I hear you on record Charlie Southerland. Speaking up in hope for vindication of Trump, and in doing so, making a clear appearance in the public sphere. I also here your ease and comfort with another human being being torn from her children for using a fake social security number to go to work, to work hard, and to receive a meager salary. A sixth degree felony made necessary by politicized laws. With that social, she likely received a W-2 and thus paid her taxes in withholding, likely more than she owed. Your president however likely paid nowhere near what he owed that same year. You allow a construct of the State to define a human being rather than have the courage to actually look at who she is, why people are here, and who actually benefits from their immigration. You are a willing subject of what is happening. I hear you.

Whether she read Eichmann correctly or not, Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil still stands. It is the inability or unwillingness to think past the offered blinds that filled the cattle cars. And has never stopped since. Call your representatives, go to the town halls, build a movement to recall them for collusion if possible. Find any spark of a counter institution growing up in your town and join it, no matter its weak points. Get your hands filthy with the million hypocrisies and inconsistencies of our entire existence in this State. Please.

I'm in love...

https://www.facebook.com/Maher/video...4432004832297/

Yeah, Brian, I know. There are websites and stories abounding about Warren. Most of the tribes don't believe her because she's unbelievable, and in fact, the whole wedding certificate thing is a pretty good cover since it can't be found( are we in birther territory yet) and the fact that while at Harvard, she never met a single time with the Native American group on campus, not a single time. Apparently, it must have been some deplorable tribe that was beneath her standing. Yeah, I know, Brian. I get it. You could argue about it all day if you wish. But here's the thing, She has accused a sitting US Senator of discrimination and racism without a shred of proof he had done or been either.

If you want to settle this whole thing, then I propose that I'll forget about Liawatha and her claims, if you guys admit that there was nothing wrong with Sessions becoming the US Attorney General. That as far as you're concerned, he's as clean as the driven snow. Deal? Otherwise, I don't mind doubling down on what I've read about her. There's lots and lots and lots. Since it is clear that Sessons isn't a racist or a bigot, and that he is supremely qualified for the job, you have far less material to work with. Ms. Warren's gonna run for president in four years and we'll take it up again at that time.

Andrew, stop digging the hole you're in. Let's take a vote here and now to see who would agree to let anyone steal their identity.

I vote no.


I bet she is with her children right now. They ( her children) can come and go across the border at will.

Now if we could figure out how to get Mexico to trade her back for all the gang members and drug dealers who live here. Let's talk about them for awhile, Andrew.

I didn't think so.

Ah Nigel. 'Romancing'? You mean lying of course.

You are so far behind the pace here, John, I had some trouble in finding what you were referring to! However, now I've tracked it down - post 232 - let me reply.

No, John, I didn't mean "lying", as if you read what I was saying carefully, you will find that I was attempting a courteous and clear paraphrase of Charlie's accusations (vide "your drift would appear to be").
The meaning was his, not mine.

Now that I have wasted an hour or so of my life following up many of the tangled skeins of this supposedly politically 'significant' story, I have discovered that it amounts to diddly-squat. A utterly useless piece of innuendo piled on assertion, amounting to nothing of any significance, save that it illuminates a pretty amateur attempt at character assasination - which, even if proved, which it clealry is not - would not affect the real arguments about Sessions fitness, or not, for his new role.

What all this does do, for me as someone outside of the polity concerned, is to raise serious questions about the purposes of those public figures who chose not only to employ this tactic, but to couch it in often somewhat racially offensive language. Their behaviour, of course, on its own proves nothing - but it does not make me ready to trust their good intent.

[Never mind. The more time and energy we waste on small stuff like Warren's family tree, the less we have for the big stuff. I still think we're all on the same side for some of the big stuff.]

Charles. She was tried and paroled and did community service. I also hear you make light of being deported from owns home of 22 years. I hear you say that is an appropriate sentence for a non-repetitive minor felony almost a decade ago. I wish this sort of unfeeling justice in your life and lives of those like you. Certainly a biblical wish that.

