Why Trump is Terrifying

[Singu]

The first post on this thread was basically about how there's not really any politics in America since the highest elected official is apparently just some sort of clown and can't influence anything. If nothing is political and something is ruling that apolitical world, I think that's what Hannah Arendt was talking about with totalitarianism since there's no way she wouldn't know that idea even if she didn't put it like that. In the decades leading up to Nazi Germany, there was all this intellectual hype about being "apolitical", and ****** also claimed to be "apolitical" even though he wasn't in line with the normal conception of that at all. So absolute apolitical control = totalitarianism while absolute political control = authoritarianism then. And the apolitical world is really based on culture, and if you look at American culture around the world...

Her argument has too many flaws, but saying that the US is becoming totalitarian (rather than authoritarian) still has easy arguments. The US is closer to an absolute apolitical rule than an absolute political rule, although I think how close is way overblown.

I think what's happening in the US is the reverse of totalitarianism, which is just as bad if not worse, because it will have a very long-lasting influence.

What this means is that the person on the very top, say the President or the executive branch, is losing power and influence. But this means that those who were below it, suddenly no longer have to work for the "greater good" (of the national interests). There is no one directing, controlling or guiding them. They have lost their sense of purpose, except to defend their own interests or the organizations' interests. So you have cabinets like Department of Defense, the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA... working to increase their own power of influence, and to defend the interests of their own organizations, and not the interests of their country. You have the military that exists for the sole purpose of increasing its military power, and not defending the country. You have the NSA whose sole purpose is to collect information from the citizens, and not defend cyberattacks from other countries. You have corporations whose sole purpose is to increase its earnings for themselves and the shareholders, and not improve the conditions of the society or the lives of the people. And so on and so forth. Those organizations are now out of control and are running amok - because they have lost their direction.

By the way, this is more similar to what happened in Japan under military rule in WW2 rather than Nazi Germany. The Japanese government has failed to control its own military faction, and the militarists took advantage of this weakness that the government didn't have a system in place to take control of them. So instead, the militarists took control of the government and the rest is history, Japan has since then entered endless and unwinnable wars after another. Kind of like how the US is currently entering endless and unwinnable "war on terror".

And that is why the reverse of totalitarianism could be just as bad, if not worse because it's very difficult to stop this whole process once it gets rolling. You could easily have "totalitarianism" without any single dictator or ideology directing anyone in particular. It just so happens "organically", where a complex web of networks affect one another.

[Pallas]

I think what's happening in the US is the reverse of totalitarianism, which is just as bad if not worse, because it will have a very long-lasting influence.

What this means is that the person on the very top, say the President or the executive branch, is losing power and influence. But this means that those who were below it, suddenly no longer have to work for the "greater good" (of the national interests). There is no one directing, controlling or guiding them. They have lost their sense of purpose, except to defend their own interests or the organizations' interests. So you have cabinets like Department of Defense, the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA... working to increase their own power of influence, and to defend the interests of their own organizations, and not the interests of their country. You have the military that exists for the sole purpose of increasing its military power, and not defending the country. You have the NSA whose sole purpose is to collect information from the citizens, and not defend cyberattacks from other countries. You have corporations whose sole purpose is to increase its earnings for themselves and the shareholders, and not improve the conditions of the society or the lives of the people. And so on and so forth. Those organizations are now out of control and are running amok - because they have lost their direction.

By the way, this is more similar to what happened in Japan under military rule in WW2 rather than Nazi Germany. The Japanese government has failed to control its own military faction, and the militarists took advantage of this weakness that the government didn't have a system in place to take control of them. So instead, the militarists took control of the government and the rest is history, Japan has since then entered endless and unwinnable wars after another. Kind of like how the US is currently entering endless and unwinnable "war on terror".

And that is why the reverse of totalitarianism could be just as bad, if not worse because it's very difficult to stop this whole process once it gets rolling. You could easily have "totalitarianism" without any single dictator or ideology directing anyone in particular. It just so happens "organically", where a complex web of networks affect one another.

Isn't everyone already constantly out to advance their own interests or their organization's interests? A lot of your argument appears to be based around this, but I don't think it's wrong, although it does show what the dynamic underneath is. When I was really young, I heard people say "We're not in this world for ourselves. We're in this world for other people." But if we're not in it for ourselves at all, then we should hate anything anyone does for us or gives us, because either it benefits us, which is bad, or it doesn't benefit us and is only making them feel good about themselves, which is promoting selfishness in them, and is also bad. You sound like you're just describing an oligarchy to me. That's a fairly common kind of government, and not really antithetical to authoritarianism or totalitarianism at all. It's just a group of people instead of one person.

The President was out for his own interests in the first place. I mean, kids are always told "be President because it's important!" not "be President because it's helpful!" No one thinks that the President is helpful, just cool or pathetic, and maybe they help people along the way of being in charge, but they're the ruler, not a servant. The government system uses "checks and balances" to make sure that everyone's personal interests conflict with everyone else's personal interests. The government is basically built on a house of cards that depends on things being stacked against each other in a specific way to stand. Everyone knows how durable houses of cards are...

[Eliza Thomason]

...That's because he isn't really "wearing the ring" if you catch my drift.

Opps, no I don't.

He isn't fully under the boot of the globalists elite, and this is why they're doing everything they can to either remove him from power and/or force him to take us to war with Russia (i.e. the only truly "Christian" major geopolitical/military power existent in the modern world at this time). ...

I am sure there is a lot going on behind the scenes and its not good stuff.

Also, don't fear the "corruption" of politics as it were. This world is already so corrupt that you've little to lose from voicing your opinion and taking the "wrong" side of Christ (as many liberals would like you think of taking the side of our savior). Just don't get converged on me. You're a source of optimism for me Eliza, don't you dare fall to the siren song of the SJW types and their hold on the mainstream.

Aw, thanks for that compliment! I have always had a rather solid core in regards to a thing I understand to be true. I am quite open to all possibilities until it hits me that a thing is quite right or quite wrong, then, no more fence-sitting and I don't move from it. I would need solid truth to show me I was misguided before I would move. Also I have gotten resigned to the fact that my heartfelt solid understanding of what I know is true is not going to win me a lot of applause when I express it. But sometimes when its so true in the face of misguided lies I just have to say it. I feel its my duty at such times to state the truth, even if its unpopular, and I have the peace of knowing I did the right thing. And nothing holds a candle to that peace!

All the fame, money, and comfort they offer is not worth your eternal soul. Remember the martyrs. They died horribly for their faith. I myself envy their end, for I have sworn to myself that I will make my exit in only one of two ways. Either I die of old age or I die in a blaze of glory. And I must say, to die for my faith is an end I welcome with open arms...

Its funny how that theme keeps coming up for me, too - that martyrdom is a very real possibility in the future. The lies of the evil one have taken hold here in this earthly kingdom he claims, and his fury is aimed at those who stand with the Lord. And people, so many, are tuned into his voice daily, ready to listen. I remember once a ways back - I cannot remember what made me say this, to my husband, that I would be willing to die for my faith and he laughed and said, "Of course! That's the easy way to go!" (Meaning, basically, a quick and straight route to Heaven, missing the slow way of hard lessons of growing in faith and holiness on earth where it is so hard to do, and bypassing any time spent in purgatory where we to make up for what we could not/would not learn on earth). I do not have the stuff of martyrs - I don't like pain! However, I know I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me and if that is what I am called to do then the Lord will give me strength to do it when the time comes (and not before).

[Raver]

I'll just leave this here:

[Singu]

Isn't everyone already constantly out to advance their own interests or their organization's interests? A lot of your argument appears to be based around this, but I don't think it's wrong, although it does show what the dynamic underneath is. When I was really young, I heard people say "We're not in this world for ourselves. We're in this world for other people." But if we're not in it for ourselves at all, then we should hate anything anyone does for us or gives us, because either it benefits us, which is bad, or it doesn't benefit us and is only making them feel good about themselves, which is promoting selfishness in them, and is also bad. You sound like you're just describing an oligarchy to me. That's a fairly common kind of government, and not really antithetical to authoritarianism or totalitarianism at all. It's just a group of people instead of one person.

The President was out for his own interests in the first place. I mean, kids are always told "be President because it's important!" not "be President because it's helpful!" No one thinks that the President is helpful, just cool or pathetic, and maybe they help people along the way of being in charge, but they're the ruler, not a servant. The government system uses "checks and balances" to make sure that everyone's personal interests conflict with everyone else's personal interests. The government is basically built on a house of cards that depends on things being stacked against each other in a specific way to stand. Everyone knows how durable houses of cards are...

They do, but theoretically (and also in practice), there has to be someone at the top who can control the entire thing as a whole (under the rule of the law and the constitution, of course). That's because the President or the Prime Minister or the Chancellor or whomever is supposed to be the will of the people. He or she is the elected representative that represents the people. We elect them to do the job because they have promised to fulfill our needs. But the people that are working beneath him or her, they are unelected representatives. So what will happen when those unelected representatives have more power than the elected representatives? Then you will no longer have democracy. You won't even get to have controlled power because nobody is in charge, nobody is in control anymore. And that's why it's so dangerous. Imagine if some military or secret service become uncontrolled or uncontrollable.

I'm not saying that it's the opposite of totalitarianism, rather I'm saying that it's the reverse or the inverse. In totalitarianism, you have one ruler and one ideology that directs everything. In this scenario, you have no ruler and no ideology, and yet the result is that situation becomes equally oppressive.

[Nanooka]

Actually Congress is supposed to be the foremost branch of government, not the President. The growth in the security state moved directly in tandem with the rise in executive supremacy, the legislature abrogating its responsibilities in oversight. What's increasingly happened is what you're describing in one leader responsible to a generalized nationwide tyranny of the majority taking the helm. With constitutional checks on the (executive-helmed but not executive-micromanaged) bureaucracy's authority decaying as the legislature and judiciary become blank checks, and the Constitution's definitions stretched ever thinner to adjust to whatever the then-ruling President's party wants at the time.

How we're technically set up and how we existed until roughly the Wilson administration, not permanently until Herbert Hoover, is a situation where instead the power is vested in various local constituencies who come together to bargain across the wide regional divides in the United States. That bargaining weakening in favor of the semi-Bonapartist "unitary executive" theory of government is one reason, I think, why those regional divides and extremist polarization have intensified over the last few decades to the current near-civil war pitch.

[Pallas]

They do, but theoretically (and also in practice), there has to be someone at the top who can control the entire thing as a whole (under the rule of the law and the constitution, of course). That's because the President or the Prime Minister or the Chancellor or whomever is supposed to be the will of the people. He or she is the elected representative that represents the people. We elect them to do the job because they have promised to fulfill our needs. But the people that are working beneath him or her, they are unelected representatives. So what will happen when those unelected representatives have more power than the elected representatives? Then you will no longer have democracy. You won't even get to have controlled power because nobody is in charge, nobody is in control anymore. And that's why it's so dangerous. Imagine if some military or secret service become uncontrolled or uncontrollable.

I'm not saying that it's the opposite of totalitarianism, rather I'm saying that it's the reverse or the inverse. In totalitarianism, you have one ruler and one ideology that directs everything. In this scenario, you have no ruler and no ideology, and yet the result is that situation becomes equally oppressive.

"Controlled power" is an oxymoron. Explain to me exactly how that works. This also just sounds like a stereotypical oligarchy, which you can observe in a lot of places as being oppressive and isn't really surprising.

[End]

Opps, no I don't.

C'mon, "Lord of the Rings" didn't pop into mind at all? As an aside Tolkien was, perhaps subconsciously, not being at all subtle about that one and I'm pretty sure he shared our faith in a very direct sense. If memory serves he got kinda miffed at how he managed to get C.S. Lewis to convert... but only to the "light" version if'n ya catch my meaning . Still, it's always an "improvement" to get the heathens and/or unbelievers to at the very least accept that Jesus was right...

I'll just leave this here

If I had more than one wish to spare one of the top candidates for either number 2 or 3 wish would be that George Carlin was alive and well right now. Oh god I can only imagine how he would have so skillfully opined on the election and the aftermath. He ripped into everyone in a way only he could. He was a singular talent. Sadly, as the song goes, "only the good die young".

He'd be in direct competition with Murray Rothbard in that department which is why I can't nail the order down. One of them is getting revived if I had my say after my first wish (World Peace as a right-wing/"brutalist" libertarian like myself would understand it if you must know). It'd depend on who I thought would most disrupt the Globalist narrative at the moment I got the wishes. It's really sad neither one seemed to know of the other. That meeting would have been one for the ages. It'd be like a battle between Hannibal and Alexander. I'd pay all my meager fortune to see that one!

