Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 09:41 on 16 April 2018
Here. Go read. And remember, Savage is a sex columnist. He knows all about kinks and how they work.
No, we don’t know for certain that the pee tape is real. But virtually all available evidence is consistent with it being real.
Published at 07:37 on 15 April 2018
The Washington Post is wrong when they counsel supporting the Pompeo nomination. They might think they’re being bipartisan, but they’re actually overlooking opportunities for productive bipartisanship.
Simply, they’re failing to think tactically, possibly because they misunderstand what motivates a decent chunk of Trump’s base. Most likely this is because they really are affluent coastal elitists who really don’t understand what they call “flyover states.”
Non-interventionism has long been part of the “America First” rhetoric that Trump spews for political gain. Consider how Rand Paul has vowed to filibuster the Pompeo and Haspel nominations.
Or look at cartoonist Ben Garrison. He’s a total Trump worshiper. Except that recently, he’s been having a few second thoughts about Trump. He doesn’t like John Bolton at all, and he’s not a big fan of bombing Syria, either.
In general, there’s been no shortage of criticism of Trump for bombing Syria coming from various places on the political right.
I’ve personally run into more than one Trumper online who is a non-interventionist. The mess that the Iraq War turned out to be served to increase the number of that crowd on the political right; this is one of the secrets to why Trump prevailed. And this time, the war hawks are even starting to make some anti-Trump neocons like George Will uneasy.
Thus, blocking Pompeo and Haspel seems likely to be a good wedge issue with which to help fracture Trump’s base. It’s not just the morally correct thing to do; it’s tactically shrewd realpolitik as well.
Published at 20:20 on 13 April 2018
Published at 10:38 on 13 April 2018
Nine years ago, the “Tarnac Nine” were a subject of frequent right-wing hyperventilation, as if society was on the verge of being plunged into chaos by a violent left-anarchist insurrection. Now, they’ve been mostly exonerated; only a few minor charges have survived judicial scrutiny. Of the charges that survived scutiny, only two offenses, committed by only one of the Nine, were judged serious enough to merit any punishment.
Contrary to the right-wing fear-mongerers, there simply was no terrorist plot. And by this time nearly everyone has forgotten about the (mostly forgettable) work the Nine were associated with.
But it took nine years to fully deal with the charges. Nine years of having lives seriously disrupted, motivated by nothing more than the Establishment fearing those who are fearless to question authority and hierarchy.
Published at 10:59 on 12 April 2018
First, Trump probably will can Mueller. It would be entirely in character for him to do so, after all:
So, it’s all but inevitable. Then what? That’s the big question.
First, the Republicans are much more captive to the White House than they were in the Nixon years. Those were a far more bipartisan time than ours, as evidenced by Nixon’s landslide victories; such victories would not have been possible without a lot of Democrats crossing party lines to vote for Nixon. So that makes an impeachment threat much less plausible than it was for Nixon.
But it’s not quite so simple. It’s looking more and more like there’s a so-called “blue wave” coming. Sooner or later, the rats will start deserting the sinking ship of Trumpism, preferring to save their own careers over the now-lost cause of saving their party’s majority. But it may take until they lose badly this November for that to happen.
Moreover, if the Democrats take just the House of Representatives, impeachment still becomes much more likely. The House will be able to launch its own investigation, which will be run entirely by the legislative branch, and thus be entirely outside the control of the executive one. They’ll be able to dig up dirt on Trump then make it public in order to shame the Senate into convicting the president and removing him from office.
Of course, this is still the same Democratic Party that let Bush basically get away with the Iraq War we’re talking about, so it must be kept in mind that there’s no guarantee of anything happening unless the Democrats are forced by pressure from below to make things happen. That makes widespread protest and disruption of business as usual when the inevitable occurs a necessity.
Published at 08:00 on 6 April 2018
Actually, there’s a silver lining to this dark cloud. It’s going to hurt the farmers and the capitalists, and both groups tended to lean towards Trump in the election. Thus, it’s going to hurt Trump’s base of support.
But we’re only beginning to enter the woods on this one, and this case the woods is more like a jungle full of vipers ready to strike and jaguars ready to pounce. The worse the economy gets, the more likely the regime is to start a war in order to distract from it, and a war with North Korea in particular could easily escalate into a nuclear conflict with China.