Most undocumented human beings aren't moving drugs. They're picking the fruit you stuff in your mouth, filling the chicken plants and the drywall crews. Any comment about a drug trade is so blindly hypocritical it is hardly worth replying to. Who is buying all that product? Often its your white bread neighbors. Only for them it isn't a felony if they play their cards right. It's you know...the weekend. You don't even see the racist and misogynist undertones of many of your well thought out public post. Can't imagine your unguarded thoughts.

Again, I hear you on your belief that an empathic understanding of illegal acts, especially by brown people, to survive are beyond comprehension as a poet. Lets keep this up. You come clearer with each thread. For posterity's sake as they say. The internet makes Madame DeFarge look like an amateur.

Yeah she bought a false social number. Bad call. Community arbitration and restorative justice are more than capable of balancing out the hurt caused in such messes. The State of the last decades, not so much. The State we see rising here, only an idiot would entertain any trust in this one.

Lets see. You agree to stop embarrassing yourself by your daily confession of cartoon news source indoctrination regarding the sinister nature of a romanticized family claim to obscure indigenous connection if we agree to say Sessions stand against the voting rights act, legal immigration, path to citizenship, use of racist language to colleagues, and open support of the Trump campaign doesn't imply he is a racist.
As terrifying as your mastery of the facts seems to be (truly), I am gonna let keep appearing as you truly are.

Oh no! You are gonna keep talking like this! Dude, if the general population can't smell the blood in that swill your casking after a few more months of this, then nothing will much matter anyway.

I might or might not have an interest in Warren as president. You keep making the mistake of thinking we are only defending our team instead of just speaking up for distinctions between what's clearly sinister and what seems negligible in comparison. I understand how important the whole liberal/conservative binary is to you and how it has created a virus that allows ideological loyalty to imitate humane consideration but I don't host that bug anymore and I don't have a team in this State that survives beyond each moment. Onward, Christian Soldier.

A bit more on Sessions. I realize not everything said about the guy is in context. Regardless of possible exaggeration he is an open fanboy of Trump. To have watched this campaign and Trumps personal history as Sessions has and come out of that movie excited to be ready to defend his legal proclivities is damning all by itself. Even if some of the allegations are shaky from the past to bring forth a person tainted with racist allegations at this volatile point in nation is a symbol all in itself. It shows at best a tone dead stupidity that should make everyone watching take notice, at worst it is a dog whistle to the far right.

Keep going, Andrew. I'm getting a picture of who your team is. Far be it from me to stop you. It sure ain't America. You are the reason 60 million people voted for Trump. I hope you are this excited in four years. We might get 49 states like Reagan did. More, please.

I am still waiting for you to tell me what does Pound have to do with any of this and who or what Counter-Currents is. Cat got your tongue?

What is it then? More than half of U.S. voters in the general election loathed Trump's campaign, his comments, his arrogance, his cruelty. Are all of us not America?

You still haven't been able to answer my question from post #37 on this thread, Charlie. That's where I list egregiously negative things about Trump and ask: Even if you and other Trump supporters are in agreement with some of Trump's policies do you feel that those positives outweigh the massive negatives and the great damage he can do to the U.S. and the world?

The reason you can't answer it is that it's unanswerable without saying: "We're willing to overlook the immensely and dangerously negative stuff, we're willing to turn a blind eye to it as long as it's not blatantly against us and so long as we can get our agenda met." It's like someone saying they don't mind dumping toxic coal waste in streams provided the coal industry gets its way. Oh wait, that just happened this month.

Not sure about Counter-Currents but Andrew meant Pound's anti-Semitic radio broadcasts from Fascist Rome during WWII.

Pound lived to old age, and lived to regret his irrational anti-Semitic ranting and raving. I'll see if I can find my biography of Pound and locate his exact words on the subject, if it's not online somewhere.