To put this in a more "philosophical" frame I can only wish that an ILI like Nietzsche could have met the IEI Soren Kierkegaard. If only they could have met up and debated at least once as, once again if memory serves, they were contemporaries. It might have been an old dude vs. a young gun but point is their life spans/birth dates were close enough to have made an IRL meeting possible.

This is one of the curses of dominance BTW. "Time" is foggy in a sense. You get it in an "innate" sense at the expense of getting it "concretely" as it were. You know "IF" you did something, but you'll never be able to pin down *exactly* when you did it. It's hard to explain but that's how it works for me and likely most of my type. We did it, but we're at a loss as to *precisely* when. Still works out for us though, as we always seem to get the task done "just in time" for our plans to continue unmolested by the likes of anyone who ain't an SEE...

[Grendel]

It's not Trump that I find terrifying; it's the foundation of the political system. I think Socrates explained it best:

Better to suffer from a political decision that I contributed to than at the hands of a stranger. Anyone who can take that micron of power away from you may as well have killed you already.

[Pallas]

Better to suffer from a political decision that I contributed to than at the hands of a stranger. Anyone who can take that micron of power away from you may as well have killed you already.

The problem is that no one contributes in a democracy. The demos contributes. People are not persons. Basically every language has a different word for a person and a group of people for that reason. Just telling you you can influence something because you're involved somehow doesn't make it so.

[Grendel]

The problem is that no one contributes in a democracy. The demos contributes. People are not persons. Basically every language has a different word for a person and a group of people for that reason. Just telling you you can influence something because you're involved somehow doesn't make it so.

You still have a greater share in the decision that's made than you ever would in a dictatorship. Which, in some circumstances, may translate into a slightly greater chance to save oneself.


Sure the outcome might be better for the largest demographic in a more efficient autocracy - but what about me? You can't call it a fair system when it, in theory, could stomp out the individual's last fledgling chance of defending himself.

Frankly fuck the common good.

[Pallas]

You still have a greater share in the decision that's made than you ever would in a dictatorship. Which, in some circumstances, may translate into a slightly greater chance to save oneself.


Sure the outcome might be better for the largest demographic in a more efficient autocracy - but what about me? You can't call it a fair system when it, in theory, could stomp out the individual's last fledgling chance of defending himself.

Frankly fuck the common good.

I'm not arguing for autocracy at all though. There are way more options, and the one the video was arguing for was a republic in the first place (although I think its reasoning also falls a bit short). And the problem is that American democracy caters only to demographics and individual people are insignificant. If you're in some group of 20 people and you vote, that's actually persons voting because everyone is able to discuss and come to a conclusion. But with American democracy, it doesn't work that way at all. There are hundreds of millions of people, so you have to choose who you associate with, and people are already pre-grouped by what they believe. CNN watchers refuse to associate with Fox News watchers, and people who posts lists of 50 new genders a day for everyone to memorize if they don't want to be a trisemidemigenderfluidphobic bigot on Tumblr refuse to associate with people who unironically post pictures of Pepe the frog quoting ******'s calls to exterminate all Jews but then ironically say it's ironic on 4chan. These larger isolated groups decide the outcome, and they're essentially static and replace their parts if any parts leave. Groups being incredibly stable and generally sufficient to determine elections is why gerrymandering even matters.

The only way for American democracy to not be based on these stable groups is for everyone to devote basically all of their free time to political discourse. Someone skilled and opportunistic could also convince the groups to believe something else, which allows very few people to have influence, but it still isn't individual people voting for who they like so much as people giving up all their old group associations and re-forming. But in the absence of people either being actively interested in a subject (which is kind of ridiculously hard to take on in the first place in the case of American politics) or having some sort of crisis, they're not even going to think about their views and just vote the same way as other people, and that combined with the stable nature of all the groups means that how one person votes can't make a difference.

[dot]

I hope this person wasn't being completely serious. Trump can't be ******. It's against the American character, and I don't see the American character changing any time soon.

****** happened in a certain culture context, even though it did a lot to overturn that context. Most of the "Trump is ******!" arguments tend to fall flat. The only way to stop American autocracy will be to know how America works, not stuff about German Idealism and everyone banning Expressionist film and rambling about Blut und Boden. The average American couldn't care less about most of the things old Germans cared about.

The article has some points but Nazi alarmism about Trump is just a distraction and a way to confuse people because people will look for patterns that aren't there and miss the ones that are. But the "deeply running currents" are things buried so deep that most people can't see them, which is the problem. People see what's different, but not that it's a natural progression of what's the same, like fish don't see water, or don't smell the air freshener in their house after a while. It takes the exact kind of alienation and destabilization to see the currents as it does to just make them run wild while still being unseen.

Nope ****** didn't happen in a cultural context. We've learnt about our country's past in school and basically everywhere in Germany for years, so most Germans have a very good and reflective view on why things happened the way they happen, while having an overview of the whole history of Germany before and after ****** and which events eventually led to him climbing to the position he did. The thing is ****** did use the sentiments of depression and chaos in Germany after WW1 to make people believe he would bring change. A strategy that works with humans all over the world, since most humans will feel drawn towards outstanding, maybe even extreme characters in a world where most people are wishy-washy, especially in politics.

The cultural context you might be speaking of is the German precision with which people carried out these horrifying tasks, where other countries might've slacked off a bit more.

To believe that things like these could never happen in another part of the world is very naive and shows that there is not much awareness for the human nature. To even think that Americans couldn't be that way is also very naive. The whole 'blood' thing and racism existed since the dawn of modern white America, if one looks at the perspective of the African American and Native American people. The impact of genocide and brutality easily matched Nazi Germany's cruelty.
The thing is that most people and nations in the world do not have much of an awareness of their own country's cruelty in a reflective way, since Germany was forced to reflect on it (which eventually is one of the best things that could've happened in a modern human world) so that we are very aware of what we are doing and in a way we are also very cautious. What happened in Germany is an example of how to NOT DO things and should be taken into consideration when voting/electing a new head of state, with no exceptions for any nation. Also if one studies more of world history then one will be able to see there have been many cases of genocide and cruelty and even similar dictatorships that happened before, the reason why Germany got famous is because of 1. the German exceptional precision in execution of this cruelty (the actual cultural thing), 2. losing the war in the Western World -> thus being known around the world because of the immense Western influence, being forced to reflect and pay reparations and used as example for other nations to learn and not do the same mistake.
Most countries in this world do not have this specific shame/ability of reflection I am talking about (if you ever visit Germany or spend some period of time with natives you will know what I am talking about).
No situation is of course ever the same, yet humans usually work pretty similarly.. no matter the culture.

[Singu]

"Controlled power" is an oxymoron. Explain to me exactly how that works. This also just sounds like a stereotypical oligarchy, which you can observe in a lot of places as being oppressive and isn't really surprising.

How is that an oxymoron...? You have power, and in a democracy, that is controlled by the will of the people ("democracy" literally means people-power). If you don't like someone, then you will vote them out. Elected representatives are allowed to have as much power as the people, the law and the constitution allow them to have. Anything else is fair game. Oligarchies are ruled by people who are not elected by the people. Same with technocracy, bureaucracy etc. You will always have a small group of people who have a lot of power and influence over people. The only difference is, are they elected by the people, and for the people?

[Nanooka]

That's not only the difference. There are a few even bigger ones than whether 50% + 1 of the population elected them: do they respect the rights of that other 49.99% of the population? Is their management style conducive to stability, to an environment where the basic principles of their republic are carried on even in those common situations where reform is necessary?

Absent respect for minority rights and the liberal (i.e. free speech, right to individually-owned property) principles undergirding a healthy republic, the fact that someone was elected by a majority would mean nothing. Authoritarian regimes often come to power with majority support.

[Grendel]

I'm not arguing for autocracy at all though. There are way more options, and the one the video was arguing for was a republic in the first place (although I think its reasoning also falls a bit short). And the problem is that American democracy caters only to demographics and individual people are insignificant. If you're in some group of 20 people and you vote, that's actually persons voting because everyone is able to discuss and come to a conclusion. But with American democracy, it doesn't work that way at all. There are hundreds of millions of people, so you have to choose who you associate with, and people are already pre-grouped by what they believe. CNN watchers refuse to associate with Fox News watchers, and people who posts lists of 50 new genders a day for everyone to memorize if they don't want to be a trisemidemigenderfluidphobic bigot on Tumblr refuse to associate with people who unironically post pictures of Pepe the frog quoting ******'s calls to exterminate all Jews but then ironically say it's ironic on 4chan. These larger isolated groups decide the outcome, and they're essentially static and replace their parts if any parts leave. Groups being incredibly stable and generally sufficient to determine elections is why gerrymandering even matters.

The only way for American democracy to not be based on these stable groups is for everyone to devote basically all of their free time to political discourse. Someone skilled and opportunistic could also convince the groups to believe something else, which allows very few people to have influence, but it still isn't individual people voting for who they like so much as people giving up all their old group associations and re-forming. But in the absence of people either being actively interested in a subject (which is kind of ridiculously hard to take on in the first place in the case of American politics) or having some sort of crisis, they're not even going to think about their views and just vote the same way as other people, and that combined with the stable nature of all the groups means that how one person votes can't make a difference.

But one affiliation might cater to the net needs of my demographic group more than the other, so if I vote based upon these interests I have a chance to affect a political decision that benefits me if my demographic turns out to be most powerful. The more energy I devote to studying politics, the better to understand what platforms really benefit me the most directly. It's less a matter of individual wills and more of a symbiotic relationship between oligarchs and the Demos below. Groups, like all things, can and do deteriorate, and the influence of swing votes can in theory circumstantially rise to the point where as little as a single vote may change the course of a nation.

The ability of powers to bend demographics is not part of the design for democracy. It is an implicit flaw that cannot be totally corrected. It is an extension of the universal human will to power, only manifesting in more extreme forms the less democratic and more authoritarian a society becomes. Democracy cannot banish this sin entirely, it can only dilute it, but far more effectively than any other system mankind has devised.

It inherently loses efficiency in fulfilling its basic duties because of this, but the fact is it's the best thing we have. Sure, your vote has less than a quark's weight in the final outcome, but on average that's the greatest it can ever be - it's still better than absolutely none. When you get right down to it, any alternative you can propose lies somewhere on the spectrum between democracy and authoritarianism, so the further towards the latter end said system lies, the less it's going to suffer the inefficiencies of democracy and the more from the problems of unchecked authority.


Now if you're looking to purge the problems of democracy via gerrymandering you're probably going to need a lot of coercive force, and while some is obviously needed to preserve any society, ramping it up always accelerates the problem democracy was designed to delay, so is it worth it?



Tl;dr a minuscule chance for an individual to affect politics is better than none.

[Pallas]

@MaviTilki I never said things that are just as bad can't happen elsewhere. They can and have. Or are you guilted into thinking the scale of the Holocaust was unique as well? If you read statistics it really wasn't, and "the Holocaust is unique" is one of the main weapons Holocaust deniers use in the States, because a scale of a crime being singularly incomparable to anything else before or after makes it sound at least a little unlikely. The fact that Germans use the word Holocaust rather than Shoah is kind of a sick Anglophone influence in the first place. Jews routinely comment that the term Holocaust makes it sound like the Nazis were agents of God giving them as sacrifices in a burnt offering. That makes the Nazis seem in the right, like some chosen holy people, and the swastika is a form of a cross that no one really consciously recognizes, to make things worse. And the Jews would be mere animals if they're getting sacrificed, or Isaac under Abraham since they got "spared".

It's also like a religious heresy to Christians who recognize it as being essentially a religious term (never mind that Elie Wiesel copied The Stranger to write about the Holocaust and that's how most people know it in America. Camus was deliberately being heretical and people who don't accept that see the whole narrative like that, which motivates wacko denialism and Nazi sympathizers even more). A term with sick associations like that that also tried to stand in for religion should go out of use pretty fast.

In English the term is sort of just there, but Germans not using the local Jewish word for it in favor of an extremely disturbing English-language term has no good excuse. I bet the Americans designed the education program and the Jews themselves have no influence whatsoever, since I don't see any other way that kind of glaring thing could slip in there, much less the fact that there's more to Nazism's rise than just autocracy and genocide (which are a pretty undiscriminating evil). I think America could far surpass that in my lifetime, since the general trend is that everyone gets better at everything, and not just values-neutral things like pole vaulting and Flight of the Bumblebee. It just won't be quite qualitatively identical since America is rather qualitatively different, and there's no guarantee for it the same way there's no guarantee for volcanos to erupt soon even if they're long overdue.

I'm also not sure how döner kebabs are enough to keep wealthy Turks around in your country when they're constantly reminding everyone that some people don't even have to acknowledge that they've committed an atrocity, yet you've based nearly your entire culture around it.

