Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

@eurocelticyankee,

If Trump ever uses a metaphor, I’ll send you a twenny.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Lash wrote:
Generations of Germans were brainwashed with guilt ...
What do you mean by "guilt"?

From the very beginning, the collective guilt thesis served the purpose of defence and distraction in the discussion about National Socialism in Germany: if people were indignant about the nonsensical construct of collective guilt, there was no need to deal with the historical facts themselves.
This is why the ‘collective guilt thesis’ is repeatedly invoked by right-wing extremist propagandists as a supposed instrument for humiliating the Germans after the Second World War.

Incidentally, today marks the anniversary of the 1938 pogrom night.

1 Reply

@Lash,

Lash wrote:

The fish think they are the experts in what’s in the fishbowl, but it’s never the case.

I'd thaught that the fishbowl theory was used as a teaching method in late-primary and secondary schools as an alternative to traditional large-group discussions.

There must be a different meaning, so okay, then teach me German history.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Certainly, the generation who took active or passive part in the Holocaust deserved shame, but much later generations? I say no. History, yes—shame, no.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Don’t get overwrought!
Here are some happy emoticons. Mr. Green

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@Lash,

Lash wrote:

Certainly, the generation who took active or passive part in the Holocaust deserved shame

Just shame ? Really?

Lash wrote:

History, yes—shame, no.

The Shoah, probably the most horrific crime against humanity in history, originated on German soil.
Accordingly, the German way of dealing with the past, the collective memory, is also shaped by this breach of civilisation.
Throughout Germany, memorials, monuments, stumbling blocks (many more were/are laid yesterday and today) and memorial plaques commemorate the crimes of the Nazi era - they warn against forgetting and that something similar must not happen again.

“Germans are the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital,” was a slogan of the extreme right AfD-party regarding the Holocaust memorial in Berlin.

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@hingehead,

That is very, very funny!

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@Lash,

Quote:

Staring at teleprompter during what’s supposed to be your own conversation vs having your source material in hand if necessary??

Um, you can't conduct a conversation by reading off a teleprompter. Similarly, you can't debate an opponent while wearing a wire.

Quote:

He’s not looking at it.

Yes, it's not a campaign rally! It's not even a full-scale press conference! He's answering questions from reporters! Pretty much off the cuff! Brilliant observation! It was posted as comic relief – close-ups from that particular event showed a few words written in large type with a sharpie and the weird physicality of the man, who's probably wearing heel-lifts. That's all.

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Two must-watch videos here. The first is Heather Cox Richardson and Jon Stewart in conversation HERE and the second is Angelo Carusone speaking on MSNBC on a (or perhaps "the") central factor in how we've ended up where we are in modern US politics/culture HERE. Don't skip either of these, folks. They are both very, very good.

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@blatham,

Good to see you here and thanks for the recommendations – I'll check them out.

I have some reasons for thinking that, as bad as the next four years will be, the "massive political realignment" may be illusory. If I can turn these musings into a coherent analysis I'll share it with you. I might even post it here.

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@glitterbag,

glitterbag wrote:

One correction, you should ask our Viet Nam war hero George.....he knows everything.

Not sure I understand the meaning or intent of this post. I'm not a hero and I don't claim to know everything, though I have (often with some difficulty) learned to recognize the boundaries of what I do know and understand.

I have learned that the bearing of continued animus toward others is often a poisonous thing that can eat away at one's inner self.

I hope you are well and happy. how are things in Annapolis?

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@hightor,

Quote:

I have some reasons for thinking that, as bad as the next four years will be, that the "massive political realignment" may be illusory.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this. It's complicated, isn't it? There are many dynamic factors in play, some quite apparent and others which are undoubtedly mostly hidden from us at this point. But the voting patterns this election are little different from previous elections so there's no reason to think that the majoritarian preference for many liberal policies will suddenly evaporate. What Trump and movement conservative bigwigs are explicitly planning to accomplish with this present opportunity is boilerplate authoritarianism: to further control information dissemination through bullying/crippling independent media sources and by continuing to "flood the zone with ****" (as Steve Bannon has put it); to place highly partisan ideologues across multiple agencies so as to effectively disempower them and bring them under the control of the WH and the GOP; to seek out and remove liberals/liberalism from any points of influence in the nation as explicated by Leonard Leo...

Quote:

The conservative activist who led the crusade to overhaul the US legal system is making a $1bn push to “crush liberal dominance” across corporate America and in the country’s news and entertainment sectors.

In a rare interview, Leonard Leo, the architect of the rightward shift on the Supreme Court under Donald Trump, said his non-profit advocacy group, the Marble Freedom Trust, was ready to confront the private sector in addition to the government.

