think what that person thinks!" in a desperate attempt to pretend to be an intellectual?

You cannot provide evidence of one instance where blatham yelled, "Look everyone! I think what that person thinks!" nor have you any proof of "desperation" or "pretension". You are a liar. A serial liar.

Here, mull this over for a while:

Michel de Montaigne wrote:

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

3 Replies

@hightor,

Quote:

You are a liar. A serial liar.

That should be directed at Blatham. He lies every time he posts on this thread. That is a proven fact.

1 Reply

@hightor,

hightor wrote:

Did you "hate" the USA when Obama was president?

This is a crucial point. That "Make America Great Again" bullsh*t clearly came to refer to Mr. Obama's presidency. I'd ask these clowns "When did America stop being great?" People had no answer, they'd just get angry and abusive. It is clear, though, that for Plump's base, America stopped being great when a n*gger was elected to the presidency. (My apologies to those who find that word distasteful, it is necessary to zero in on Plump's fundamental racism, echoed by his supporters.)

1 Reply

@coldjoint,

Quote:

Name one sociopathic thing Trump has done.

Just one?

"There may be somebody with tomatoes in the audience," Trump warned people at a rally in Iowa last month. "If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell -- I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees."

"Even in elementary school, I was a very assertive, aggressive kid," Trump wrote in the bestseller. "In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye — I punched my music teacher because I didn't think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled. I'm not proud of that but it's clear evidence that even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very forceful way. The difference now is that I like to use my brain instead of my fists."

"When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head you know, the way you put their hand over [their head]," Trump continued, mimicking the motion. "Like, 'Don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody, don’t hit their head.' I said, 'You can take the hand away, OK?'

The sociopath rationalizes, glorifies, and excuses illegal acts of violence. In addition, Trump reflects these sociopathic characteristics:

possessing superficial charm and good intelligence
guilty of untruthfulness and insincerity
shows a lack of remorse and shame
exhibits poor judgment and failure to learn by experience
demonstrates a general poverty in major affective reactions

0 Replies

@coldjoint,

Quote:

That is a proven fact.

Provide evidence of this assertion or you are a liar.

1 Reply

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