[Singu]

@Nanooka What I mean is that what's happening in America is that all its political apparatuses have sort of "outlived its usefulness", and turned into these monstrous institutions that are out of control, are not accountable to anyone, and are not under proper political control.

Who is exactly held accountable for every criminal acts that the US military is committing every single day in foreign countries? Who is held accountable for all the breach of privacies, how the NSA has its hands on every one of citizens? How about the financial system? The banks? Federal Reserve? The CIA, the intelligence? Even the law enforcement? The Federal Reserve is supposed to oversee the activities of the financial firms, and guard against their possible excesses. None of those institutions seem to be doing the very things that that they were intended to do when they were first created. The fact is, nobody even knows much of what goes on, because so much of it is kept in secrecy, so much of it is hushed in the media, in the public, unless someone with a conscience occasionally comes out in forms of whistleblowing and leaks, like the case with Snowden, a desperate attempt to bring back political accountability.

You can kind of see how this leads to all the noise created about Russia. What does this have to do with Russia? Well, why would the Americans, especially the ruling elites, the "intelligence", "fan the flame" and drum the drumbeat toward having a war with Russia? Even if it's just to play "chicken"? It would not be in the national interest for America to go to war with Russia, or anyone for that matter. It would be disastrous for everyone involved. Is it because Russia is truly "evil"? Are they the warmongers, and not the US? Can we not simply talk to Russia, and use diplomacy to solve the problem? Is Putin comparable to someone like ****** or Saddam Hussein? The fact is, Putin has always been open to solving the issue via diplomacy, which the US has denied. The reason is, these institutions are NOT working for the national interest, but for the interest of their own groups, their own organizations, which might be to increase its military, financial, intelligence, etc. power.

That's not only the difference. There are a few even bigger ones than whether 50% + 1 of the population elected them: do they respect the rights of that other 49.99% of the population? Is their management style conducive to stability, to an environment where the basic principles of their republic are carried on even in those common situations where reform is necessary?

Absent respect for minority rights and the liberal (i.e. free speech, right to individually-owned property) principles undergirding a healthy republic, the fact that someone was elected by a majority would mean nothing. Authoritarian regimes often come to power with majority support.

Even in a democracy, you can't please every single person. At one point, you will eventually have to make a decision, and when we do, it's majority rules, even if it's 51% vs 49%. Of course, the rights of the minorities still have to be guaranteed, and they will be guaranteed by both the law and the constitution. But when we're talking about policy-making, the 51% will be making the decision, or however % required by the constitution. If you don't like the decision, vote them out. That's only way to affect any changes in politics.

Of course, democracy could very well turn into dictatorship if the majority agree enough to revise the constitution to allow dictatorship. Democracy is a double-edged sword.

[Skepsis]

I would agree with this except that those networks are operated by the governments themselves. Also, BBC is way more exciting than any American news netweork, with Doctor Who and Top Gear.

Americans have an irrational fear of anything run by the government. It's as if they don't realize that the government is run by people and is only as good as the people put into office. Instead of electing people with higher standards, they just bitch about the "evil government", so nothing changes. Corporations are much less accountable to the People, yet people don't complain about them nearly as often, at least on the Right.

Well, having a disdain for experts is part of being an intellectual. If you want to look for how things work and why things are yourself, you must immediately ignore the experts, and listening to experts means that you aren't forming your own ideas and doing work yourself. We need more people to have disdain for experts. If people have so much disdain for experts, why do they believe everything they hear on TV in order to elect Trump?

Experts are people that actually have knowledge in a field of study. If you self educate yourself you can certainly become an expert too, but then you actually have knowledge and can adequately debate and challenge the other expert in the position of power and authority. But that is not what I am referring to. I am referring to those who are challenging experts because the have a disdain for them for irrational reasons or because they think their opinion is of equal value to the expert. It is the conflation of opinion with knowledge that is disconcerting.

Fox News and its viewers have a disdain for experts that conflict with their opinions.

...Yep.

The connection is in the hair and how it is styled to look exactly as if he had been wandering above a sea of fog, and had to pat in down after he returned.

Also, actual postmodernists don't think any form of government is different from any other form of government so they don't care what kind of government the US has. It wouldn't lead to direct democracy since direct democracy is just as valid as what currently exists and as an autocratic regime. If any postmodernist favors anything, it's anarchism.

This election was a nihilistic attempt to bring down the elite for its own sake, which is postmodern. It's children playing with fire. It was not about the people or government returning to our founding principles, it was about rejecting elitism, intellectuals, scientific facts, enlightenment ideals, democratic republic virtues, etc. to push their own very limited worldview into the government as a whole and our leaders seem incapable of stopping it. The average Trump supporter is just a member of the populace who is feeling disenfranchised and wants their fair share of the pie based on their heritage and the color of their skin. They are no different than the very people they are criticizing. Our subpar politicians are catering to them instead of defending the higher ideals of our constitution. It has degenerated into "keeping our guns from the government". It's as if that's all they have left. Instead of participating by better educating themselves and demanding better, more educated candidates in office, they just want someone who is going to spew the same uninformed nonsense in Washington.

A direct democracy is the end result of everyone thinking their opinions are just as good as someone's knowledge and demanding that they be heard in government. In modern times, it has been heavily influenced by postmodern thinking, if indirectly. Think of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, who both report without the integrity of objectivity. As part of their entertainment package, they point fingers at the other's political bias and use that to justify their own biased reporting. While I doubt all of these journalists read postmodern literature, they certainly report as if they do. A direct democracy certainly can lead to anarchism and totalitarianism, as the masses look for a strong leader to pull them out of the mess they helped create.

Donald Trump has cashed in on this fact. He knows how the media works and used this to his advantage to obtain the power he desired. His timing could not have been better. He knows Americans are desperate for a "strong" anti-establishment leader that can pull them out of the uncertainties they are drowning in. He is their self made man who bucks the system, their anti-hero, their superman.

[Pallas]

Americans have an irrational fear of anything run by the government. It's as if they don't realize that the government is run by people and is only as good as the people put into office. Instead of electing people with higher standards, they just bitch about the "evil government", so nothing changes. Corporations are much less accountable to the People, yet people don't complain about them nearly as often, at least on the Right.

...That tends to happen in times of crisis. But people on the Left are complaining about corporations all the time, and even people on the Right will often complain about specific ones *cough*Monsanto*cough*.

Experts are people that actually have knowledge in a field of study. If you self educate yourself you can certainly become an expert too, but then you actually have knowledge and can adequately debate and challenge the other expert in the position of power and authority. But that is not what I am referring to. I am referring to those who are challenging experts because the have a disdain for them for irrational reasons or because they think their opinion is of equal value to the expert. It is the conflation of opinion with knowledge that is disconcerting.

Fox News and its viewers have a disdain for experts that conflict with their opinions.

People who watch Fox News fetishize "experts", they just pick different "experts" than anyone who wouldn't watch Fox News would. You have to just be trolling to say this.

The connection is in the hair and how it is styled to look exactly as if he had been wandering above a sea of fog, and had to pat in down after he returned.

I would say the hair's styled to look exactly like he's wearing a dead albatross on his balding head, but to each his own I guess.

This election was a nihilistic attempt to bring down the elite for its own sake, which is postmodern. It's children playing with fire. It was not about the people or government returning to our founding principles, it was about rejecting elitism, intellectuals, scientific facts, enlightenment ideals, democratic republic virtues, etc. to push their own very limited worldview into the government as a whole and our leaders seem incapable of stopping it. The average Trump supporter is just a member of the populace who is feeling disenfranchised and wants their fair share of the pie based on their heritage and the color of their skin. They are no different than the very people they are criticizing. Our subpar politicians are catering to them instead of defending the higher ideals of our constitution. It has degenerated into "keeping our guns from the government". It's as if that's all they have left. Instead of participating by better educating themselves and demanding better, more educated candidates in office, they just want someone who is going to spew the same uninformed nonsense in Washington.

A direct democracy is the end result of everyone thinking their opinions are just as good as someone's knowledge and demanding that they be heard in government. In modern times, it has been heavily influenced by postmodern thinking, if indirectly. Think of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, who both report without the integrity of objectivity. As part of their entertainment package, they point fingers at the other's political bias and use that to justify their own biased reporting. While I doubt all of these journalists read postmodern literature, they certainly report as if they do. A direct democracy certainly can lead to anarchism and totalitarianism, as the masses look for a strong leader to pull them out of the mess they helped create.

Donald Trump has cashed in on this fact. He knows how the media works and used this to his advantage to obtain the power he desired. His timing could not have been better. He knows Americans are desperate for a "strong" anti-establishment leader that can pull them out of the uncertainties they are drowning in. He is their self made man who bucks the system, their anti-hero, their superman.

...Now you're just making me regret not posting Frankenstein's Monster but photoshopping it so Trump is the monster and Frankenstein is Anderson Cooper. The rest of your argument just doesn't make any sense, especially the phrase "anarchism and totalitarianism". No one was trying to bring down the elite for its own sake. Hillary Clinton was just a very unpopular candidate, the same as she was when Obama was elected. Postmodernism isn't nihilism either. It sounds like Tumblr feminism, but it isn't. Do you confuse Tumblr feminism with Russian anarchists throwing bombs? Well, considering you think Trump relates to Romanticism solely based on his strikingly awful hairstyle, probably.

[Nanooka]

@Nanooka What I mean is that what's happening in America is that all its political apparatuses have sort of "outlived its usefulness", and turned into these monstrous institutions that are out of control, are not accountable to anyone, and are not under proper political control.

Who is exactly held accountable for every criminal acts that the US military is committing every single day in foreign countries? Who is held accountable for all the breach of privacies, how the NSA has its hands on every one of citizens? How about the financial system? The banks? Federal Reserve? The CIA, the intelligence? Even the law enforcement? The Federal Reserve is supposed to oversee the activities of the financial firms, and guard against their possible excesses. None of those institutions seem to be doing the very things that that they were intended to do when they were first created. The fact is, nobody even knows much of what goes on, because so much of it is kept in secrecy, so much of it is hushed in the media, in the public, unless someone with a conscience occasionally comes out in forms of whistleblowing and leaks, like the case with Snowden, a desperate attempt to bring back political accountability.

I agree with most of this. Serious reform is needed particularly in the PATRIOT Act (which is the legal basis for the NSA's blanket surveillance), the Federal Reserve's private status, and police accountability.

I think your mistake is in assuming the "proper political control" is in the role you ascribed to the President, as a primary deciding force in government elected to represent "the will of the people" as one body. Constitutionally, Congress controls the printing of money and therefore would take on the Fed's role. Surveillance is under executive authority, but the PATRIOT Act empowers the surveillance state by overriding the judiciary's oversight. It's the judiciary's job to decide whether or not federal agencies can act on their request to spy on a target. Police accountability would involve bills imposing oversight that involve all three branches in their passage, but as this is law enforcement the oversight would primarily be judicial as well. These branches' roles are respectively: to represent the wills of their local constituents and bargain collectively balancing their interests, and to represent the laws enshrined in the Constitution.

You can kind of see how this leads to all the noise created about Russia. What does this have to do with Russia? Well, why would the Americans, especially the ruling elites, the "intelligence", "fan the flame" and drum the drumbeat toward having a war with Russia? Even if it's just to play "chicken"? It would not be in the national interest for America to go to war with Russia, or anyone for that matter. It would be disastrous for everyone involved. Is it because Russia is truly "evil"? Are they the warmongers, and not the US? Can we not simply talk to Russia, and use diplomacy to solve the problem? Is Putin comparable to someone like ****** or Saddam Hussein? The fact is, Putin has always been open to solving the issue via diplomacy, which the US has denied.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_reset

The US has been diplomatically engaging Russia for a few decades now. Putin's still in the habit of invading sovereign states on his border to prop up friendly secessionist movements, still in the habit of conducting military exercises off the American West Coast, and the evidence leans pretty heavily towards his state's intelligence being behind the recent major cyberespionage against America.

There can't be a drumbeat for war without the call for non-diplomatic action, which you just aren't seeing. The call even among congressional hawks is for increasing oil sanctions on them, so I have literally no idea what RT/Sputnik are basing their "Innocent Victim Russia vs. Ruthless American Satan" fearmongering narrative on. Normal economic pressure is by definition diplomatic.

If Putin chose to respond militarily (unlikely; he's not stupid and he'd lose numerically) to said sanction increases designed to exert pressure on and extract reform in/boxing in of his regime, then he'd become a pariah for nakedly using military force to ensure Europe buys his country's oil. In using the term "playing chicken," I was referring to the Russian Air Force drills off the coasts of Alaska and San Francisco. Conducting drills right off our waters amounts to egging us on and seeing if we'll take the bait, a dangerous kind of geopolitical trolling.