I agree about Pound, Bill. He was a self-righteous blowhard at times, but this was counterbalanced later by conscience and humility. Several years ago I got to know an old English poet in Italy who had known Pound well in his later years in Venice (in the '60s). He told me that Pound had come to see how he'd been gravely mistaken in his support of Mussolini and anti-Semitism.

I don't know, Andrew. I grew up in the 60's and 70's. I said the pledge of allegiance, sang the national anthem, God Bless America, and dove under my desk during Thermonuclear war drills. I love baseball and apple pie. Not grits though. I hold onto that America. I am a hunter, a grower, a Christian. America seems far removed from what it was. I played and fought with black kids and white kids alike. I've worked my whole life with the same.

Andrew M. can barely contain himself from outright calling me things, derogatory things that are barely covered by his hyperbole and rhetoric. I saw that kind of hate from the Commie Unions in the steel mill in East Chicago where I worked. I detested it then and I detest it now. So no, not all of us are America. So, if you hate this country, hate the people who work, go to church, pay their bills and taxes, vote for love of country instead of being a Commie sympathizer whose warped ideals are totally unrelatable out here in fly-over country, then it's pretty hard to find common ground with such.


I thought I had answered you early on but here goes.

Any Person in charge of anything can be catastrophically bad in their given or elected position. Trump is no different than anyone else. My job is to keep an eye on him personally, through my elected representatives and through my prayers to God. Not necessarily in that order. Why do you wish for more than that? Do you wish him ill to the point of destroying the country just to prove your point? I hope not.

Just what is it do you want, Andrew?


I only know Pound through his poems, his Cantos. I like his trimeters. I don't want to know his politics. He's dead.

I couldn't disagree more, Charlie. That's exactly the point: this really is different, it's a different order of dangerous than we've had with various administrations. Bannon's a symbol of that (though far from being the only perpetrator), and the hateful rhetoric spewing from Trump's mouth or his Twitter feed is the daily reminder. As many conservatives have said, Trump is not really a conservative. He insults even the best among conservatives--McCain for instance. Why would you overlook that or let it slide? I urge you to set aside ordinary conservative expectations/politics to look at this squarely for what is developing before our very eyes: an attempted hijacking and betrayal of U.S. democratic (note the small 'd') values.

I have mixed feelings about Pound. I like some of his poetry, find much of it dull or self-indulgent, but overall I think he made a significant contribution to poetic idiom. The politics unfortunately do run through some of the Cantos as well.

Yes, Andrew, we like in extremely dangerous times. We face Islamo-fascism extremism, Globalists who would have us in chains, Communists, low information nabobs, infrastructure deterioration and several other threats to mankind. Those are all things we have faced since the 1972 Olympic Games where Palestinean terrorists killed the Israeli team.


America is the most well armed and well trained populace in the entire world. We are not France or Germany or Italy or the UK. We are as prone to revolution now as we have always been. It is what separates us from everyone else. If politicians get out of control, rebellion is in our blood.

Yes Andrew, we are dangerous, very very dangerous, all the time.


McCain hears voices. He would have been scary as president.

Rant and polemic won't fix the situation, Charlie, dangerous or otherwise. You know that I gave McCain as one example among many to illustrate that Trump doesn't represent conservative values or politics. Trump's own pick for Supreme Court nominee, who seems an excellent example of an honorable and conscientious conservative, expressed alarm about Trump's dismissal of leading U.S. judges. As I recall, Trump also dismissed his own intelligence community when it didn't agree with his agenda. That's a betrayal of what a president is hired to do. Your rant and polemic skirts around that as a way to avoid addressing the details. As Blake said, we're idiots when we generalize about important shit like this.

Charlie: "Trump is no different than anyone else."

If you can't see how he's different than anyone else than you've got a problem. It's fixable. Please examine the man himself, the entire panoply of his adult life, and re-imagine who he is and why he is the wrong person at the wrong time to lead our nation.
(Obama was the right person to lead our nation who, in hindsight, came at the wrong time. Such a tragedy.)

