Another difference between Stalin and Trump is no-one ever shat themselves waiting to meet Trump
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Consensus reality: that used to be a thing, wasn’t it?
It’s as if the the ideological spectrum has - for decades now had a 49% minority that’s been saying democracy is ineffective and should be scrapped. And the 51% majority is so committed to fairness and democracy that they’ve gone along with tolerating this madness. And when those nutters gain just enough power to barely tip the balance, then, by golly, democracy means allowing them to demolish it all.
It’s such a shallow, vapid interpretation of “democracy” that a deeper, more cynical explanation is called for.
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There’s already a word for that. It’s called gaslighting.
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On reconsideration, maybe when it’s him we can call it Asslighting?
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How do we know the clock wasn’t photoshopped into the state department picture to throw everyone off?!?
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I humbly suggest reserving that term for acts committed by trusted individuals rather than applying it generally to the mole farm of bullshit emerging from institutions, celebrities, algorithms and apricot shitgibbons.
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Maybe Trump is converting the room into a casino.
Also, you can’t imagine Trump phoning up Mikhail Bulgakov for a literary discussion.
And there are generals in the WH whose job seems to be to be Trump’s keepers, while Stalin got rid of the generals. From that point of view, a definite win for the US.
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Clock-blocked.
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I imagine it was just easier to smudge out the whole area than to carefully smudge out around the fire alarm.
The goal of the photoshop job wasn’t to produce a perfect photo without a trace of alteration. The goal was to prevent the photo from containing information giving away the exact time and a strong hint at the place of the meeting. If a Taliban intelligence operative notices the photo is photoshopped, it tells him nothing. If he notices a clock on the wall displaying the exact time of the photo in local time and “Zulu time” (US military jargon for Universal Coordinated Time), he now knows that the meeting wasn’t in Kabul but was almost certainly at a US military facility, and that’s useful information if he wants to attack the Afghan president in the future.
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There is the other reason why both the Afghani and American governments would want to give the impression that the meeting was in Kabul(and it’s closely related to the reason why it wasn’t):
Pretending that the US operation in the area was even vaguely successful, or that the local totally-not-puppet government isn’t hapless, requires politely ignoring the fact that the security situation is “as long as you stay inside the walls you probably won’t catch more than a mortar attack”.
It’s not like embassy architecture is generally warm and inviting; but the fact that safety here dictates meeting in a fortress an hour and a half outside of town…reflects poorly… on the security situation, which is embarrassing for everyone involved.
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I believe it. And frankly, whatever the reason it’s clear that the U.S. Embassy staff had discussed this enough to play along, but the State Dept media office didn’t get the message, or at least didn’t consider the implication.
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The embassy staff were clearly in on the message; but either felt like keeping it simple; or hew to the theory(quite possibly popular among diplomats) that calculated selective disclosure is way classier than plain lying. They just went with a tight crop for their press release.
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That’s not airbrushing; Stalin just pushed him in to the river. What a kidder.
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Am I the only one who read the details? It was the Afghan government that photoshopped the photo and released the statement implying that Tillerson went to visit Ghani and not the other way around. This has nothing to do with Trump.
It would seem to make more sense to just blur the time displayed.
Keep in mind that the Trumpists are only one-third of the country. They never got anywhere near 50% support from the population.
More embarrassing for the Afghans because it shows that the meeting wasn’t in their building.
Nah the bottle’s empty and there’s nothing left.