At one point, you will eventually have to make a decision, and when we do, it's majority rules, even if it's 51% vs 49%. Of course, the rights of the minorities still have to be guaranteed, and they will be guaranteed by both the law and the constitution. But when we're talking about policy-making, the 51% will be making the decision, or however % required by the constitution.

The majority rules if their decision doesn't violate the Constitution. If it does, then while we've edged more and more to a situation where it's a worthless scrap of paper, technically they don't get what they want. America is a republic, so our foundational liberal principles take precedence over some vague, often in flux, easy for demagogues to manipulate "popular will." The judiciary can and often does rule legislative bills and executive decisions (far too little on the latter) unconstitutional. We're a democratic republic, in that our set-up is supposed to be the public deciding within the confines of our constitutional boundaries. We aren't an absolute democracy, and I'd argue nor should we be past the local level.

Actually one reason we have Trump in office is that even our system of presidential election is designed not to simply put the most popular person in office, but to put in whoever can best balance our often-fractuous regional interests. The Electoral College is designed to make sure a President appeals to as many regions as possible, it was set up to stave off civil war in the founding period. It managed to kick it back two solid generations.

[Skepsis]

...That tends to happen in times of crisis. But people on the Left are complaining about corporations all the time, and even people on the Right will often complain about specific ones *cough*Monsanto*cough*.




People who watch Fox News fetishize "experts", they just pick different "experts" than anyone who wouldn't watch Fox News would. You have to just be trolling to say this.

False, Fox news often chooses fringe "experts" that are consistent with their own political ideology. A perfect example is giving equal, if not more time, to climate change skeptics(deniers) when the scientific consensus is that increasing C02 into the atmosphere is causing global warming(based on the properties of the molecules, which is a nonpolitical property):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyOgSLslDDo

No need for ad hominems

...Now you're just making me regret not posting Frankenstein's Monster but photoshopping it so Trump is the monster and Frankenstein is Anderson Cooper. The rest of your argument just doesn't make any sense, especially the phrase "anarchism and totalitarianism". No one was trying to bring down the elite for its own sake. Hillary Clinton was just a very unpopular candidate, the same as she was when Obama was elected. Postmodernism isn't nihilism either. It sounds like Tumblr feminism, but it isn't. Do you confuse Tumblr feminism with Russian anarchists throwing bombs? Well, considering you think Trump relates to Romanticism solely based on his strikingly awful hairstyle, probably.

lol, the hair connection is just humor.

No, I am not confusing tumblr feminism with Russian anarchists. I am referring to how postmodernism ideas affect large segments of the population in different ways.


Not all that is postmodern is nihilism, but nihilism, as commonly understood, is postmodern.


The average supporter is not nihilistic, but those leading the charge are. The movement was. The Washington Post picked up on the trend:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=.04f9e62748bd

and the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/20...hilism/510314/

Here is a more specific example(http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/04/2...rump-winning):
Largely, O’Reilly said, “a broad disenchantment with the direction of America has fueled the Trump campaign.”
“His outspoken attacks galvanize Americans who are bitterly disenchanted by a society that puts grievance above achievement,” he explained.

“After nearly eight years of the most liberal president in U.S. history, millions of voters have had enough of a social system that directly denigrates their values and caters to non-working individuals.
“They want someone to blow that system to hell.
That’s why Trump is winning.
He pinpointed festering disenchantment long before anyone else.”

[Singu]

@Nanooka Yes, I don't necessarily mean that the President literally controls over everything. But the state would still need a center of political will and accountability. If we were to compare the State to a body, then we would need a "brain", and all its political apparatuses are its right hand, left hand, right foot, left foot and so on. What's increasingly happening in the US is that it's starting to lose its "brain", and its hands and feet are moving independently in their own directions, without any directives from the "brain". What's worse, the right hand and the left hand are not even communicating with each other, due to so much political infighting, turf-wars, etc. They are moving in opposite directions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_reset

The US has been diplomatically engaging Russia for a few decades now. Putin's still in the habit of invading sovereign states on his border to prop up friendly secessionist movements, still in the habit of conducting military exercises off the American West Coast, and the evidence leans pretty heavily towards his state's intelligence being behind the recent major cyberespionage against America.

There can't be a drumbeat for war without the call for non-diplomatic action, which you just aren't seeing. The call even among congressional hawks is for increasing oil sanctions on them, so I have literally no idea what RT/Sputnik are basing their "Innocent Victim Russia vs. Ruthless American Satan" fearmongering narrative on. Normal economic pressure is by definition diplomatic.

If the US was serious about improving relations with Russia, then you don't vilify the head of the state of another country in the media. You don't have top-ranking officials openly vilifying the head of another state, comparing him to Saddam Hussein or ******. You don't create some hysteria about hacking allegations when they're just that - allegations without any definite proof. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that's straight from WW2 propaganda days. I don't even think RT stoops down to that level, they don't go on about how much Obama was evil and how he's comparable to ****** or Saddam Hussein. That's the kind of stuff that North Korea does.

How are oil sanctions diplomacy? That's a definite threat, the kind of threat that you would make on mostly illegitimate states like North Korea. By diplomacy, I mean peacefully resolving issues by having talks, not inflame the situation even further by making threats.

How is Putin invading, when the NATO has been increasing its members on ex-Soviet countries, when it has promised to not "move an inch" from Europe? How is Putin invading, when NATO has been stationing military troops near Russian borders, and putting missile bases near the border? It looks more like NATO is invading Russia to me...:



At any rate, the NATO was created in 1954 to counter the "Communist threat" from the Soviet Russia. And now that the Soviet fell, the NATO has "outlived its usefulness". It no longer has any justification for its existence. So that's why it needs to keep creating the "Russian threat" in order for it to exist.

What you see in the media and public are lies, lies and more lies. It's not because there's a gigantic conspiracy and some small nefarious group of people are conspiring, but because the whole situation necessitate the creation of lies and propaganda. How else would you justify the exorbitant and bloated spending in Defense? How else would you justify the fact that the NSA is snooping in on every level? How else would you justify that the CIA is involved in conspiracies and toppling governments in the other side of the globe? How would you justify the fact that the economy is so "rigged", and the corporations are out of control? etc. etc.

The majority rules if their decision doesn't violate the Constitution. If it does, then while we've edged more and more to a situation where it's a worthless scrap of paper, technically they don't get what they want. America is a republic, so our basic laws take precedence over some vague and often in flux "popular will." The judiciary can and often does rule legislative bills and executive decisions (far too little on the latter) unconstitutional. We're a democratic republic, in that our set-up is supposed to be the public deciding within the confines of our constitutional boundaries. We aren't an absolute democracy, and I'd argue nor should we be past the local level.

The majority has the every right to revise the constitution, if they were bold enough to do so. According to the US constitution, you'd need 2/3 votes from the both parties of the Congress, and then the 2/3 votes from the public in the referendum. Then there might be some additional restrictions. So the requirements are pretty steep and constitutional revisions are unlikely to happen. The last time that the constitution was revised was in 1992.

[Nanooka]

@Nanooka Yes, I don't necessarily mean that the President literally controls over everything. But the state would still need a center of political will and accountability. If we were to compare the State to a body, then we would need a "brain", and all its political apparatuses are its right hand, left hand, right foot, left foot and so on. What's increasingly happening in the US is that it's starting to lose its "brain", and its hands and feet are moving independently in their own directions, without any directives from the "brain". What's worse, the right hand and the left hand are not even communicating with each other, due to so much political infighting, turf-wars, etc. They are moving in opposite directions.

I agree with that. And I think, if you look at the historical trajectory, this is a consequence of the Presidency steadily usurping Congress' role as "the brain." The bureaucracy that you talk about is part of the executive branch. Meanwhile, the legislature being at the helm of politics forces bargaining and compromise, which weakens extremism and polarization.

You're seeing the legislature reassert their authority to some degree now, capitalizing on some of the federal bureaucracy's disdain for Trump's erratic (i.e. likely to inspire blowback and weaken their standing as well) instability to make it a partner in the investigation into whether or not he committed obstruction of justice or is blackmailable by foreign powers. I wouldn't describe this as a "turf war" or in any way a bad thing; it's part of the checks and balances of our system, it's how Congress retains even a slim degree of power over the executive and therefore it's our safeguard against Bonapartism. The alternative is an unchecked executive branch that, like myriad despotisms, increasingly takes unitary hold over the government.

This also happened in the aftermath of Watergate, with a similar fractuous coalition of circumstance in play between Congress and anti-Nixon elements in the bureaucracy (i.e. "Deep Throat"). Like Trump, Nixon resented both the legislature and the bureaucracy and his supporters talked about centralization of key powers of both around the White House, specifically around his close confidant and Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman. This led to a series of Presidents afterwards who, while still pretty strongly empowered (they were no less powerful than say, Eisenhower or Kennedy), lent more power to the legislature and states than Johnson and Nixon had. But the Bush and to a lesser but substantive extent Obama administrations reverted the gains seen for resumption of legislative power in its aftermath. Mostly with the PATRIOT Act in 9/11's aftermath, which was a willing and fear-driven abrogation of legislative responsibility.

If the US was serious about improving relations with Russia, then you don't vilify the head of the state of another country in the media. You don't create some hysteria about hacking allegations when they're just that - allegations without any definite proof. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that's straight from WW2 propaganda days. I don't even think RT stoops down to that level, they don't go on about how much Obama was evil and how he's comparable to ****** or Saddam Hussein. That's the kind of stuff that North Korea does.

If we: invaded a Russian-allied Mexico or Canada to prop up pro-US secessionists, flew military jets off the coast of Russia in unauthorized drills on a regular basis, and were based on the piling evidence the overwhelmingly likely culprit in hacking into a Russian presidential candidate's email server to influence the election result, you would very much see the American President vilified in Russian media. That's because that President would not only be presiding over a rogue state, but also a direct threat to Russian interests.

We vilify the Chinese leadership too, and again rightly so considering their even harsher suppression of dissent than Russia's still-atrocious record, but they're still one of our top trade partners. These are not either-or propositions.

What you see in the media and public are lies, lies and more lies.

And the Kremlin's media organ, with less verification standards, is somehow more trustworthy? The US media does less independent research than I would like and puts too much faith in a source's past credibility alone, but it's a mile better than a tabloid that fuels nonsense like "9/11 was an inside job" and "Pizzagate," that has no independence from their state sponsor.

How are oil sanctions diplomacy? That's a definite threat, the kind of threat that you would make on mostly illegitimate states like North Korea. By diplomacy, I mean peacefully resolving issues by having talks, not inflame the situation even further by making threats.

I'd argue a regime that jails and kills its critics is "mostly illegitimate."

How are oil sanctions not diplomacy, though? It is in neither contradictory with talks (which we already engage in), nor a military threat. It is saying you're not going to buy their oil, so you can exert leverage based on "you stop doing X, we'll start buying again." This has been a part of diplomatic engagement for literally centuries. To describe it as a threat is "cry me a river" to an absurd degree. Or are we somehow obligated to buy their oil now?

How is Putin invading,

He sent troops into Ukraine to take Crimea, and Georgia to aid South Ossetian secessionists? These were acts in violation of the borders of two sovereign countries.

when the NATO has been increasing its members on ex-Soviet countries, when it has promised to not "move an inch" from Europe? How is Putin invading, when NATO has been stationing military troops near Russian borders, and putting missile bases near the border? It looks more like NATO is invading Russia to me...:

We're the superpower. As the superpower, you contain potential rival powers from expanding and threatening the stability that comes with a less haphazardly multipolar world order. The countries we stationed troops in were Central Asian and Caucasian countries that said they wanted them, because they have interest in containing encroachment of the kind that the Russian Empire inflicted on them over the centuries on gaining independence from the USSR, that's today happened in Georgia and Ukraine.

Meanwhile, we actually have no missile defense shield in Poland despite the fact that every wargame shows it'd be necessary to avoid Russia overrunning the European continent if they decided to strike through the Baltic, due to Europe's relatively small amounts of enlisted. Europe would quickly be retaken, but it'd add extra chaos to any future conflagration, in the worrying event their regime became even more brazen than they are today. Like if Dugin continues to be a respected state ideologue and advisor, if an ideological Duginist like Naryshkin succeeded Putin who he's already close to.

The Obama administration cancelled that defense shield deal because then-President Medvedev considered it "inflammatory," and therefore it risked hurting the Russia Reset. There was also a Bush-Putin anti-Islamism rapprochement similar to Obama's "Russia Reset" that the Georgia invasion quashed. Given these facts, I can't take the "Evil Invading America" vs. "Innocent Harmless Russia" black-and-white narrative seriously. It doesn't match the respective countries' behavior.

