President Trump: Making America Great Again...

[frank ryan]

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bend the knee

Tyrant

[falafel]

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trum...kimmel-2132463

Donald Trump Says Late Night Shows Aren't Allowed to Mock Him

"All they do is hit Trump," he told reporters on Air Force One Thursday on the return trip from a state visit to the U.K. "They're licensed. They're not allowed to do that."

The current government is doing something—unprecedented and un American.

My hope is that Trump accelerates these types of comments and actions, not retard them. He lives in a perfect echo chamber of his own design. No one will caution him and he will drive the train right into the canyon. We are a year away from the mid-terms and look how brazen he is behaving. In hasn't even been a year since he took office. In another year, if he keeps this pace and ABC, CBS, and NBC have been buried for their "un-American" reporting of Trump's bad acts, there is no way the gerrymandered Texas map will stop the people from giving Trump the middle finger. He is now posting fake approval polls showing that "most people" approve of his work.

The danger in the right's plan to disassemble the government is that is moves too quickly or too slowly. Trump knows that he just needs to survive the mid-terms and keep the house and senate. Then he's golden. But he also knows he's on a clock and that he needs to make as much "progress" towards the goal as possible, because time is of the essence. Its a like a souffle. If he goes to fast, the whole thing collapses. If he takes too long, the whole thing is GROSS! Unfortunately for Trump, no one in his inner circle (or any layer) is going to tell him the souffle is undercooked.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Dude, these kind of false equivalences are below you!

Yes. Yes, they are.

[Northwestcoug]

trump adding 100k fee to h1b. cool the president can just add fees whenever

I thought it was a one-time fee, which is bad enough. But it's annually! That is insane.

[Jeff Lebowski]

This is not some new or particularly controversial terminology.

This "not particularly controversial" debate has been going on for many years now. From an article in the Atlantic from 2017:

https://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...olence/533970/

The title and tag line:

Why It's a Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence

A claim increasingly heard on campus will make them more anxious and more willing to justify physical harm

And here we are 8 years later with an assassination on a college campus.

some excerpts:

Of all the ideas percolating on college campuses these days, the most dangerous one might be that speech is sometimes violence. We’re not talking about verbal threats of violence, which are used to coerce and intimidate, and which are illegal and not protected by the First Amendment. We’re talking about speech that is deemed by members of an identity group to be critical of the group, or speech that is otherwise upsetting to members of the group. This is the kind of speech that many students today refer to as a form of violence.

Perhaps they are referring to the same study cited by tooblue:

Recently, the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, a highly respected emotion researcher at Northeastern University, published an essay in The New York Times titled, “When is speech violence?” She offered support from neuroscience and health-psychology research for students who want to use the word “violence” in this expansive way. The essay made two points that we think are valid and important, but it drew two inferences from those points that we think are invalid.

First valid point: Chronic stress can cause physical damage. Feldman Barrett cited research on the ways that chronic (not short-term) stressors “can make you sick, alter your brain—even kill neurons—and shorten your life.” The research here is indeed clear.

First invalid inference: Feldman Barrett used these empirical findings to advance a syllogism: “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.” It is logically true that if A can cause B and B can cause C, then A can cause C. But following this logic, the resulting inference should be merely that words can cause physical harm, not that words are violence. If you’re not convinced, just re-run the syllogism starting with “gossiping about a rival,” for example, or “giving one’s students a lot of homework.” Both practices can cause prolonged stress to others, but that doesn’t turn them into forms of violence.

i.e., same kind of point I made above.

Another article by Greg Lukianoff. This was published after the Trump assassination attempt but before the Charlie Kirk murder.

https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/w...lence-argument

I love this part:

The notion that speech is violence fails to recognize the essential role of provocative speech and art, the revelation of harsh truth in science, and the reality of messy and distorted psychological states people can genuinely find themselves in. Most importantly, however, it is an affront to the foundation of our democracy and modern civilization. The bright line between action and speech is one of the best things humankind has ever devised, and it has been an engine for peace, progress, artistic achievement, and innovation for centuries. Without that line, representative government — not to mention the freedom to be our authentic selves without fear — is impossible.

So what have we learned today? Well, for the 50,000th time: Cancel Culture is real and is not going away unless we do something about it. Also, the phenomenon comes from both sides of the political spectrum, and people tend to care about it only when it's directed at their own side (a crucial part of what Rikki and I call hypocrisy projection).

But most importantly, I want people to understand this takeaway: Speech is not violence, and saying so is an insult to anyone who's experienced actual violence. The phrase, “Your words are violence!” itself is little more than a rhetorical device, useful in politically homogeneous settings. It functions as a luxury belief, something that helps the advocate gain esteem for his or her passion in certain circles, but would lead to an inevitable spiral of violence if it were generally believed.

The great irony here is that you can't support the notion that speech = violence and at the same time criticize the FCC for shutting down Kimmel or criticize Trump for wanting to shut everyone else down for criticizing him. Anyone who truly believes in free speech will call out this speech=violence for the dangerous bullshit it is.

Thank you for coming to my Friday night Ted Talk.

[frank ryan]

This "not particularly controversial" debate has been going on for many years now. From an article in the Atlantic from 2017:

https://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...olence/533970/

The title and tag line:



And here we are 8 years later with an assassination on a college campus.

some excerpts:



Perhaps they are referring to the same study cited by tooblue:



i.e., same kind of point I made above.