Charlie, you seem to me to be a fatalist. I think most religious paradigms (if not all) require that of individuals looking for answers. There are no answers. As long as you shield yourself with religion I don't think you will grow as a person through to the end. Religion can play an important referential part of life, but not, in my opinion, the guide for all my life.

Tell me, what do you think of Obama?

What people imagine their gods are saying doesn't come from their texts as much as from their own needs.

Here is a link to a guy, same god but different need...

No, it's not. At least not the way you and others here are going about it.

This thread (which I admit I have stopped following in detail) seems a great illustration of the "backfire effect," "the effect in which corrections actually increase misperceptions ..."

Andrew and Jim, Politicians aren't to be trusted. None of them. That is not fatalism. Power does wonky things to them. It takes a good man or woman and defiles them. It takes bad men and women and makes them badder.

We've had very few populist leaning presidents in our history. We certainly haven't had one in the mold of Trump. I think Teddy Roosevelt was the last one. Teddy would say and did say that he was a Progressive. Progressivism has taken sharp turns to the left in the political arena. It was always meant to do so. The turn always goes toward the government can do more for you than you can do for yourself. Its proponents are almost always rich and aloof.

I suspect Trump will head in that direction and please the Left before he is out of office. I'm surprised at how the Left has went after him so hard. He is not a Republican, he doesn't seem to be a deeply spiritual man, does not seem to be intellectually curious, and he seems to shun war like the plague. Does he love the country? I believe so, which is where he deviates from the Left, in that, they, Progressive Democrats, are always hating our founding, our way of life, our total freedom to do as we please. They think that humanity must be regulated and controlled by the State because the people are too stupid to govern themselves.

To be honest, the Left has a good many unwittingly willing sycophants. This is borne of ease, not sacrifice of self to achieve better things. Academia leads this charge, has nearly always led it in the past 125 years. Most of Academia hates the very thought of God, the supreme higher power that claims control over mankind's destiny. It is a doctrine filled with pride and hubris. It has been taught now, this Godless pride and hubris for many years, indoctrinating children from an early age well into their twenties. This has always been the fight for the country. Nothing else is so important. Those of us who are Believers in God follow a book that foretells our end and our eternity. Those who don't believe this Way scoff and fight tooth and nail to destroy the faith. I understand why, it's no mystery. Believers follow a God that cannot be seen or proven to exist. That makes no sense to the Left, for the most part. There are a few Believers scattered among them but few who are hardcore about it. I believe God is Sovereign. That does not make me a fatalist, contrarily, it makes me an eternal optimist in the most literal sense. It is what drives some of you crazy. I get it. If I were in your shoes, I'd be right there with you.

Jim, I can tell you in a few short words what I think of Obama. I think he was mostly true to his Leftist beliefs which have been detrimental to this country. It doesn't matter what I think of the man personally, since I never met him.

It's the same with Trump. I don't have the luxury of looking back on a Trump administration. I haven't met the man to get a grasp on who or what he truly is.

I have no more or less concerns with him than I did Obama or Bush or Clinton or any other president. History permits me to opine. It seems what is going on here is that you guys want to prevent history from taking place as it was meant to be. Tsk,tsk. That is always the way the Left Progressive mindset works when they have an itch.

Charlie--

I know that a lack of formal education is a point of pride to you, but a few history classes, particularly focusing on the early twentieth century, would benefit you a great deal. The notion, too, that academia has been leading the charge from the left might work for the humanity and social sciences in recent decades (sort of). Less so for business programs, and the sciences had a lot of government contracts in the Cold War. In my own field, I can think of plenty of leading figures in the last 125 years--W.A. Dunning, Ulrich Phillips, the consensus guys, off the top of my head--who weren't lefties, while real innovators like Herbert Aptheker couldn't get jobs due to the Red Scare. So I'm calling bull$#!t.

All I can say to that Quincy, is that it will be my pleasure to meet you soon.

Max,

Thanks for that link.

Greg

Actually, you should speak for yourself. You can only backfire if you fire. But there's been no backfire for me thank you very much.

