And It’s No. 2

Published at 08:23 on 12 June 2018

My prediction was spot-on. As if that’s a huge accomplishment or anything. This was so easy to see.

Something, but effectively nothing. Some sort of agreement that leaves all the difficult issues to be hashed out at some unspecified future date, coupled with many meaningless glad words about a new era.

Everything in this document has been in other agreements that North Korea has made in the past. None of those other agreements ended up making substantive changes to North Korea’s policies, so why should this one?

The only substantive new thing is that for the first time a US president met the North Korean dictator in person and fawned over him with disgusting (and false) rhetoric. And he did so in the immediate wake of repeatedly insulting the prime minister of Canada.

Most Likely Summit Outcomes

Published at 20:27 on 11 June 2018

Listed in no particular order:

  1. Nothing at all. One of the two crazy, unstable leaders throws a tantrum and walks out, or quickly reneges on an agreement he just signed.
  2. Something, but effectively nothing. Some sort of agreement that leaves all the difficult issues to be hashed out at some unspecified future date, coupled with many meaningless glad words about a new era.

What’s not going to happen? North Korea agreeing to give up its nukes and welcome US inspectors inside to verify it’s keeping good on its promise.

Tom Nichols Just Nailed It

Published at 08:08 on 11 June 2018

In this Twitter thread. It’s pointless to try to argue policy with Trumpist true believers so long as they remain true believers.

Instead, I would suggest focusing on reaching out to the unmotivated who sat by and allowed Trump to take power because they didn’t care enough about either side. Then there’s those who were simply too disgusted by both sides to vote for either. On that latter subset of voters: in a world where, as Marx observed, “the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them,” why wouldn’t they be?

Also, focus on the disenchanted; some (not all, you can not count on it being all or even most) Trump voters will, after enough pain, start to question their decision and can be peeled off from his base. We’re already starting to see that with some capitalists and farmers getting queasy about the trade wars Trump is starting.

But there’s going to be true believers that stay true believers. Heck, there’s still Hitler and Stalin fans out there, who believe their idols have been massively unfairly treated by the opinions of a misinformed public. Trying to convert such people with facts and logic is mostly a wasted effort.

Nixon, Reagan, Bush the Younger, Trump: A Continuum

Published at 11:20 on 10 June 2018

From the standpoint of many Never Trump conservatives it’s politically incorrect to point this out, but there really is not an quantum gap between Trump and the Republican Party from the era of Nixon onwards.

It’s been a party built on lies and bigotry, from Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to Reagan’s lies about welfare queens driving Cadillacs (no evidence of such a person existed), to Bush the Younger’s lies about Iraq and his acolytes’ expressions of love for myth and contempt for truth, and their dislike for the rule of law.

Trump is merely more crude and blatant (and thus, in a sense, more fundamentally honest) about his fascistic principles; that’s all. For more details, see this Twitter thread.

Barney Frank, Bankster

Published at 07:54 on 25 May 2018

Barney Frank’s claims that Trump is not gutting the regulations that were passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis should be taken with not just a grain but a large block of salt, given that he now sits on the board of a bank poised to profit from the deregulation (no doubt at taxpayer expense when the next crisis rolls around).

And the Dodd-Frank regulations themselves were weak in the first place; they failed to fully replace the Glass-Steagall Act (which itself was repealed with no small amount of Democratic Party complicity).

It’s not just the Republicans that are at fault; the Democrats are the party of banksters and capitalism, too.

The Embassy Move is Not a Favor for Israel

Published at 08:29 on 14 May 2018

It is a favor for domestic Christian fundamentalists (a core part of Trump’s base), who believe that:

  • The Old Testament of the Bible is a title deed that allows the Zionists to occupy and claim land by force, and
  • Israel needs to occupy that land (all of it, from the river to the sea) in order to fulfill the prophecies in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation.

That it is a favor for Christian fundamentalists (and not Zionists) perfectly explains why this pastor was invited to speak at the embassy’s opening.

Will the Democrats Pay Attention to This Article in the Post?

Published at 06:49 on 11 May 2018

The Washington Post had a good article that delved into the politics of places in the rural Midwest that typically vote Democrat but which didn’t in the last election. Two quotes stuck out to me.

Quote No. 1:

Shaynan Holen, who lives in nearby Vernon County, where a similar pattern had occurred, blamed Clinton’s defeat on an intraparty split among Democrats, caused by the bitter primary contest with Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.). “Once Bernie was eliminated, they abandoned Hillary,” she said, referring to Sanders’s supporters. She added: “They came right out and said, ‘I’m voting Republican.’ ”

First, the attitude that Hillary was entitled to the votes of anyone who voted for Sanders. I may sympathize with the attitude that it was stupid to vote for such an obvious fraud as Trump, but nobody is entitled to anyone’s vote. Votes must be earned. (And if you think that quote shows a serious attitude of entitlement to votes, wait until you read some of the comments about it.)

Hillary quite simply failed to do enough to earn enough votes in those places, a failure that is underscored all the more by how those same places typically vote for the Democrat. Heck, Hillary’s campaign wrote many of those states off and decided not to even bother campaigning in them.

Second, it’s just an anecdote, but it shows once again that Sanders was almost certainly the more viable of the two candidates.

Quote No. 2:

Smicker recalled that many of those he encountered were mad, fed up with the state of things. “This is my observation, it is not necessarily my belief,” he said as he described their motivations. “Number one, they said minority political people have been well taken care of. Small business and working people have been identified as the source of income to take care of those people.”

This of course has prompted plenty of howls of outrage about the racism of Trump voters in the comments section. And yes, it is a racist sentiment. Minorities do not have it easy. Whites are privileged.

But, and this is critically important, there is still a grain of truth in the above sentiment. Whites are still privileged, but not as much as before. And many working-class whites have slipped down the economic ladder in recent decades. By contrast, identity politics has made things get gradually better for minorities. Bitter losers helped Trump win.

The problem isn’t so much the presence of identity politics as the absence of class politics in the Democratic Party. This has caused the white working class to be in the unique position of having grown collectively worse off over the past few decades. Of course they’re upset; who wouldn’t be?

And note that while, to reiterate, it is a racist sentiment to say that minorities are privileged, many of these same racist white people also voted for Obama… twice! It is simultaneously possible to be a racist while also not being an incorrigible racist, and still having a better side that it is possible to appeal to.

Absent any Democratic finalist that could appeal to those workers’ better sides, Trump alone was trying to appeal to them, to their worse sides.

Racism is an ugly thing, but it exists and must be dealt with. Candidates have to win in the world that actually exists, not in some hypothetical ideal world that we might wish existed. Throwing tantrums about how unfair it is that Trump can appeal to racism won’t help the Democrats win one little bit. Figuring out how to appeal to voters’ better sides with a class-based message can.