Donald Trump Presidency-Day One

[broncofan]

As for Roseanne Barr, I find it frankly pathetic that she now says it was the pills what did it. Does a sleeping pill really make a person relate Valerie Jarrett to Planet of the Apes rather than, say, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins or Star Wars? Why, when referring to George Soros is the automatic thought not about money, his hair-style, his clothes, or his Open Society programme, but about Jews and Nazis?

I have quite a bit of experience with the sleeping pill she talked about and stopped taking it for the simple reason that I would not fall asleep, would call people and have long conversations that I didn't remember. The thing is, when I asked what we talked about, they assured me they didn't know anything was amiss and that at most I was more talkative, but maybe the associations were a bit looser. It doesn't do more than disinhibit you and if it did more it would likely make you incoherent and not a belligerent racist.

The George Soros one is a bit of a mystery but if I dig into it I can see why it's important for them to portray him as a traitor to Jews. Of course criticizing Soros as a politically active billionaire is acceptable and if it were on par with say the criticism of the Koch brothers the Republicans would never find themselves in trouble. But they want to accuse him of having mystical powers, of paying protesters without leaving a trace and effecting all sorts of global outcomes that he has no causal relationship to. It's only a matter of time before people say, this is your Emmanuel Goldstein, that you use both as a form of catharsis and a scapegoat. So what do they do? They say he's the real hater of Jews and was a Nazi collaborator. Roseanne, who is Jewish, is probably not even aware that this is the underlying motivation, having allied herself with open haters and parroting their poison. The poison she directs at other groups (Arabs and African-Americans) she does seem very well aware of and is her own concoction.

I am curious to what extent the hard right, the people that Roseanne has been channeling and retweeting for several years, are aware of the fact that they're lying. To what extent are they partially aware and have just decided that they can be dishonest and disgusting if they are surrounded by enough like-minded people.

[broncofan]

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/...48460881035265

This is Donald's response. This is someone who has gone his entire life without people expecting him to behave decently and who has never felt the compunction to on his own. I know it's overused, but he's a sociopath. Most people have something internal that would prevent them from responding this way.

[Ben in LA]

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/...48460881035265

This is Donald's response. This is someone who has gone his entire life without people expecting him to behave decently and who has never felt the compunction to on his own. I know it's overused, but he's a sociopath. Most people have something internal that would prevent them from responding this way.

My signature is my reply to that “make it about me” tweet.

[Stavros]

The George Soros one is a bit of a mystery...
They say he's the real hater of Jews and was a Nazi collaborator.

There is no mystery, it is a basic loathing of the Jew. George Soros was 13 years old at the time. Need I say anything more?

Or, maybe he is superhuman, the X-Man of finance, but I guess in fact he is just a guy who is good with money, with the additional fact that what he does with it is legal. There is another man I can think of who brags about his achievements with money, but is not so much an X-Man mutant as a fraud, as his record with money is: very good at pocketing yours, and hiding mine. Just as one billionaire funds the Open Society Programme that promotes democracy, human rights, education and holding the powerful to account, the other wakes up at six in the morning and by 10 has insulted, abused and threatened as many Americans as he can find, for the simple reason they don't agree with him.

[filghy2]

The George Soros one is a bit of a mystery but if I dig into it I can see why it's important for them to portray him as a traitor to Jews.

The anti-Soros thing seems to have become a popular meme on the right. Anti-Soros rhetoric featured prominently in the recent Hungarian election, where the ruling party argued that Soros was behind a conspiracy to flood the country with muslim immigrants. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-0...mpaign/9632958

All of this has strong echoes of the international Jewish financial conspiracy, which has long been a popular theme of the far right, though I've never been able to understand how they believed that is was both an international finance conspiracy and a Bolshevik conspiracy. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Intern...ish_conspiracy

Of course, people like Roseanne would have no problem with Soros if he used his money to back political causes directed at enriching himself further, like the Koch brothers and the Mercers.

[yodajazz]

The anti-Soros thing seems to have become a popular meme on the right. Anti-Soros rhetoric featured prominently in the recent Hungarian election, where the ruling party argued that Soros was behind a conspiracy to flood the country with muslim immigrants. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-0...mpaign/9632958

All of this has strong echoes of the international Jewish financial conspiracy, which has long been a popular theme of the far right, though I've never been able to understand how they believed that is was both an international finance conspiracy and a Bolshevik conspiracy. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Intern...ish_conspiracy

Of course, people like Roseanne would have no problem with Soros if he used his money to back political causes directed at enriching himself further, like the Koch brothers and the Mercers.