Another article by Greg Lukianoff. This was published after the Trump assassination attempt but before the Charlie Kirk murder.

https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/w...lence-argument

I love this part:





The great irony here is that you can't support the notion that speech = violence and at the same time criticize the FCC for shutting down Kimmel or criticize Trump for wanting to shut everyone else down for criticizing him. Anyone who truly believes in free speech will call out this speech=violence for the dangerous bullshit it is.

Thank you for coming to my Friday night Ted Talk.

JL, I am not asserting words actually assault people, when people use the term "violent words," they do not mean words will punch you. I feel like I'm being misunderstood by you. The seriousness of emotional abuse is not controversial. I don't know why you are pushing back that notion.

That's a pretty loaded statement.

[Northwestcoug]

If that is the calculus, they are a very naive bunch. Trump is just testing the waters with Colbert and Kimmel. If it goes well (the media continues to roll over), then expect more pressure and extortion. He's already telegraphing next moves. They ignore him at their own (and our own) risk.

Nick Catoggio says something similarly, that this was and is always the plan:

To believe that Trump and Carr made a strategic mistake by not letting a grassroots backlash against Kimmel develop organically, you need to believe that the president wants American institutions to fear right-wing cultural power.

He doesn’t. He wants them to fear his power.

It would have done nothing for Trump personally if spontaneous public outrage had driven Kimmel’s show off the air. He wants cultural stakeholders to answer to him and his government—not Republican consumers—for their crimes against MAGA. And he wants the right itself to warm up to that idea by getting comfortable with the prospect of state censorship. They’ve been whining about left-wing media bias for generations. It’s time to let their hero do something about it.

[tooblue]

JL, I am not asserting words actually assault people, when people use the term "violent words," they do not mean words will punch you. I feel like I'm being misunderstood by you. The seriousness of emotional abuse is not controversial. I don't know why you are pushing back that notion.

That's a pretty loaded statement.

A TED talk appeal to authority, commentators words in place of verifiable research, hyperbole in place of sincere efforts to understand is buttressed by a reprehensibly flippant attitude on the impact words can have in situations where emotional abuse has occurred.

It's unfortunate.

Edit: don't ignore the straw man argument that one can't truly believe in free speech unless they believe as he believes.

[USUC]

Trump knows that he just needs to survive the mid-terms and keep the house and senate. Then he's golden. But he also knows he's on a clock and that he needs to make as much "progress" towards the goal as possible, because time is of the essence.

I think this may be the thought process for some of Trump's inner circle, but Trump is permanently stuck in a bubble of narcissism and has extreme difficulty with strategic long term planning. And he overrides the more strategic of his advisors.

The House will undoubtedly go to the Dems, the senate will be close as always.

[Maximus]

I thought it was a one-time fee, which is bad enough. But it's annually! That is insane.

And if you're on a business trip if you aren't back by midnight 100k for this year

[Northwestcoug]

If it weren't so ominous, his pathetic need to broadcast every action as a power move would be funny. Here he is, trying to oust the AG whom he picked because he couldn't dredge up crimes to prosecute:

When asked if he would fire Mr. Siebert, Mr. Trump responded, “Yeah, I want him out.”

Ms. James, he told reporters, was “very guilty of something.”

Mr. Trump later disputed that Mr. Siebert had resigned, saying in a late-night social media post, “He didn’t quit, I fired him!”

When Pam Bondi is the voice of reason in a cabinet, you know it's serious:

Attorney General Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who runs the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department, had privately defended Mr. Siebert against officials, including William J. Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who had urged that he be fired and replaced with a prosecutor who would push the cases forward, according to a senior law enforcement official.

Mr. Pulte’s power far outstrips his role as the head of an obscure housing agency. He has gained Mr. Trump’s favor by pushing mortgage fraud allegations against perceived adversaries of the White House, including Ms. James; a Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook; and Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California.

Sounds like Pulte is another Loomer for Trump.

It didn't seem like Trump's first term went off the rails crazy until COVID. Here we are, not even one year in and there is no one in his orbit that can push back on his worst impulses.

[frank ryan]

I think this may be the thought process for some of Trump's inner circle, but Trump is permanently stuck in a bubble of narcissism and has extreme difficulty with strategic long term planning. And he overrides the more strategic of his advisors.

The House will undoubtedly go to the Dems, the senate will be close as always.

I think his advisors are far more awful than the first term.

He picked people off of Fox News to work for him. I worry he is going to try and pull shit during the elections. It won't go smoothly

[frank ryan]

If it weren't so ominous, his pathetic need to broadcast every action as a power move would be funny. Here he is, trying to oust the AG whom he picked because he couldn't dredge up crimes to prosecute:



When Pam Bondi is the voice of reason in a cabinet, you know it's serious:



Sounds like Pulte is another Loomer for Trump.

It didn't seem like Trump's first term went off the rails crazy until COVID. Here we are, not even one year in and there is no one in his orbit that can push back on his worst impulses.

Vance is far more slimey than Pence.

He is surrounded by terrible people. I just read Utah has had more measles cases this year than in the past 25 years combined. Thanks RFK!

[LVAllen]

Open Seas Murder Event #4.

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[frank ryan]

Open Seas Murder Event #4.

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Where are all the conservatives who kvetched about Obama's drone strikes?