“We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious, so we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident,” Leo told the Financial Times.

... and many other such classically authoritarian devices.

These folks are ultimately concerned with power and control over others (and, often, accumulation of personal wealth) thus have little genuine concern with the well being and the actual desires of citizens. "Liberal democratic governance doesn't work. It can't work, axiomatically. Therefore, if we take it away from you even through constant deceits or through purposefully divisive messaging, we are really doing you a big favor".

When half of the nation's population doesn't buy into this con, particularly when things get perceptibly less agreeable for citizens, that leaves open a very big door for a shift back to sanity.

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@Walter Hinteler,

I've travelled to Germany several times and enjoyed everything I saw. In many ways I found Germans to be very similar to us, with a wry sense of irony and amusing regional rivalries. ( I recall warnings from a Bavarian friend about the supposed poor quality of the food in Berlin.) My wife's grandfather was a Professor at Humboldt University and had a home in Charlottenburg, west of the Brandenburg gate in an area that is now parkland. Five Haeussler sons left in the early 1920s settling in Chile, Mexico and Puerto Rico and starting now large family groups in each. We've visited them all, and found that, even after two generations, they're all remarkably similar.

My impression is that most European nations are suffering from the influx of (so far) hard-to-assimilate immigrants from the Middle East & Africa. Reactions are underway, taking various forms across the Continent. Initial reactions here to the floods of Germans, in the 1850s, and later Irish, Polish, Jewish, & Italian were similar, however in retrospect a few generations later it all looks rather benign. My parents were from Ireland and I grew up in an ethnic stew in Detroit, where the boundaries of each national neighborhood were known and well defined. We all had epithets for the "others". (I was 12 when I discovered the term "dumb Polack" was really two words, and that they had a similar term for the Irish - by then it didn't matter)

I was surprised to see that Angela Merkel ( a former physicist) so assiduously took in the Global Warming frenzy, shutting down a well-functioning nuclear power system that then provided roughly 40% of the country's need, making them dependent on expensive imported fuels. My impression is that Germany needs inexpensive, abundant energy resources to restore it's now fading economic dominance. The initial capital costs for restoring it will be high, but the operating costs are low and it appears to be the only effective long-term solution. We need to do the same , and I believe the new AI revolution, with its enormous power requirements and widespread public appeal , it will happen.

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

I was surprised to see that Angela Merkel ( a former physicist) so assiduously took in the Global Warming frenzy, shutting down a well-functioning nuclear power system that then provided roughly 40% of the country's need, making them dependent on expensive imported fuels.

The last reactor in Germany was finally shut down in March 2023.
For the moment, it seems that nuclear power is indeed history in Germany.

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Quote:

After Trump’s win, some women are considering the 4B movement

In the hours and days since it became clear that Donald Trump would be re-elected president of the United States,
there’s been a surge of interest in the US for 4B.

Young liberal women across TikTok and Instagram are discussing and sharing information about the South Korean
feminist movement, in which straight women refuse to marry, have children, date or have sex with men.

These women say they are enraged and fed up after a majority of their male counterparts voted for a candidate
who was found liable for sexual abuse and whose appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices led
to the overturning of national abortion rights protections.

In response, they say they’re swearing off men — and they’re encouraging others around the country to join them.

“We have pandered and begged for men’s safety and done all the things that we were supposed to, and they still
hate us,” Ashli Pollard, a 36-year-old in St. Louis, told CNN.

“So if you’re going to hate us, then we’re going to do what we want.”

What is the 4B movement?
4B is a shorthand for the four Korean words bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae and bisekseu, which translate to no marriage,
no childbirth, no dating and no sex with men.

The 4B movement emerged in South Korea around 2015 or 2016, per Ju Hui Judy Han, an assistant professor in gender
studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Mostly popular among young women in their 20s, she described it as
a fringe offshoot of #MeToo and other feminist movements that arose in response to stark gender inequality in the country.

(cnn)

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@Walter Hinteler,

Indeed. And the French very wisely adopted the then fairly new Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) and quickly standardized their design. PWRs have now been now adopted worldwide (except in Russia) and have an unparalleled record for safety, reliability and low operating cost. Both France and the USA have growing needs to quickly replace ageing plants. Germany needs to do this as well.

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@blatham,

I believe one could more accurately describe what is planned as an effort to reduce the size, cost and reach of increasingly authoritarian government bureaucracies, which over the last three decades have grown far beyond their established limits as defined by the Congressional legislation that established them and other laws adding to these limits. Contrary to what you have implied, the result of these planned actions will be increased individual freedom, and more direct involvement of the Democratically elected representatives in our government -- all as specified in our Constitution.
This and the recent Supreme Court decision removing the so-called Chevron precedent which called for a degree of deference for the actions of these bureaucracies will finally restore the accountability of these organizations to the truly Democratic institutions that created them.

