December 27, 2016

This is the simplest explanation I have found for why some on the left defend Russia

against the US.

http://odessareview.com/ukraine-american-solipsist-mind/

Ukraine And The American Solipsist Mind
By Igor Satanovsky -
December 26, 2016

...
For decades, many American intellectuals on the Left concentrated on criticizing the American foreign policy, which they’ve perceived (and often rightfully so) as needlessly interventionist. However, this mindset left them ill-prepared to judge the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Sympathetic to the critical voices from abroad, they internalized anti-American propaganda — particularly the belief that most political developments in the world are only effects of the application of America’s will.

...
Just like Mr. Chomsky, the American Leftist-at-large found it much harder to understand Ukrainian concerns, or grasp complexities of Ukrainian politics. It might as well have been Western Sahara. It’s all about America: projections of the American solipsist mind locked into internal debate over its identity and policies toward the major geopolitical forces like the EU, China, Russia, and the Islamic World. Tens of millions of puppets, remote-controlled from the State Department, must be populating vast areas in between, so why even try?

This bizarre worldview mirrors the opinions expressed by Russian conspiracy buffs & Putin’s propaganda in the most comic and unfortunate way. Distorted reflections of American power are absorbed and internalized to fortify the perceived might of American thought, will, and ego.

December 20, 2016

Truth is a lost game in Turkey. Dont let the same thing happen to you

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/15/truth-lost-game-turkey-europe-america-facts-values?CMP=share_btn_tw
...
"This refashioning of a post-truth, post-fact Turkey has not happened overnight. The process has involved the skilful and wilful manipulation of narratives. We gave up asking the astonished questions “How can they say or do that?” some time ago. Truth is a lost game in my country. In Europe and America, you still have time to rescue it – but you must learn from Turkey how easily it can be lost.

It started 15 years ago, with a phenomenon that will now be familiar to you, when intellectuals and journalists reacted to a nascent populism with the self-critical question: “Are we out of touch?” To counter that possibility, they widened the parameters of public debate to include those who were said to be representatives of “real people”. We thought our own tool, the ability to question and establish truth, would be adequate to keep the discourse safe. It wasn’t. Soon we were paralysed by the lies of populism, which always sounded more attractive than our boring facts.

...
An analogy came to mind: that this is like trying to play chess with a pigeon. Even if you win within the rules, the pigeon will clutter up the pieces, and finally it will shit on the chessboard, leaving you to deal with the mess. Farage, having told us to “cheer up”, and that this was “not a funeral”, did exactly that. Having dumbfounded the audience, he announced – as if fleeing a boring party – that he was off to meet Donald Trump in Washington.

Be warned. For 15 years we played chess with the pigeon in Turkey, but now we don’t even have the chessboard. Some of you still have time to shape your future. Use it."

We Hillary voters are not out of touch, we are more in touch with the all the diverse people of this country than any WWC/rural Trump voter. Never forget that.

December 6, 2016

Meet the Press The hustlers, hucksters, hacks, and cowards who helped elect Donald Trump

This is long but a great read:

https://washingtonspectator.org/press-trump-perlstein/
December 6, 2016

By Rick Perlstein

I was curious, so I did a bit of research on theories about why great civilizations fall. Some scholars point to the danger of overextended militaries, others on overwhelmed bureaucracies. Sometimes the key factor is declines in public health, often caused by agricultural crises. Political corruption is another contender, as are inflated currencies, technological inferiority, court intrigue, rivals taking control of key transportation routes, or an overreliance on slave labor. Others point to changes in climate, geographic advantages won and lost, or the ever-popular invasion by barbarian hordes.

None I could find, however, mentioned what may become future historians’ most convincing explanation for America’s fall, should Donald Trump end up her author and finisher: bad journalism.
...
Trump boogied his way to Pennsylvania Avenue to the tune of the extraordinary finding by a Washington Post-ABC News poll that “corruption in government” was listed by 17 percent of voters as the most important issue in the presidential election, second only to the economy, and ahead of terrorism and health care—and that voters trusted Trump over Clinton to be better on the issue by a margin of 48 to 39 percent, her worst deficit on any issue. This is the part of my article where rhetorical conventions demand I provide a thumbnail sketch of all the reasons why it’s factually absurd that anyone would believe that Donald Trump is less corrupt than Hillary Clinton. I have better things to do with my time than belabor the obvious.
...
Click the link. Print it out. Seal between two six-inch thick plates of Lexan glass and bury it 50 feet deep in a lead-lined bunker. Future archaeologists are going to need it. It will help them explain how a once-great civilization fell.

December 3, 2016

Harvard IOP - Roundtable discussion GE - Campaigns postmortem - audio

If you are really interested in what the Trump and Clinton campaigns had to say for the historical record - links here to audio

https://soundcloud.com/harvardiop

I am only 20 minutes in, I think I can take this only in small doses but it is interesting. There is also an interview with Nate Silver.