Instead I think realpolitik is a better explanation as it is in most international relations, Putin's regime is expansionist because (as a land/resource power) that's the only way to even possibly take superpower status in the long-term. And it's certainly the only way to avoid Russia being just a player in an America-dominated world order. As someone who cares more about geopolitical stability and protection of liberal values, my interests diverge from Putin's in that I don't care about Russia becoming a major world power and do care about the negative effects of policies pursuant to that.

At any rate, the NATO was created in 1954 to counter the "Communist threat" from the Soviet Russia. And now that the Soviet fell, the NATO has "outlived its usefulness". It no longer has any justification for its existence. So that's why it needs to keep creating the "Russian threat" in order for it to exist.

It's only outlived its usefulness so long as there are no longer threats to the North Atlantic countries. There are, both Islamism and an increasingly emboldened Russia. The former should be straightforward given ISIS' terror attacks within the West, the latter was shown above in their routine cyberespionage against the West, of which the probable Clinton hack is just one example; they're the #2 conducter of cyberattacks against America's security systems in general, after China. (http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/1.673962 and https://www.voanews.com/a/china-russ...t/1608419.html) Also in conducting military drills right off NATO powers' coasts.

How else would you justify the exorbitant and bloated spending in Defense? How else would you justify the fact that the NSA is snooping in on every level? How else would you justify that the CIA is involved in conspiracies and toppling governments in the other side of the globe? How would you justify the fact that the economy is so "rigged", and the corporations are out of control? etc. etc.

These are major issues that are often talked about in American political discourse.

The majority has the every right to revise the constitution, if they were bold enough to do so. According to the US constitution, you'd need 2/3 votes from the both parties of the Congress, and then the 2/3 votes from the public in the referendum

Sure, there are procedures for Congress and the state governments to amend it if part is faulty, though that public referendum bit you're referring to isn't the case and I'm not sure where you're getting it from. That's true of several state constitutions, not the national one. The second "2/3 vote" is a vote of the state legislatures. You also don't technically need both parties in Congress, just a supermajority, though for it to pass the states it generally needs bipartisan support anyway.

These amendments are usually minor tinkering around the edges on one issue or another, the last one that changed our system of government in a substantive way was the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1860s. I'd argue another major one is needed, to strike down the awful Citizens United ruling so we can reinstate laws restricting large-scale private campaign finance/legalized bribery.

The Bill of Rights is the safeguard of our liberal principles though and has never been revised, even the fiercest defenders of "unitary executive" theory argue it shouldn't be since it would stoke the fires of chaos. What we've revised are the procedural portions from the rest of the Constitution. This doesn't stop people from voting for candidates who broaden the Bill of Rights' terms to the point of uselessness in practice, but the Supreme Court in most cases has more power than the voter-elected candidates for good (ruling Jim Crow unconstitutional) and for ill (Citizens United). This acts as a restraint, to change our Constitution in any substantive way you're right that steep requirements are set.

[Nanooka]

But whatever. I don't think this board is good for my stress levels, debating is just talking past one another here and parroting slogans, with seemingly no relation to exchange of ideas and collaboratively figuring out where the truth lies. The high-stress nature of it has been causing me splitting headaches. I've thought about ragequitting every single time it sucks me in, and I think it might be time to actually do that. :/

[Bertrand]

you just need a nice SEI to support you while you otherwise burn it at both ends (emotional and physical) in support of intellectual truth and rigor

apathy is also a justifiable response to singularity

[Pallas]

But whatever. I don't think this board is good for my stress levels, debating is just talking past one another here and parroting slogans, with seemingly no relation to exchange of ideas and collaboratively figuring out where the truth lies. The high-stress nature of it has been causing me splitting headaches. I've thought about ragequitting every single time it sucks me in, and I think it might be time to actually do that. :/

I think that might just be the nature of public Internet debates in general. I found where Philosophy Forums has moved to and it seems barely above here. Of course all the huge generic forums like deviantArt and Reddit would be in the bowels of hell on a quality graph in comparison. I think Internet forum debates asymptotically approach a neutral quality level in the first place... The Internet makes it impossible for anyone to be even vaguely idealistic about human nature if you even read a little bit.

[Pallas]

But the state would still need a center of political will and accountability. If we were to compare the State to a body, then we would need a "brain", and all its political apparatuses are its right hand, left hand, right foot, left foot and so on. What's increasingly happening in the US is that it's starting to lose its "brain", and its hands and feet are moving independently in their own directions, without any directives from the "brain". What's worse, the right hand and the left hand are not even communicating with each other, due to so much political infighting, turf-wars, etc. They are moving in opposite directions.

This just sounds like a combination of Hindu castes and the social contract system. Just ways to pretend that power doesn't pool up like water in a tarp.

The majority has the every right to revise the constitution, if they were bold enough to do so. According to the US constitution, you'd need 2/3 votes from the both parties of the Congress, and then the 2/3 votes from the public in the referendum. Then there might be some additional restrictions. So the requirements are pretty steep and constitutional revisions are unlikely to happen. The last time that the constitution was revised was in 1992.

http://law.capital.edu/WorkArea/Down....aspx?id=32584

1992 is not long ago at all politically.

[Singu]

@Nanooka Just to be sure, I'm not necessarily supporting Trump, nor am I even saying that he's a good guy (nor am I necessarily supporting Russia). But he still legally won the election, and he has every right to exercise every power that has been handed to him.

I agree with that. And I think, if you look at the historical trajectory, this is a consequence of the Presidency steadily usurping Congress' role as "the brain." The bureaucracy that you talk about is part of the executive branch. Meanwhile, the legislature being at the helm of politics forces bargaining and compromise, which weakens extremism and polarization.

I'm saying that both the President and the Congress are the "brain". But the President is either the figurative or the actual leader of the country, the leader of his own party, and the leader of the Congress. He has the ability to launch executive orders, and he has the ability to pass the law by having the ability to veto the law. One of the reasons why you'd need a clear "leader" of the country is because you would need to deal with other countries. You can't just go and talk to other countries and say, "Well, I have no idea what's going in my own country, I have no way to affect anything". They would get tired of you and say, "Take me to an ACTUAL leader! Not this useless buffoon!". You'd need a "face" to show to the rest of the world.

You're seeing the legislature reassert their authority to some degree now, capitalizing on some of the federal bureaucracy's disdain for Trump's erratic (i.e. likely to inspire blowback and weaken their standing as well) instability to make it a partner in the investigation into whether or not he committed obstruction of justice or is blackmailable by foreign powers. I wouldn't describe this as a "turf war" or in any way a bad thing; it's part of the checks and balances of our system, it's how Congress retains even a slim degree of power over the executive and therefore it's our safeguard against Bonapartism. The alternative is an unchecked executive branch that, like myriad despotisms, increasingly takes unitary hold over the government.

By turf-war, I don't mean only between the President and the bureaucrats, but also between other bureaucrats and "rival" bureaucratic institutions. What do you think would happen when the Department of Defense, and the CIA, FBI and the NSA are not cooperating with each other or not even communicating with each other? The entire purpose of those institutions is to serve the President as well as the country. They're not supposed to be fighting with each other, but cooperating with each other for a common goal.

I mean sure, if the President is involved in an obvious criminal activity, then they should bring that to light. But I don't necessarily think that's happening with Trump. If there is, then I would like to see a definite proof, and not just allegations. We don't know if he has actually obstructed justice. We don't even know if he's a "Russian puppet", which is a pretty ridiculous claim.

If we: invaded a Russian-allied Mexico or Canada to prop up pro-US secessionists, flew military jets off the coast of Russia in unauthorized drills on a regular basis, and were based on the piling evidence the overwhelmingly likely culprit in hacking into a Russian presidential candidate's email server to influence the election result, you would very much see the American President vilified in Russian media. That's because that President would not only be presiding over a rogue state, but also a direct threat to Russian interests.

Yeah, and that's basically what the US is doing in foreign countries.

We vilify the Chinese leadership too, and again rightly so considering their even harsher suppression of dissent than Russia's still-atrocious record, but they're still one of our top trade partners. These are not either-or propositions.

That's really unheard of in other countries. It just goes to show how ridiculous the US has been acting lately. Sure Putin is some far-right authoritarian figure, he deserves criticism but he's probably not comparable to ****** or Hussein.

And the Kremlin's media organ, with less verification standards, is somehow more trustworthy? The US media does less independent research than I would like and puts too much faith in a source's past credibility alone, but it's a mile better than a tabloid that fuels nonsense like "9/11 was an inside job" and "Pizzagate," that has no independence from their state sponsor.

I didn't say that RT was trustworthy, but even RT doesn't stoop down to that level of vilification and allegations. Wasn't the respectable media supposed to report things based on definite proofs, and not just some allegations or vilifications?

How are oil sanctions not diplomacy, though? It is in no way a military threat. It is saying you're not going to buy their oil, so you can exert leverage based on "you stop doing X, we'll start buying again." This has been a part of diplomatic engagement for literally centuries. To describe it as a threat is "cry me a river" to an absurd degree. Or are we somehow obligated to buy their oil now?

You use sanctions when the talks have failed or have been rejected. Sanctions are the next level to diplomacy. Past that, you might even have military confrontations.

By the way, Germany criticized the US sanctions as harmful to the EU economy.

He sent troops into Ukraine to take Crimea, and Georgia to aid South Ossetian secessionists? These were acts in violation of the borders of two sovereign countries.

He didn't "take" Crimea, 94% of the Crimean population agreed to be annexed by Russia via a referendum, since they are mostly a Russian-speaking population.

And of course, there is the documented proof that the CIA had aided 5 billion dollars to the Neo-Nazi faction in Ukraine.

We're the superpower. As the superpower, you contain potential rival powers from expanding and threatening the stability that comes with a less haphazardly multipolar world order. The countries we stationed troops in were Central Asian and Caucasian countries that said they wanted them, because they have interest in containing encroachment of the kind that the Russian Empire inflicted on them over the centuries on gaining independence from the USSR, that's today happened in Georgia and Ukraine.

How is the multipolar world less stable? The US had been acting more seriously when there was the threat of Cold War. After that, the US has been acting carelessly since it no longer had a rival to worry about. At any rate, "containing" either Russia or China is impossible; they will simply be a pushback from those countries, which could be disastrous for the stability of the world. The American hegemony is no longer benefitting anyone in the world, and hence there's so much problems with "terrorism" these days. What's next, will there be more problems with the "Russians" or the "Chinese"?

Again, how is Russia invading, when NATO has been closing inch by inch to Russian borders? Is Russia putting missile bases near Mexican borders?

Meanwhile, we actually have no missile defense shield in Poland despite the fact that every wargame shows it'd be necessary to avoid Russia overrunning the European continent if they decided to strike through the Baltic, due to Europe's relatively small amounts of enlisted. Europe would quickly be retaken, but it'd add extra chaos to any future conflagration, in the worrying event their regime became even more brazen than they are today. Like if Dugin continues to be a respected state ideologue and advisor, if an ideological Duginist like Naryshkin succeeded Putin who he's already close to.

They didn't put missile bases to "protect from Russia", the excuse was that they needed those missile bases to fend off threats from Iran.

Again, how can Russia overtake Europe, when EU-NATO countries alone spend 4 times as much on defense than Russia? And not to mention... the US spends as much as the top 10 biggest defense spenders combined. Basically, the US has no rival. This whole "Russian threat" is completely overblown. Germany is pretty much skeptical of the whole thing, because well, I guess they'd need to export stuff to Russia and China. But it's also based on common sense. Conflicting with Russia would benefit no one in the world. We can keep blaming Russia for being "invasive" and "aggressive" till the cows come home. But again, who is actually doing the invading?

Instead I think realpolitik is a better explanation as it is in most international relations, Putin's regime is expansionist because (as a land/resource power) that's the only way to even possibly take superpower status in the long-term. And it's certainly the only way to avoid Russia being just a player in an America-dominated world order. As someone who cares more about geopolitical stability and protection of liberal values, my interests diverge from Putin's in that I don't care about Russia becoming a major world power and do care about the negative effects of policies pursuant to that.

I think Putin is more focused on rebuilding his own country and its economy. Which shows that he has been pretty effective in doing so. Being invasive would distract him from that goal. Again, Putin is not a good guy, but who has actually been doing all the invading? How many countries have the US invaded, since 9/11?

It's only outlived its usefulness so long as there are no longer threats to the North Atlantic countries. There are, both Islamism and an increasingly emboldened Russia. The former should be straightforward given ISIS' terror attacks within the West, the latter was shown above in their routine cyberespionage against the West, of which the probable Clinton hack is just one example; they're the #2 conducter of cyberattacks against America's security systems in general, after China. (http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/1.673962 and https://www.voanews.com/a/china-russ...t/1608419.html) Also in conducting military drills right off NATO powers' coasts.