The recent restrictions on freedom of speech and information have all been initiated by the Biden Administration and its supporters with their campaign against "misinformation" - a thinly disguised attack on our Constitutional freedom of speech which establishes no a priori test on accuracy.
What pray tell is a "bullying/crippling media source?? It smells like a euphemism intended for Fox news (though there are no material differences between its methods and those of CNN, MSNBC or the New York Times).

The supreme Irony in all of this is that it has long been the Left wing in contemporary American politics which in fact persistently seeks an authoritarian state and restrictions on our freedom of expression .... all while now loudly accusing Trump and his supporters of doing the same !!

Afterthought - there may be some of the same gong on now in Canada, with what appear to be actions against the Liberal/Trudeau government there.

1 Reply

@blatham,

blatham wrote:

These folks are ultimately concerned with power and control over others (and, often, accumulation of personal wealth) thus have little genuine concern with the well being and the actual desires of citizens.

This appears to be a remarkably accurate description of the reality of the Biden Administration. The oddly named "inflation Reduction Act" of 2022 gave President Biden an enormous trillion dollar slush fund which he could with very few constraints on almost anything he wished, while adding to the national debt.. The surge in government spending that quickly followed ended a twenty plus year period of low inflation (less than 2% annually) and within five months inflation was approaching a 9%/year peak.

The "Biden Brand", as son Hunter's associates called it, was the source of millions in payoffs from Russia China and Ukraine that flowed through Hunter's Burisma Board salary, various Family capital investment Firms and a maze of LLCs to the pockets of Biden's brother and son, and, of course "the Big Guy" himself. I don't know of any other time in the history of our country in which such flagrant corruption and payoffs occurred, and with so little attention from a mainstream media so committed to covering up the obvious and flagrant corruption before it.

The recent election appears to have started some realignments in the American electorate which may yield lasting changes.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

Contrary to what you have implied, the result of these planned actions will be increased individual freedom, and more direct involvement of the Democratically elected representatives in our government -- all as specified in our Constitution.

"Increased individual freedom" – this nostrum sounds so sunny while actually being a prescription for ceding more power to the wealthy, who will use their power to limit the ability of government to respond to inequalities caused by increased economic concentration of power in the hands of the owning class.

Quote:

The recent restrictions on freedom of speech and information have all been initiated by the Biden Administration and its supporters with their campaign against "misinformation" - a thinly disguised attack on our Constitutional freedom of speech which establishes no a priori test on accuracy

What "recent restrictions on freedom of speech and information" are you referring to? Do you not see the danger posed by deliberate misinformation posted on digital platforms? This isn't the late 18th Century. Do you not accept that social media companies have the right to moderate content as they see fit? As is done on this very platform?

Quote:

The supreme Irony in all of this is that it has long been the Left wing in contemporary American politics which in fact persistently seeks an authoritarian state and restrictions on our freedom of expression...

Can you illustrate what you mean? What "Left wing" are you talking about? I don't recall any mainstream candidates campaigning on these issues.

Quote:

The oddly named "inflation Reduction Act" of 2022 gave President Biden an enormous trillion dollar slush fund which he could with very few constraints on almost anything he wished, while adding to the national debt.

A total misrepresentation of the IRA (other than the dig at the name of the bill Smile

) which completely ignores the importance of government investment in our country's infrastructure, developing industrial policy, and promoting new technology. And, by the way, thanks to the actions of the independent Federal Reserve, inflation has come down without the country suffering a recession.

Quote:

The surge in government spending that quickly followed ended a twenty plus year period of low inflation (less than 2% annually) and within five months inflation was approaching a 9%/year peak.

No mention of the worldwide effects of Covid on the international economy.

Quote:

The "Biden Brand", as son Hunter's associates called it, was the source of millions in payoffs from Russia China and Ukraine that flowed through Hunter's Burisma Board salary, various Family capital investment Firms and a maze of LLCs to the pockets of Biden's brother and son, and, of course "the Big Guy" himself.

This was never confirmed. The case fell apart in the hapless attempt to impeach Biden.

Quote:

The recent election appears to have started some realignments in the American electorate which may yield lasting changes.

This remains to be seen.

1 Reply

@Region Philbis,

Mental health services must be made affordable for the US—in the meantime, the media should be held financially accountable for the mass psychosis they’ve whipped up.

1 Reply

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