Talking about clusterfucks, I don’t think the Australian exceptionalism is much different from the US-american exceptionalism. And Abbott, while replaced, has left a legacy which is as toxic as Trump’s unilateralism will quite probably proof to be.
Not even in the same ballpark.
Abbot was a vicious idiot who destroyed Australia’s climate policy (amongst many other sins). Trump is a deluded fascist in control of a military and surveillance apparatus that would make Hitler green with envy.
Entirely different order of destructive magnitude.
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I wish you would stop namedropping Nazis and (quasi-)Communists. It plays into the hands of Trump and colleagues.
I think I prefer her British name.
Comical Kelly.
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We should have stopped listening to Trump years ago too and now look where we are!
If you would not have invoked the Nazi comparison, we could probably discuss if the effect of Abbott’s Australian Clause policy has had on international treaties. Their legitimacy has been eroding, and it seems like we now reached a point where the US and the UK are playing the short game rather than the long one. Which, btw of “special relationship” to the UK, might very well affect Australia very quickly and profoundly.
“Ballparks” between Abbott and Trump are not my concern.
Polarisation, however, is. That includes “ballparks” between the regime headed by a dictator seizing total political power which attempted to kill 11 million people on the basis of racial ideology, and the current US administration. Headed by demagogue of truly epic proportions, I agree. But not yet a dictator. (And FFS, don’t let it happen that he becomes one. And while we’re at it, what the heck is happening in Turkey?)
I am still figuring out how we got here, and where the FUCK is the way out. But as of recent, I think that calling “Hitler!” every now and then might not help, at all.
I think there might be some online, but some already have and are taking action (the Woman’s march), so there’s that. And his nose-holding supporters can be alienated, but that doesn’t mean they are our allies. To really get them to react and align with the left, something obvious and big needs to happen. Remember, it was his own party which cornered Nixon, and I think that the GOP is far more partisan now than back then. So, getting them on board is a complicated dance that will include Trump not doing what they want. So far, he’s been pretty friendly with their agenda.
The senate has to do that, and unless something major happens, I don’t think they will over this. There is a lawsuit, though. I think we need to flip the senate in 2018 or get them to realize how dangerous he is for THEIR interests.
Agreed. The proof needs to be iron-clad, though.
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I understand where you are coming from, and it doesn’t really matter that I was being jocular because someone could easily read me as dead serious. The whole lying about what the weather was to support a favoured-by-god-narrative thing had my head spinning at the time.
Comparing Trump to historical leaders of murderous states doesn’t really help anything because people tend to mentally categorize those leaders as unredeemably evil, so the comparison doesn’t mean anything other than, “Trump is also unredeemably evil.” The fact that there might be real parallels between Trump and some dictator doesn’t register and there is no discussion of what those parallels mean or how important they are.
The real question isn’t whether Trump is Hitler or like Kim, it’s whether 70 years from now people will be attacking one another’s candidates by saying they are Trump.
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Even if this is true (or perhaps close to an “alternative fact”), this thread is not the place to discuss it.
Although I appreciate @Wanderfound 's response.
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aaaand that is stuck in my brain.
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The real question isn’t whether Trump is Hitler or like Kim, it’s whether 70 years from now people will be attacking one another’s candidates by saying they are Trump.
Oh. Dear gods. This is going to preoccupy my brain for days now. Holy crap.
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This seems like a job for sweeping the crowd with a camera and applying some facial recognition to ferret out who these people are and see how many of these events they show up at.
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What if water wasn’t wet?
What if radiation is actually good for you?
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Well said.
I wish I knew how to prevent that, given that it seems Senate, Congress, and Supreme Court are not likely to fundamentally oppose the Trump administration.
Coming back to the original idea of the thread: currently, The Media™ seems to be more important than during the last decades to do the “checks” thing, as “balances” seems quite out of balance. Personally, I would think that outlets who do interview Conway et al. will need an extra room full of seasoned journalists to be able to mitigate.
The narrative part one is that the so-called liberals resorted to The Daily Show, Colbert Report (et al.) already during the last how many years? to cope, and sometimes as important source of news. Because somehow, news without the satirical comment were both hard to stand, and also not to be trusted.
Part two is that “alternative truths”, social media and Jokes Won the Election* (see the New Yorker piece now also linked on BB), also because The Media™ was not to be trusted, and are hard to understand.
The upcoming part of the narrative is that we need to find a way to educate ourselves in political discourse (longer than 140 characters), and finding acceptable consensus. The aim is to rebuild trust in a political system: representative democracy.
The alternative is bleak, and history teaches us that it is no acceptable alternative.
- (I deliberately did not mention Russia here, because The Media™, The Services™ and The Cyber™ cannot be trusted. If you catch my drift… I might stop sliding towards an abyss of cynicism.)
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The moderate right. The party has come a long way since Andrew Jackson.
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I can only assume it wasn’t an Andy Borowitz piece.
To quote, from the piece of Emily Nussbaum:
The situation had begun to resemble an old story from the original fake-news site, the Onion: “Ironic Porn Purchase Leads to Unironic Ejaculation. […] On both the left and the right, the advertising imperative was stronger than the ethical one: you had to check the URL for an added “.co” to see if a story was real, and how many people bothered? If some readers thought your story was a joke and others thought it was outrageous, well, all the better. Satire was what got traffic on Saturday night.
The joke is on us.
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