Again, who is the "threat", and who is NATO supposed to be protecting itself from? Russia? Again, it shows that EU-NATO spends 4 times as much on defense than Russia. Besides, the Soviets fell, so there is no longer the "threat of Communism". "Islamism" is a problem that is pretty much created by the US since 9/11. Russia also wants to get rid of ISIS, obviously, but the US or the NATO aren't cooperating with Russia for some reason. The NATO is just creating more and more problems in order to justify its own existence. NATO is supposed to protecting the Atlantic, yet ironically it's creating more problems for the Northern Atlantic.

Sure, there are procedures for Congress and the state governments to amend it if part is faulty, though that public referendum bit you're referring to isn't the case and I'm not sure where you're getting it from. That's true of several state constitutions, not the national one. The second "2/3 vote" is a vote of the state legislatures. You also don't technically need both parties in Congress, just a supermajority, though for it to pass the states it generally needs bipartisan support anyway.

Well, it turns out that it was either 2/3 votes from the Congress OR the 2/3 votes from the public, which has actually never been used. Usually, it's both for some other countries.

These amendments are usually minor tinkering around the edges on one issue or another, the last one that changed our system of government in a substantive way was the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1860s. I'd argue another major one is needed, to strike down the awful Citizens United ruling so we can reinstate laws restricting private campaign finance.

The Bill of Rights is the safeguard of our liberal principles though and has never been revised, even the fiercest defenders of "unitary executive" theory argue it shouldn't be since it would stoke the fires of chaos. What we've revised are the procedural portions from the rest of the Constitution. This doesn't stop people from voting for candidates who broaden the Bill of Rights' terms to the point of uselessness in practice, but the Supreme Court in most cases has more power than the voter-elected candidates for good (ruling Jim Crow unconstitutional) and for ill (Citizens United). This acts as a restraint, to change our Constitution in any substantive way you're right that steep requirements are set.

What I'm saying is, if the majority wanted to revise the constitution badly enough, and even to completely rewrite it, then they have every right to do so. I'm not saying that that's likely to happen, but if they wanted, then they can.

[rat200Turbo]

I'm not wasting my time getting too involved in this, but there is this claim which is false and irritating:

And the Kremlin's media organ, with less verification standards, is somehow more trustworthy? The US media does less independent research than I would like and puts too much faith in a source's past credibility alone, but it's a mile better than a tabloid that fuels nonsense like "9/11 was an inside job" and "Pizzagate," that has no independence from their state sponsor..

What are you, a political science major? You regurgitate information well but it's not personally thought out, it sounds like it came from a textbook honestly.

It was an inside job - anyone who has personally made the effort to research the topic will know this. There is no doubt about it: 9/11 was an inside job.
Did you know that a 3rd world trade center - a 47 story skyscraper, called WTC7, collapsed at the same time as the twin towers and was not hit by an airplane? And that the news never told you this building collapsed, or that it even existed? Why not? Yet its collapse contradicted the entire narrative put out about jet fuel. Maybe since you seem to know everything you can explain to me how that happened - it wasn't jet fuel, it wasn't hit by an airplane. It collapsed in freefall, it was a steel frame skyscraper, it had MINOR fire damage, the media BLACKED OUT the story - which is why you've never heard of it... Why did they not report it? They didn't notice that big 3rd pile of rubble, no one got wind of the tapes of the building coming down? There was more media surrounding this event than a presidential election, for weeks... Let's hear it, since you know everything about this topic already (without researching it).
Of course a government could never POSSIBLY stage an attack on themselves to rally their people to war - it's not like this hasn't already happened repeatedly throughout history, as recently as ****** staging Poland attacking Germany which sparked the entire war.

PizzaGate you haven't researched either - you don't even seem to know what the claim is: the Podesta emails are full of very clear references to child porn. I grew up on the internet and dwelling in channels like 4/chan, I can tell you without any doubt when people are using code words referencing child porn and that is exactly what the Podesta emails do. Don't believe? Can't believe it? Would it shatter the little happy bubble you hide in to ponder that possibility? We've had politicians arrested for pedophilia repeatedly. We had Boystown - ever heard of Boystown? A very public indicent of politicians kidnapping and raping young boys, for years... in an organized network, which NO ONE DENIES HAPPENED. Why would it be absurd that this could still be happening? It's not absurd, at all, and there is undeniable evidence that it still is - and you haven't examined or thought about the evidence, have you?
Don't run your mouth about things you don't understand

Who is the "Kremlins media organ"? Alex Jones? Are you really so caught up in this Russia conspiracy nonsense that you believe Alex Jones is working for Russia?
Where is your brain? How are you passing this off as "thinking"? I don't see how you can claim to be thinking, this is just hysteria and appeals to consensus and authority. It's nothing - not thinking.

Why did they not tell you about this building?

[Nanooka]

@Nanooka Just to be sure, I'm not necessarily supporting Trump, nor am I even saying that he's a good guy (nor am I necessarily supporting Russia). But he still legally won the election, and he has every right to exercise every power that has been handed to him.

Not if he's broken the law. That's what's being investigated, and with the Felix Sater revelations looks increasingly likely.

I'm saying that both the President and the Congress are the "brain". But the President is either the figurative or the actual leader of the country, the leader of his own party, and the leader of the Congress.

The Speaker of the House is the leader of the Congress, which is entirely separate from the executive branch and often even controlled by the party opposite the President. The two branches only overlap in the figure of the Vice President, whose only power is to cast tie-breaking votes. The actual management of the Senate is done by the Majority Leader, also part of the legislative branch.

And we don't have formal party leaders. It's very arguable whether Trump or Ryan is currently leader of the Republicans. It was arguable whether Obama, Reid, or Pelosi was leader of the Democrats until this year. Plain and simple, you're talking with very incomplete information about America's system of government.

He has the ability to launch executive orders, and he has the ability to pass the law by having the ability to veto the law.

Vetos can be overriden by a large enough legislative vote, as can executive orders. There's also strong but loosening precedent on what is and what isn't acceptable for executive orders, their use is pretty limited in scope.

One of the reasons why you'd need a clear "leader" of the country is because you would need to deal with other countries. You can't just go and talk to other countries and say, "Well, I have no idea what's going in my own country, I have no way to affect anything". They would get tired of you and say, "Take me to an ACTUAL leader! Not this useless buffoon!". You'd need a "face" to show to the rest of the world.

This is a job for the State Department which yes, falls under executive authority. That said, treaties are actually negotiated by the Senate, so the legislature has extensive overseas authority as well.

By turf-war, I don't mean only between the President and the bureaucrats, but also between other bureaucrats and "rival" bureaucratic institutions. What do you think would happen when the Department of Defense, and the CIA, FBI and the NSA are not cooperating with each other or not even communicating with each other? The entire purpose of those institutions is to serve the President as well as the country. They're not supposed to be fighting with each other, but cooperating with each other for a common goal.

I don't see any evidence DoD as at war with the CIA, FBI, or NSA. Rivalry between the intelligence branches is common in every country, there's often a minor domestic vs. foreign intel branch competition. This is rarely a serious impediment to getting things done and I don't see any evidence it's gone that way in the US, since our intelligence agencies seem to be mostly on the same page. If it were, particularly related to the NSA considering its very existence wasn't declassified until a few decades ago (it was formerly joked about as "No Such Agency"), we unfortunately probs wouldn't know though.

I mean sure, if the President is involved in an obvious criminal activity, then they should bring that to light. But I don't necessarily think that's happening with Trump. If there is, then I would like to see a definite proof, and not just allegations. We don't know if he has actually obstructed justice. We don't even know if he's a "Russian puppet", which is a pretty ridiculous claim.

You can't have proof without an investigation, so instead of attacking said investigation as some plot to undermine wonderful democratic unitary-executive government, why not see what they come out with?

The obstruction of justice charges are pretty easy to defend, since his own words demonstrate the Russiagate investigation was the foremost reason for the Comey firing, though they want a fuller picture before bringing it to trial. The question they're currently looking into is financial blackmailability, considering his long-standing business ties to Russian mafiya-connected figures like the Saters and financial interest in the Bank of Cyprus where Russian oligarchs stash their dough.

Yeah, and that's basically what the US is doing in foreign countries.

And in those countries, which do not include Russia, the American leadership is vilified. I'm not here defending every aspect of American foreign policy. Sometimes our interventions are right, sometimes they're wrong. It depends on the circumstances at the time. I am here saying your claim, which was "Russian media doesn't vilify the American President like American media vilifies Putin," would almost definitely not be true if the US were doing towards Russia what it's done towards us.

I didn't say that RT was trustworthy, but even RT doesn't stoop down to that level of vilification and allegations.

RT has promoted Pizzagate. This is a claim that there was a vast pedophile network involving Clinton, Podesta, and Obomer run out of a pizza joint in DC. That sounds like pretty heavy "vilification and allegations" to me. They also promoted the idea referenced above that 9/11 was an inside job.

You use sanctions when the talks have failed or have been rejected. Sanctions are the next level to diplomacy. Past that, you might even have military confrontations.

By the way, Germany criticized the US sanctions as harmful to the EU economy.

The Russia resets under both Bush and Obama did fail with the Georgia and Ukraine invasions respectively, new talks would need concrete incentive (i.e. sanctions) rather than simply an assumption of good faith.

We'd need Germany on board for the sanctions to be effective. Russia's interest in the German election and ramped up espionage against Germany (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ussian-hackers and http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a7718006.html) give cause to lower that reticence though. It now affects them too.

He didn't "take" Crimea, 94% of the Crimean population agreed to be annexed by Russia via a referendum, since they are mostly a Russian-speaking population.

And of course, there is the documented proof that the CIA had aided 5 billion dollars to the Neo-Nazi faction in Ukraine.

Source on the latter? Note: GlobalResearch.ca is not a valid source.

Per the former, "no" typically didn't vote due to the Autonomous Republic of Crimea being run by Yanukovych allies and therefore the pro-annexation side controlling the polling stations. Nonpartisan polling shows annexation would have definitely won regardless, but with a margin closer to 60-65%, if there were no concerns about the vote's legitimacy. However, Crimean Tatars tend to be very anti-Putin; were they given right of return home, the vote likely would have narrowly lost.

The above is all besides the point, too. The point is that a sovereign country's borders were invaded pursuant to that. This is a violation of international law. It'd be like if the '00s fringey movement for Vermont to secede and join Canada had succeeded in winning a majority's support, this doesn't then give Canada control over an area under US jurisdiction.

How is the multipolar world less stable?

Too many cooks in the kitchen.

The more varying interests with roughly equal power, the higher the risk of large-scale war is, because "back down" becomes less and less of a mathematical necessity for those other powers. Added to that, this myriad of powerful interests leads to complex alliance structures with widely competing demands; if one turns into military conflict, the risk of this spreading becomes greater once those alliance structures get involved. Whereas today, wars tend to be small in scale relative to the wars of the 1400s to WWII, wars between the rise of the nation-state and the dawning of a more stable bipolar (then unipolar) world system. The reason for it is simple game theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari...s)#Unipolarity

The US had been acting more seriously when there was the threat of Cold War. After that, the US has been acting carelessly since it no longer had a rival to worry about.

Wilsonian derangements began in a multipolar world, under Woodrow Wilson. It's just a logical extrapolation from a basic part of the American national consciousness though, rooted in the millennialist Puritan "shining city on a hill" ideal and Thomas Jefferson's very similar proposed "empire of liberty." This ideal of spreading the providence of liberty entails a certain amount of desire to liberalize the world, which unfortunately is often done haphazardly with pie in the sky "we can turn this country with no history of liberalism into a democracy ovenight" plans, rather than through long-term trade and deft realpolitik.

The merits of bipolarity versus unipolarity could be an interesting debate. I think we did make less reckless mistakes during the Cold War, though also more atrocities were committed, things that make Abu Ghraib look extremely minor by comparison. On the other hand, a bipolar world's conflicts when they turn violent have the sharpest risk of human extinction since that's where the MAD calculus leads with only two players. The Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the world has come to blowing up.

I personally would prefer a unipolarity within the context of a world federalist system, the kind of decentralized global arbitration the green movement proposes. With input from a wide variety of regions to prevent the kind of solipsistic fantasism you see in the neoconservative movement from making colossal mistakes again. But that'd require a majority acceptance of liberal principles or it'd swiftly turn into world despotism, I don't think the planet is there yet.

At any rate, "containing" either Russia or China is impossible; they will simply be a pushback from those countries, which could be disastrous for the stability of the world.

You're seeing pushback in both, particularly Russia, but I think both countries are also led by rational people who are looking to maximize their country's gains. Therefore, if the game theory shows they'll back down and play by the rules of international law, they almost certainly will. My fear is only an irrational actor rising to power in one.

Again, how is Russia invading, when NATO has been closing inch by inch to Russian borders? Is Russia putting missile bases near Mexican borders?