Much of it depends when the Republicans in Congress start deciding they need to pay more attention to the wishes of their Wall Street paymasters than the adult toddler in the Oval Office, and consequently act to seriously rein in or remove Trump.
Published at 08:42 on 5 April 2018
I don’t do this often, but this article raises some points I feel compelled to comment on.
After for decades supporting trade policies that gave the middle finger to the working class, increasing numbers of the working class decided to give a middle finger to the Democrats:
Union leaders in Ohio and elsewhere watched in frustration during the 2016 election as significant portions of their workforce ignored union endorsements of Democrat Hillary Clinton and voted for Trump instead. Jack Hefner, president of United Steelworkers Local 2 in Akron, estimated around a third of his membership voted for Trump despite the leadership’s support for Clinton.
“Labor’s been beating the drum that these trade deals are bad, so here comes Trump saying the same thing, which made it really hard for us,” Hefner said. “He stole our playbook.”
Given how close the election was, the conclusion is therefore even more damning: The Democrats’ rightward tilt probably cost them the election.
That’s because Trump overall is a disaster. He has no real concept of empathy, no ability to put himself in another’s shoes. It’s all about his ego, all the time.
That makes him highly likely to do things, particularly delicate ones, in ways that merely serve to needlessly provoke and inflame others. Things like rapid changes in trade policies that will serve to provoke harmful trade wars.
None of the above is to say that Free Trade has been good for society overall. It clearly has not. The rich have gotten richer, while those on the bottom have seen their incomes stagnate or backslide. This has been the case during administrations run by both parties.
A retreat from free trade was needed, but not the one that Trump is giving us. The most likely outcome of what we’re getting is a trade war that will do far more harm than good.
Trade wars are a bad thing and very easy to lose. In fact, the most common outcome of a trade war is for all sides to end up worse off than if there had been no trade war at all.
Published at 08:07 on 5 April 2018
It’s become increasingly obvious that he did willingly choose to collaborate with the Trump campaign, despite Trump’s well-known fascistic, authoritarian tendencies (which even other Republicans were commenting on during the campaign).
Doubtless, this decision was part of a way to retaliate against Hillary Clinton for her role in an administration that persecuted him, but that’s just a juvenile temper tantrum. I don’t like Hillary much either, but Trump was clearly the worse of the two choices.
After all, what did Assange’s efforts get him? A superpower led by its most corrupt, least transparent regime ever, one threatening to start wars in various spots worldwide, one of which could easily escalate into a nuclear conflict between China and the USA. That’s in addition to a tremendous impediment to progress on global warming.
Assange has shown he was willing to gamble the world’s future for the sake of his petty personal feud with Hillary Clinton. Fuck you very much, Julian.
Published at 13:23 on 3 April 2018
Exhibit A is Honduras, where then Secretary of State Killary Clinton endorsed a coup that installed an regime with a horrible human rights record, and Donald Adolph Bone Spurs Trump now stigmitizes the inevitable refugees from.
Published at 11:58 on 1 April 2018
In war, it tends to be best to worry more about defeating the enemy more than it is to worry about being nice to the enemy in order to make him like you.
In politics, therefore, “If they go low, we go high” is not always the best policy. What is the best policy depends on the particulars of the situation. What exactly do “going low” and “going high” mean? What are the chances of victory with each strategy? Are there any principles which must be compromised to follow either? If so, how important are those principles? And so on.
What made me think of this is the case against gerrymandering that is currently in the Supreme Court. The chance of an anti-gerrymandering verdict has been increased because it’s not just Republicans doing dirt to Democrats; in Maryland, the Democrats are quite reasonably being accused of doing the converse.
Nobody much likes to admit it, but the show that Supreme Court justices put on about adhering to higher principles rather than just going for what their gut wants is quite often just a show. Witness how often conservative justices forget about states’ rights the minute they are asked to rule against a state doing something they consider unacceptably too far to the left.
If it were just red states doing gerrymandering to the disadvantage of Democrats, it would be much more likely that the conservative justices would find some pretext for ruling in favor of a state’s right to gerrymander. Instead, Maryland has helped to give them motive to find some pretext for ruling the opposite way.