As for George Soros, certain elements of the right, get their power from a focus of negative energy, of hate, and fear. I like to say, it's from the Hitler playbook. Between Soros, and Hillary and Bill, they are literally demonized. They a given superpowers, with the supposed ability to control others. The supreme irony, is that people who believe this, are the ones who are being controlled. They give their hearts and minds to the leader, and secret leaders, (money suppliers) who say they are in charge of fighting those 'demons'. There are 'positive' manipulation tools also. The main one is the use of 'nationalism'. That makes the people feel powerful, when they are in fact giving up their power, to the supreme leader. American white nationalism, is a resurgent power these days. I noted in the campaign, when I saw Trump's "make America great again", the images, were from a time, when the KKK was riding high, and directly feared by many. Notice how many of Trump's Tweets, that are the subject of broadcasts, are negative.

As I reflect, Hitler did not invent this technique of control. It could literally be called, "the oldest trick in the book".

[Stavros]

One of the things I got wrong about the US election, is the belief that a negative, attacking tone turns off voters, who want to hear positive messages that tell them their future will be better than their past. What I think happened, and is crucial, is that the Republicans succeeded in transferring the problems of capitalism from a collective of decision makers in industry, finance and politics, to a personal level where they tapped into a 'politics of resentment' which personalizes political issues and licences one person to blame another for their negative position, and by extension to demonize their cohort.

Thus the book on rural Wisconsin by Katherine J. Crame The Politics of Resentment attempts to answer the question, why did Wisconsin turn Republican? She claims to find a deep well of resentment in 'left behind' rural workers who claim to see other people getting the benefits of living in the USA, and she offers insights into her research and their views in this interview -
https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...of-resentment/

However, I assume the book has not taken into account the tariff issue that has emerged in the last year, because Wisconsin farmers who may have tipped the vote in 2016, rely heavily on the export of Soybeans to China, the very sector threatened by tariffs, meaning the man they voted to improve their lives could, if the tariffs are imposed, destroy them, not that he cares about that. Some insight into Soybean and Wisconsin can be found in these two links-
https://badgerherald.com/opinion/201...ture-industry/
http://wisoybean.org/services/soybean-facts/

This leaves the question, why is resentment so strong and an important component in a political discourse that now includes an almost official 'incivility' with racist and hateful language that used to be relegated to the sidewalk and obscure web sites, now both mainstream and a regular feature of the President's daily tweets?

This I think is an interesting take on it, and is worth a read. You get a flavour of the arguments from its opening-

The US has become a country motivated less by anger, which can be used to address the underlying social, political and economic causes of social discontent, than by a galloping culture of individualized resentment, which personalizes problems and tends to seek vengeance on those individuals and groups viewed as a threat to American society.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/ite...rump-s-america

The problem with resentment is that it replaces critical thinking with emotion, and is more likely to find its expression in violence rather than dialogue.

[yodajazz]

One thing, that promotes this anger is conservative talk radio. In driving, the major entertainment, is listening the radio, if you don't not have your own music media. Their main thrust, in my book, is to feed resentment. Rush Limbaugh, is the most widely known, however that several others, such as Glenn Beck, etc. I happened to have listened to a smaller market one named Bill Cunningham, only because he comes on after the games of our major sport team. So the radio is turn on, riding with my friend, even turned low, as we are talking, and I hear this man, practically screaming in anger. I never turned it up to hear what he was actually saying, so what struck me was the emotional level he was on. But the times, I have actually listened to him, I was the the one, who wanted to scream in anger. lol! I have heard him say, "democrats are trying to destroy America", and "Black are not patriotic..." . And say I decide to turn to another station, I might run into Rush Limbaugh, who is on at the same time! Cunningham also moonlights as a special commentator on television's Fox News. Doing research on Cunningham, it was stated he makes around 250k, a year for his radio work. Rush Limbaugh signed an 8 year deal, in 2008, for 400 million. In the book I'm reading, "Dark Money" a conservative political action group once paid, Glenn Beck 1 million dollars, to blend their message, with his opinion talk. It was not presented as advertising. It was blended into his message. So this is an example, of big money interests, directly shaping public dialogue. An example of this, is framing industrial government pollution standards, as "job killing regulations". Regulations in fact create jobs, because someone inside the plant has to monitor, what their pollution output is, etc. But it does take away from the owners/corporate heads, profit margin. So this is why they are pouring huge amounts of money to influence public perceptions.

[BostonBad]

Soros is an evil man. Look how he smashed the working people of England by making over a billion in a day.

[broncofan]

Soros is an evil man. Look how he smashed the working people of England by making over a billion in a day.

I assume you're talking about Black Wednesday. First of all, Soros is not primarily criticized by the right wing for a single currency trade in 1992. Speculating with large amounts of capital can destabilize markets and cost people lots of money, but I don't personally believe a large currency bet makes someone an evil person.

Would you take the same position for someone who was shorting a stock index in 2000? Of course, I think there was an uptick rule in the stock market in 2000, so short sellers were not responsible for the dip, but rather grossly mis-valued equities were. There are probably people on this forum who know more about finance than I do, but isn't it possible that his bet was successful because he recognized weakness in the pound rather than that he created it by shorting it?