Russia literally did invade Georgia and Crimea. One can have bases in Central Asian/Caucasian countries that border Russia, and still have Russia invading neighbors. These are not at all contradictory propositions.

The bases in Central Asia and use of bases in the Caucasus were accepted by the governments of those countries, requested in the latter case. The former like balancing US, Russia, and China against one-another and don't particularly want a return to Russian Empire/USSR encroachment. The latter also have that concern, and have more uniformly America-aligned foreign policy interests.

They didn't put missile bases to "protect from Russia", the excuse was that they needed those missile bases to fend off threats from Iran.

In Afghanistan and the UAE, neither of which border Russia. The American use of Georgian bases for joint training, which I had assumed you were referring to (we don't formally have a base in the Caucasus), relate to Russia.

We don't have a base in non-Afghani Central Asia anymore by the way, your map is very off. We closed the one in Uzbekistan in 2005 after unrest in their government and being asked to leave. It was set up due to concerns over Russia and actually primarily, China. The one in Kyrgyzstan, closed in 2014, had to do with both of those as well. http://thediplomat.com/2014/06/the-u...-central-asia/

Again, how can Russia overtake Europe, when EU-NATO countries alone spend 4 times as much on defense than Russia?

That's what the wargames from both the Pentagon and NATO show, as a consequence of Russia's much better mobilization in both personnel and hybrid warfare techniques. It'd quickly reverse itself, but the fact is that with America and the UK excluded, NATO is very understaffed and unmobilized.
One of the few things Trump is right about is that the Anglosphere makes up a disproportionate amount of NATO's mobilization. (c.f. http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/03/...-lose-quickly/, http://www.scout.com/military/warrio...cs-overun-nato, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/ran...AND_RR1253.pdf)

Being invasive would distract him from that goal. Again, Putin is not a good guy, but who has actually been doing all the invading? How many countries have the US invaded, since 9/11?

Iraq was a serious problem, and the full-scale regime change in Libya was probably a mistake. As I said above, I'm not here to defend every aspect of American foreign policy, which I often disagree with. Some level of idealistic goals are a positive, but it must be tempered by realism in a way it often hasn't been in the last several decades.

Putin's regime has been invasive several times though, and twice with the sole and stated intent to aid Russia-aligned secession movements in contravention of national borders. I think he wants what every leader wants: maximizing his gains, which includes maximizing his seat at the international table. The maximization of Russia's economic gains that you mention are also a conduit to that, it translates into increased power for Russia on the world stage. He also has stated a conservative sense of Russian nationalism pretty close to Bismarck's a century and a half ago in Prussia, and based on his background I'm inclined to think that's not just campaign pandering, so I think there are explicit nationalist rather than just personal concerns on his part as well.

"Islamism" is a problem that is pretty much created by the US since 9/11.

And do you think they're just going to quit if we talk to them nicely or something? Iraq was a serious failure that dramatically inflamed these tensions, but the fact is that the hornet's nest has been kicked. It'll take time and effort to get it back down to pre-Iraq levels, we're not there yet.

Russia also wants to get rid of ISIS, obviously, but the US or the NATO aren't cooperating with Russia for some reason.

We have a basic disagreement on the proper response to Kurdish independence and the Assad regime, so it's a three-way conflict. But at least one NATO power, France, actually has collaborated with Russia in anti-ISIS raids.

Well, it turns out that it was either 2/3 votes from the Congress OR the 2/3 votes from the public, which has actually never been used. Usually, it's both for some other countries.

What's your source on "the public" here? I ask because you really don't seem to know what you're talking about, no offense.

The procedure is laid out pretty simply in the Constitution. It needs a 2/3 vote from Congress or a 2/3 vote from the states, meaning their legislatures, not the voters therein. This is the procedure if it goes to the states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_...ng_conventions There is no procedure for a nationwide referendum. There are procedures for referendums on state-level constitutional amendments in California, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington.

What I'm saying is, if the majority wanted to revise the constitution badly enough, and even to completely rewrite it, then they have every right to do so. I'm not saying that that's likely to happen, but if they wanted, then they can.

The majority actually can't rewrite the Constitution. That would entail a Constitutional Convention, which requires 3/4 support of the various state legislatures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articl...s_Constitution

I'd also disagree that they have an ethical right to do so as opposed to a legal one, though there we get into totally subjective territory. I agree with Friedrich Hayek in saying that he'd prefer a liberal but undemocratic government to a democratic but illiberal one, though obviously I want both. If the majority votes to sacrifice basic principles like freedom of speech, the right to personally owned property, the right to the freedom of one's own person, then I'd still favor those essential building-blocks of a free society being honored. Anything else is just the majority giving into a demagogic movement and fostering a tyranny, as has happened all too often throughout history.

[Nanooka]

Did you know that a 3rd world trade center - a 47 story skyscraper, called WTC7, collapsed at the same time as the twin towers and was not hit by an airplane?

This building was heavily hit by debris and had a huge fire on the side of it that the video you linked isn't showing. You can find pictures of it readily, there was a gaping hole caused by said fire and the structural damage was extensive.

And that the news never told you this building collapsed, or that it even existed?

I've heard plenty about WTC7.

the Podesta emails are full of very clear references to child porn.

They were full of references to spaghetti that 4chan decided was "code" for children, apparently unaware that the Podesta brothers are from a pretty old-school Italian-American family and are well-known in DC for lobbying over home-cooked old-fashioned Italian dinners. Feel free to show me any actual reference to child porn though.

We've had politicians arrested for pedophilia repeatedly. We had Boystown - ever heard of Boystown? A very public indicent of politicians kidnapping and raping young boys, for years... in an organized network, which NO ONE DENIES HAPPENED.

Most people deny the Omaha Reagan-administration child sex trafficking allegations surrounding Boys Town, though I actually do think there's more that's worth investigating there than in most claims from the Alex Jones mill. Unlike "9/11 was an inside job" it doesn't violate any basic laws of physics, nor does it really stretch the bounds of plausibility. It seems like it'd be a scarily effective blackmail tool, actually. The stories of those alleging the "Franklin cover-up" don't really have any concrete proof behind them, but there is a lot of interesting circumstantial stuff there.

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal also warrants much bigger investigation into links with his political friends (which include Trump and the Clintons), considering he was operating a small call-girl ring I'd be surprised if he didn't offer any to interested friends. There are specific claims that he did from girls saying they worked for him, related to Trump, Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew. One unfortunate side-effect from Pizzagate is that it led to less attention on these more readily verifiable underage sex trafficking claims.

Why would it be absurd that this could still be happening? It's not absurd, at all, and there is undeniable evidence that it still is - and you haven't examined or thought about the evidence, have you?
Don't run your mouth about things you don't understand

You're really vitriolic and condescending.

Who is the "Kremlins media organ"? Alex Jones? Are you really so caught up in this Russia conspiracy nonsense that you believe Alex Jones is working for Russia?

No, I'm saying Russia's state media literally aired stories on Pizzagate, giving its originator Mike Cernovich favorable coverage.

[rat200Turbo]

Anyone who is actually interested in knowing the facts, here's a few videos for you to watch:

[strangeling]

It really kind of ruins the thought of talking about, thinking about, or eating pizza when I know it's code for weird old dudes to have sex with boys...

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

The corruption actually happened with Obama, who is nowhere, in any shape or form- the progressive and rainbow peace-loving save the world wonder leftist that people wanted him to be. He was largely ineffectual as an inspiring leader and just catered to sociopathic businesses and the top 1%ers - the same thing Hillary would have done. "Yes we can!" Obama supporters shouted. Yes we can do what... do the same thing we did for X amount of years lel. I mean Oprah doing all those stupid and pretentious interviews with Michelle Obama while this sad little world dies a more horrible death each day, shame on them. And then some idiot leftist would then jump in and tell me I am a racist and that I hate both Michelle and Oprah because they're 'strong and successful black women!" - hurting somebody that is essentially on their same side.

Anyway, this weakness gave Trump and his party the ability to sneak in and claim he could fix all the stuff the democratic party couldn't. Instead of any logical or technical plans he just relied on male self confident and bragging which was highly effective, especially for blue collar 'smear the queer' Alex Jones-watching bully types. And people still think the left are the "emotional" ones.

Now think of the analogy of a person dying from cancer. (It's obviously a metaphor, the 'system' is the cancer, and America is dying from it but just also pretend that it's a real, terminal cancer.) If a person is dying from cancer and all the experts (the snobby professionals trump supporters hate) say "I'm sorry but there's nothing we can do for you, we don't know how to fix your cancer" (which is basically what the DNC did with all their flip flopping and empty promises) - how do you think that makes the person with cancer feel?

And let's say you have a witch doctor in the village... who claims that they have the secret potion to fix your cancer, to not listen to the competent experts (the liberal educated elite that working class understandably grew to hate) - do you trust this witch doctor (Trump) over the experts? It is idiotic to trust this con-artist just because the experts have let you down and continued to help people who never needed help. But this whole thing was never that rational of course. So you actually listen and vote for this jackass and put aside the horrid way he treats other people because you're fed up with a system who only rewards the most selfish and fucked up people, while shitting on good and decent people- out of anger and fear and desperation and sadness and a mix of other emotions. Of course this jack-ass can't actually solve your problems and the 'magic potion' you are drinking is just his own narcissism, which he continues to get even more cash for himself.

Or you vote for him because you really, really do hate women and gay men and it's that simple and evil, and for that you are a horrible and contemptible person. And you try to say that you don't hate women and gay men but you really deep in your heart do- and everybody can see it no matter how much you try to gaslight, and we can always tell the success of any society by how well it treats its women and gays. Guess what, my generation? As annoying as SJWs are sometimes they are actually right.

Oompa Loompa said "don't listen to her I know how to really stop ISIS" without giving any actual plan on doing so- and it came off as better than her response. Because in desperate times people could only listen to self confidence, with no data or logic to back it up. So he is terrifying not really for himself but the people he fools and gaslights based on empty promises that are delivered arrogantly. All the left has to do (but they won't do it cuz they suck, like I have little faith or hope) is be more Se and bad-ass and be just as arrogant with their ideals and less stupidly PC but you know that they won't.

Instead they will morally chastise somebody for sixteen hours for using the word '******' or make up dumb words like cisgendered that normal gendered people never had for themselves in the first place.

I try to focus on my own small family and help who I can in small ways because politically, it's a huge poopy train wreck.

[Singu]

This is a job for the State Department which yes, falls under executive authority. That said, treaties are actually negotiated by the Senate, so the legislature has extensive overseas authority as well.

Those people are still nominated by the President, which are yes, checked by the Senate. So if the President is comparable to the CEO of the company, then the Congress are the board of directors. It's debatable to say which has the most power, but as a single person the President has way more authority than a single person in the Congress.

I don't see any evidence DoD as at war with the CIA, FBI, or NSA. Rivalry between the intelligence branches is common in every country, there's often a minor domestic vs. foreign intel branch competition. This is rarely a serious impediment to getting things done and I don't see any evidence it's gone that way in the US, since our intelligence agencies seem to be mostly on the same page. If it were, particularly related to the NSA considering its very existence wasn't declassified until a few decades ago (it was formerly joked about as "No Such Agency"), we unfortunately probs wouldn't know though.

Those organizations are so secretive that very few people even know what's going on. How can communication between such organizations be possible? You'd only know what's going on via leaks and whistleblowing from people such as Snowden and Wikileaks, whom are warning us of the monstrosity and its undemocratic nature of those organizations. All of these things are documented by people who write and analyse things about the "Deep State", which include the very people who used to work for those organizations.

Rivalries and turf-wars not only with the intelligence, but also with any bureaucratic institutions in general are sometimes common, but that's obviously not a desirable thing. You'd essentially have unelected representatives having more and more power over people, over policies, and even laws. It's also inefficient and create many undesirable problems, since they'd be wasting so much time and energy fighting with each other, and not working for a common goal, or serving the very people that have hired them to do the job, that are the elected representatives, which are the very people that we have voted in to do the job for us.

So if you're saying that that's not a problem, then you're essentially saying that it's fine that these people that we are essentially hiring to do the job for us that we have told them to do, are not actually doing the job for us, but for their own "boss", their own organizations, and not for us or for our country.

You can't have proof without an investigation, so instead of attacking said investigation as some plot to undermine wonderful democratic unitary-executive government, why not see what they come out with?

And you can't say that someone is guilty without proof. Innocent until proven guilty, not already guilty because of allegations. That's what people are doing with Trump, they're already claiming "guilty" without any proof, without any verdicts.

The obstruction of justice charges are pretty easy to defend, since his own words demonstrate the Russiagate investigation was the foremost reason for the Comey firing, though they want a fuller picture before bringing it to trial. The question they're currently looking into is financial blackmailability, considering his long-standing business ties to Russian mafiya-connected figures like the Saters and financial interest in the Bank of Cyprus where Russian oligarchs stash their sough.