For me this thread has been informative. I took the thread's title at face value: a running account of Trump's early days in office and samplings of grassroots thinking on the matter. I've learned some of what a few verbally inclined people are thinking on these topics, and being outside the U.S. but American that has been a help.

Amen.

I hope I didn't sound as though I'm against keeping each other informed. I only meant to share research suggesting that arguing about Trump is a waste of time or even counterproductive.

You make a good point. I shouldn't let the trolling or the responses to the trolling keep me from following the thread. I might learn something from the posts aimed at helping us watch what our president is doing.

Max,
Is this a serious theory, that Charlie's deep clinging to, for example, the preposterous definitions of the Left, Patriotism, Trump, and Believers in his last post is created by sharp confrontation? Or are you saying that it is only when you try to challenge the fabricated myths of ideologues (as opposed to less artificial myths along the lines of Cassirer's Myths of the State vs. those described in his early work) that you see their true inability to think without them? Or are you just saying this is a waste of time. I don't buy A. B is the only reason I have been trolling along. And C may in fact be the truth.

Charlie,
You may believe that the sheer size of the sheep pen you hunker in gives you the right to claim ownership of the religion you assume to speak for but I find more content in the "believing" done by individuals like Dorothy Day, Simone Wiel, Jacques Ellul, Romero, Berdyaev, and Heschel that is on the same trajectory as your founder than in all the sheerings of your more "faithful" masses combined. These are but a few names. I know personally hundreds of Christians who I have walked through all manners of tight spots that would find your views of both God and their own deeply active faiths repulsive even if so immature as to be comical.

Even C.S. Lewis had the sense to realize how far a patriotism like yours is from any defensible notion of love. As for your fascinating idea of what your text is and the equivalency of your reading with the intents of its many human authors all I can do is think of the many Christianities that would dissent from most of what you say above and wonder if you have ever actually looked at the politics and techniques that gave you the cannon you are so at ease in trusting. The authority you claim to speak for your texts seem based only in the strict limitations you put on any real questioning of their claims and manifestations, a blinder you confuse with Faith. I find it unlikely that you have studied any more of these texts, their possible meanings, and the history of the discussion around them than I have so I always find your claim to authority to speak for them with anymore at stake in the game or sense of pesonal consequence than I have, so you will forgive if I laugh at your strange explanation above about the Left (permutations of which you imagine even less of than of theologies).

As for "our" freedoms and "our" way of life and the so called progressive hate for them, I again appreciate the underlining of the resiliency your indoctrination into the Feed gives you against all evidence to the contrary.
The hatred of "our" foundations are another matter. If you mean the very real genocide manifest for our destiny, or the many other betrayals of the state principles of the documents then maybe so. If you mean everything from Thomas Paine to Shay's Rebellion than you are, as usual when you pretend to have any idea what my "Left" believes, deeply confused.

On Face the Nation this morning:

http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/cbs-ne...eks-in-office/

Very instructive.

Not created. The theory, as I understand it, is that confrontation won't help Charlie to a better understanding of these issues, and is likely, in fact, to make it harder for him to understand them.

If you want to better understand what the Dartmouth researchers are saying, asking me is the wrong approach. Above, I've provided a link to an article about the study. Here's one to the actual study.

My response is a disagreement with the conclusions being drawn from the article. I think the "backfire" is just a higher reading of an already existing commitment to defend an underlying certainty. I doubt there is any way to actually engage those certainties without that backfire unless it is through other human avenues that have nothing to do with public debate. So, I am not here to do anything like "help" Charlie.

Without the courage to place the certainty, and security that comes with it , on the blocks I have never seen this sort of argument make any conversions so I never even imagine that that is what I am about. I say this from experience. I am not, contrary to Charlie's schtick here, educated in the academy or with any stake in it. Until recently I was a high school quitter of the working class. I have been in demolition, roofing, even ditch digging as an honest choice for decades until settling into old house carpentry. I just read stuff for my own interest. Every day I try to put any recognized intellectual safe hiding place out into fresh air and open to ravages of what's-really-out-there. Whatever is still there at the end of the day, I take back inside for the night. I admit i don't have alot of grace for folks who refuse to do the same and white wash the violences their certainties need to survive.