Who is doing the blackmailing? "We will carry on investigations and cause headaches via the media if you don't agree to do what we tell you to do, because the media is already claiming you guilty without any proof"? What if he just wanted to stop with the "Russiagate" nonsense? Would you want someone investigating you with a crime that you didn't commit? This is not an uncommon tactic to overthrow someone that they don't want to be in office.

Basically, it's naive to think that the same thing wouldn't have happened to someone like say, Sanders. They could just say, "Bernie is a socialist! No wonder he loves Russia! Is he a Russian spy who wants to bring Socialism to the USA? He is too soft on Russia, this would only prove that he's a Russian puppet" etc. etc. This whole narrative, this whole "You're either pro-Russia or anti-Russia, you're either a spy or not a spy" false dichotomy, is created by someone like Hillary.

We'd need Germany on board for the sanctions to be effective. Russia's interest in the German election and ramped up espionage against Germany (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ussian-hackers and http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a7718006.html) give cause to lower that reticence though. It now affects them too.

Oh great, the Russians are "hacking" Germany too? Why don't Russia just hack the entire G7 countries, since they have actually managed to hack the election of the most powerful nation in the world? I'm sure we'll have Russian controlled puppets as Presidents/PMs etc in Germany, France, Italy, UK, Japan... in no time. Then we're really screwed, because we'd have to welcome our Russian overlords.

I'm not sure if anyone outside of the US actually believes in this nonsense. Most people attribute the election of Trump to the stupidity of Americans or whatever (which I don't necessarily agree with). So the "Russians" hacked Trump into becoming the president, when I'm sure they could have picked a much better, smarter person to be the puppet for them, but ok... The reason why Trump became the president is not because both the Democrats and the Republicans have become so corrupt and incompetent that both parties became a joke, not because Hillary sucked so bad, not because the Republican party has become such a joke that they couldn't even find someone who is better than Trump, but because well... Russians. Right...

This is stuff straight out of a bad fiction or a video game, which is the narrative that the US has been telling itself for so long, that it actually started to believe in their own lies.

Source on the latter? Note: GlobalResearch.ca is not a valid source.

Per the former, "no" typically didn't vote due to the Autonomous Republic of Crimea being run by Yanukovych allies and therefore the pro-annexation side controlling the polling stations. Nonpartisan polling shows annexation would have definitely won regardless, but with a margin closer to 60-65%, if there were no concerns about the vote's legitimacy. However, Crimean Tatars tend to be very anti-Putin; were they given right of return home, the vote likely would have narrowly lost.

US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, Nuland said: “Since the declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1991, the United States supported the Ukrainians in the development of democratic institutions and skills in promoting civil society and a good form of government - all that is necessary to achieve the objectives of Ukraine’s European. We have invested more than 5 billion dollars to help Ukraine to achieve these and other goals. ” Nuland said the United States will continue to “promote Ukraine to the future it deserves.”

Nuland: OK. He's now gotten both Serry and [UN Secretary General] Ban Ki-moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or Tuesday. So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and to have the UN help glue it and, you know, Fuck the EU.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957

Oh great, here comes another excuse that the referendum was not "really" legitimate, just like Trump was "really" hacked by the Russians. You can just keep coming up with myriads of these excuses and "explanations". There were people who were actually present during the voting, and they have said that it was all peaceful and there was nothing funny going on. It's ludicrous to think that it all happened under duress or pressure or something. 94.4% voted in favor, that's a fact, so face it. At any rate, the population of Crimea is mostly Russian-speaking and they identify themselves with Russia.

The more varying interests with roughly equal power, the higher the risk of large-scale war is, because "back down" becomes less and less of a mathematical necessity for those other powers. Added to that, this myriad of powerful interests leads to complex alliance structures with widely competing demands; if one turns into military conflict, the risk of this spreading becomes greater once those alliance structures get involved. Whereas today, wars tend to be small in scale relative to the wars of the 1400s to WWII, wars between the rise of the nation-state and the dawning of a more stable bipolar (then unipolar) world system. The reason for it is simple game theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari...s)#Unipolarity

You're seeing pushback in both, particularly Russia, but I think both countries are also led by rational people who are looking to maximize their country's gains. Therefore, if the game theory shows they'll back down and play by the rules of international law, they almost certainly will. My fear is only an irrational actor rising to power in one.

That's a pretty ludicrous claim. Both Russia and China have historically known to not back down. They are both proud countries with a long history. Russia is certainly not interested in backing down, and neither is China. We should allow them to rise peacefully, not containment. Would you want someone stronger than US to "contain US", put missile bases near Mexican borders, and have warships surrounding the American seas? If that happened, the entire American population would panic, and would be calling for the extinguishment of said country.

From the end of WW2 to the end of Cold War was one of the most peaceful periods in history, if not the most peaceful and prospering period ever. That's because the US actually had a rival to worry about, the Soviets. It kept US on its toes. Then now, you have all these nonsense with "war on terror" and "1% vs. the 99%". The world is becoming increasingly more unstable. Why should we have the US dictate over everything? We should at least be able to choose which superpower are more right. Monopolies hardly ever lead to better results.

Countries are hardly ruled the "rational people", and you can't just apply game theory to international relations, as if it's some sort of science.

Russia literally did invade Georgia and Crimea. One can have bases in Central Asian/Caucasian countries that border Russia, and still have Russia invading neighbors. These are not at all contradictory propositions.

You say invasion, when 94.4% voted in favor of annexation. What you are saying is a dishonest narrative created by mostly the US.

And do you think they're just going to quit if we talk to them nicely or something? Iraq was a serious failure that dramatically inflamed these tensions, but the fact is that the hornet's nest has been kicked. It'll take time and effort to get it back down to pre-Iraq levels, we're not there yet.

Those "terrorists" would stop terrorizing when you actually stop bombing and invading those countries, since they would see that terrorism is the only way to effectively fight back. Contrary to popular belief, the "terrorists" don't just one day decide to randomly bomb people because they "hate freedom" or even "because Allah". This whole mess was created by the US in the first place (by invading those countries), and it's dragging the entire world to this "war on terror", which is an impossible idea since you can't wage war on an idea, you can only wage wars on other countries with the possibility of becoming defeated.

You say it'll take time, and it has been more than 15 years since 9/11... and not only is it not getting better, but it's getting worse. Much worse. This is a completely unwinnable and reckless "war" that is benefitting no one in the world.

We have a basic disagreement on the proper response to Kurdish independence and the Assad regime, so it's a three-way conflict. But at least one NATO power, France, actually has collaborated with Russia in anti-ISIS raids.

So again, you're saying that we should just get rid of Assad, just like we got rid of Hussein. And look how that has turned out for Iraq.

What's your source on "the public" here? I ask because you really don't seem to know what you're talking about, no offense.

The procedure is laid out pretty simply in the Constitution. It needs a 2/3 vote from Congress or a 2/3 vote from the states, meaning their legislatures, not the voters therein. This is the procedure if it goes to the states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_...ng_conventions There is no procedure for a nationwide referendum. There are procedures for referendums on state-level constitutional amendments in California, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington.

Nevermind, it turns out that the US doesn't have a provision for a referendum, like you do in most other countries. So yes, basically either you'd need 2/3 votes from both the Senate and the House of Representatives, or 2/3 votes from the states legislatures. So it's actually not that steep.

The majority actually can't rewrite the Constitution. That would entail a Constitutional Convention, which requires 3/4 support of the various state legislatures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articl...s_Constitution

I'd also disagree that they have an ethical right to do so as opposed to a legal one, though there we get into totally subjective territory. I agree with Friedrich Hayek in saying that he'd prefer a liberal but undemocratic government to a democratic but illiberal one, though obviously I want both. If the majority votes to sacrifice basic principles like freedom of speech, the right to personally owned property, the right to the freedom of one's own person, then I'd still favor those essential building-blocks of a free society being honored. Anything else is just the majority giving into a demagogic movement and fostering a tyranny, as has happened all too often throughout history.

And how are the 2/3 of the people from the Congress not the "majority"? They are voted in by the majority of the people. If the people wanted to revise the constitution badly enough, they would vote in 2/3 of the people to the Congress who would promise to revise the constitution.

You're basically saying that you don't trust the majority enough to protect freedom of speech, basic human rights etc. I mean sure, you shouldn't amend the constitution so easily without any careful thought and a long, arduous national debate, and that's why you'd need 2/3 of the elected representatives in both of the Houses.

[Wulzirik]

lol @ the russophobia in this thread

What you must understand is that anti-Trump is anti-Russia. The Western (((media))) just wants him gone because he wants to talk with us. They are ginning up this war frenzy among the Americans to go to war against "great ****** Putin" as if that ****** is not the USA's own actions around the world for decades. You did it against us too, do not kid yourself kids. You destroyed our country in Wall Street shekel boys funding the Bolsheviks. And then once we Russified Bolshevism you tore us down again with the globalist backed Gorbachev treason

I don't care about your "liberal values" or whatever pretentious bullshit you talk about. These are not Russian values or even any non-USA values, you have no right to force us into an (((open society))) only wanted by George Soros and ******s. Wage war on our Christian heritage and European racial identity. Spread to us the same racial wars and gender dysfunction you have in America. NO THANKS we want a society that is strong, healthy, and natural but you don't know anything about that. No rootedness in America, all immigrants from somewhere else. No wonder your country fails. Quit spreading your bullshit to us

But I half hope your deep state and Clinton machine succeed. It'd expose what a farce American "democracy" really is. Honestly I'd love to see your shitty country blotted from the world forever so it doesn't spread the (((liberal))) cancer you celebrate. Just try to "press charges" on Assad like the travesty against Milosevich. You'll see how hard Russia fights, EVERY MAN fought against the Nazis which you are the modern version of. I'd love to see your joke of a country blotted out forever

Putin is a liberal BTW, Russian nationalists only support him b/c he supports Russian elite liberals rather than treasonous global/EUphile elite liberals. He is "liberal nationalist" which is really cucked nationalist when you get down to it. Capitalism destroys the nation inherently with mass migration. It is the biggest culture destroyer known to man. But b/c of Gorbachev our communists are even more pro-globalist than the Putinists so real anti-capitalists are forced into alliance with Putin

Look into National Bolshevism. It explains a lot of how the world works

[Wulzirik]

Also "Russian mafiya" lol what is this Goodfellas or something. This is a JOKE you idiots. And its what your deep state "investigation" is pushing.

Into the man your public wants to represent them. Trump has tried to "drain the swamp" of globalists to save the American worker. He fights outsourcing every day. This is a LEFTIST ISSUE. But your leftists don't care because you're not real left. You're rich liberal girls and queers, you abandon working men who are pro-Trump. You just want to fight the community. Fight the police. Fight the family. Fight the traditions. Fight anything upholding society. Fight anything against materialist degrading. Fight anything for the nation's spiritual health

All this talk of "legislature" too. WTF is that. Legislature represents the regions, not the nation. You need a firm hand as said to have the people together as one will. Otherwise there are many wills. The country can't unify as one to great projects then

Only "blackmail" is deep state blackmail. The globalist media says "you will be a hero, you will be loved." When Trump goes along with the Clinton/neocon agenda. When he disregards Russia. When he makes these calls for Assad and "criminal charges." Like how they railroaded Milosevich's dream of stable unified, non-Islamist Balkans. This is to pressure him into becoming something against the workers. Something against how he ran for. You liberal fucking freaks are how they do it

Your left is Jewed and will not fight for workers. But Trump will fight. I want him to drain the swamp. I want him to take down every deep state bastard and old cuck in the (((Congress))) fighting him. Learn from Lenin. Democratic centralism is how great things get done

VIVA TRUMP

[Kim]

I don't care about your "liberal values" or whatever pretentious bullshit you talk about. These are not Russian values or even any non-USA values, you have no right to force us into an (((open society))) only wanted by George Soros and ******s. Wage war on our Christian heritage and European racial identity. Spread to us the same racial wars and gender dysfunction you have in America. NO THANKS we want a society that is strong, healthy, and natural but you don't know anything about that. No rootedness in America, all immigrants from somewhere else. No wonder your country fails. Quit spreading your bullshit to us

It's fascinating how effortlessly you covered racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and a misguided and a laughable sense of superiority in just one post. You have the best words. MRGA.

[silke]

It's fascinating how effortlessly you covered racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and a misguided and a laughable sense of superiority in just one post. You have the best words. MRGA.

What is amazing is how you have projected such vicious attitudes into his post, and then attempted to mask it with a passive-aggressive back-handed compliment. The new person a right to express his views, let him speak without your underhanded toxicity.