In the there are implications in what Charlie and others say on here that seem to ugly to not pick a fight with. So I pick a fight.

I think that might make me a jerk some days. I can live with that.

I wonder how many in this thread have gone in private with Charlie, because I see accusations of him which I know for a fact are utterly false.

What bothers me tremendously is this word "trolling." I can't say it's directly aimed at Charlie, but if it is, it's just plain false. For those of you who've mentioned trolling, all I can say is you must not have had any interaction with a real Internet troll. I saw one belligerent soul shut down at least two newsgroups in a relatively short amount of time, with nothing but vicious and multitudinous posts that eventually no-one had any time for. This site is moderated, and it's almost impossible to troll for very long on a moderated website without being called out and banned. The days of the anarchic newsgroups are old hat, and the term troll has lost a lot of its punch. From what I can see when things get heated, the term is like any other ad-hom: applied when it's convenient, and getting no-one anywhere but stuck in useless anger and frustration.

So let's stop with the accusation, since it is entirely without basis. And ya know it, that's the frustrating thing! If you want someone to respect your argument, why not refrain from accusations that are clearly and demonstrably false? (That goes for all of us, of course.)

As for the danger of ideological thinking, it works both ways. The far Left can be just as lethal as the far Right. I brought up Russia, 1918, in a recent argument wherein someone asked why I said just that. His only real answer was, "well, that was a century ago," as if that meant anything. We are already seeing so-called peaceful protests erupt into violence. If the mob gets whipped up enough, they will stop at nothing. History has proven this, and whether the mob chant for the Left or the Right makes precious little difference. Extremists on both sides will eventually run dangerously short of restraint once their collective wrath builds to a breaking point.

William,
If you will show me something in my case against Charlie's ideas that you know as a fact to not be present in his ideas, either willfully or implicitly, I would be interested in hearing it.

If the information expressed on this thread in support Trump or his policies is gathered from a peer based review of either history or science or what have you, again I would be interested to hear it.

If you have a way that ideas like inerrant notes form exclusive and violent Deities can be put forward as the last word in the polis without them becoming ideologies of force, again I would be interested in how that might work.

The left you bring up, I assume, is the Bolsheviks and later Stalin. Personally I don't recognize most of that business with the anything but another Statist ideology gone bad. So if that is the Left, then I am not. I think the State and its techniques are what most threatens life on this globe and that only ideas more kin to anarchism, mutual aid, and what-have-you have any real promise. Not the place for a long rant on this but I am all Fanya Baron and very little Trotsky I guess. I don't think socialism is innately tied to that sort of business. I think the idea that the autonomous movements for environmental, gender, and economic justice have murderous counterparts today to the destruction of capitalism, consolidation, and religious fundamentalism is total bull%$#t. Any evidence that I am wrong here, again I would be interested in seeing.

The last person to use the word trolling was me. I used it about my own behaviour of late, responding aggressively to each of CS's posts. I also said why that was so. If my writing is unclear on those points, I apologize.

nevermind.

Well, this isn't good:

http://observer.com/2017/02/donald-t...ssian-embassy/

Neither is the combination of this (North Korea has taken its saber-rattling up a notch, with a provocative ballistic missile test) and this (Trump nixed the experienced deputy that our neophyte Secretary of State was begging for; apparently the need for a U.S. State Department that knows its ass from its elbow is less important than the fact that the guy had criticized Trump during the presidential campaign).

And in other news, the Trump Administration's attacks on the judiciary leg of the three-legged stool known as the Constitution's separation of powers continue, too. That can't be good, either.

This musical intermission brought to you by ...


I was reminded that there are no breaks from politics.

Oh, wait. Andrew found one.

Like someone said on Twitter, it took George W Bush seven years, two wars, and a hurricane to get to this point of how Americans perceive U.S. world standing. Trump: three weeks.