US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8609

On August 31 2017 05:53 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

Interesting that you picked that. And I'm glad you did. As described after that posts and just these past few pages, there's so much nuance and complexity to this, that straight eliminating their right to free hate speech and assembly may not be the best way to go about it. I just don't want you or anyone else saying anything contrary to your held beliefs when someone you're against does the same thing and we repeat this process.

I'll allow your snide remark about intelligence slide because I'm frankly tired of being warned when I engage you.

On August 31 2017 03:37 Danglars wrote:

Were you expecting conservatives to be satisfied with Trump's performance in office?

I'm puzzled to why you quote my response to Brooks and how he stands apart from the conservative movement to talk about conservatives and their opinion of Trump in office.

Arpaio is a hero to the populist Right, but his theatrical, inhumane imprisonment policies, ham-fisted immigration enforcement, and all-around witless showmanship had become so toxic that he got soundly thrashed in his latest reelection bid in a Trump-friendly county. No one serious about immigration restriction should want Arpaio to be the poster boy for the cause, but that is clearly what Trump considers him, and his pardon makes the point rather emphatically. Better than dumping this pardon on a Friday night would have been never granting it at all.

Right now there are otherwise good people who, out of partisan habits or long-borne outrage at biased media, are trying to concoct excuses for why Trump’s Q&A wasn’t so bad and all the criticisms of it are just fake news.

It’s time for that to stop.

On August 31 2017 07:31 Kyadytim wrote:


I was a little short on time and couldn't choose the best quotes, and clearly I also needed to explain them. I will give you that the article about Trump being a nightmare boss wasn't a good pick. I didn't read that one thoroughly enough. However...


From the article about the Arpaio pardon:

Do you see maybe a slight critique of people who are happy about that pardon in this paragraph?

I will let the quotes from the articles about Trump's failing salesmanship and his enmity with the media stand for themselves without adding more quotes. Tthe entire article up to the end of the quoted paragraph is an indictment of people who voted for him. And do you maybe not see a criticism of Republicans sentence I quoted about Donald Trump's media relationship? That first half of that article is also a criticism of Republicans who continue supporting Trump because he keeps attacking the media.

As for the Federalist article, it was split about evenly between condemning Trump for his softness on the white supremacists and condemning people on the right for jumping to his defense. Here's a quote summing that up:


I'll admit my previous post wasn't my best, but those articles contained enough clear condemnation of people who supported Trump and continue to support him that I shouldn't have had to make this post.

On August 31 2017 07:33 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

I did. Twice. Now, read what I wrote.

On August 31 2017 08:28 Danglars wrote:

My problem is IgnE's argument on Brooks was about white identity politics, white lives matter, and white resentment. You're quoting critique on orthogonal lines about the shittiness of 'it's all fake news' voters and people that cheer the pardon. I'm not very much opposed to criticizing that segment. So did you mean to quote some other post of mine that wasn't David-Brooks-centric, because it really seems you're taking issue with something I didn't say and can't guess.

Between 1984 and 2003 I worked at National Review, The Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and The Weekly Standard. Most of my friends were Republicans

In that time, I never heard blatantly racist comments at dinner parties, and there were probably fewer than a dozen times I heard some veiled comment that could have suggested racism. To be honest, I heard more racial condescension in progressive circles than in conservative ones.

But the Republican Party has changed since 2005. It has become the vehicle for white identity politics. In 2005 only six percent of Republicans felt that whites faced “a great deal” of discrimination, the same number of Democrats who felt this. By 2016, the percentage of Republicans who felt this had tripled.

Recent surveys suggest that roughly 47 percent of Republicans are what you might call conservative universalists and maybe 40 percent are what you might call conservative white identitarians. White universalists believe in conservative principles and think they apply to all people and their white identity is not particularly salient to them. White identitarians are conservative, but their white identity is quite important to them, sometimes even more important than their conservatism.

These white identitarians have taken the multicultural worldview taught in schools, universities and the culture and, rightly or wrongly, have applied it to themselves. As Marxism saw history through the lens of class conflict, multiculturalism sees history through the lens of racial conflict and group oppression.

According to a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, for example, about 48 percent of Republicans believe there is “a lot of discrimination” against Christians in America and about 43 percent believe there is a lot of discrimination against whites.

On August 31 2017 01:20 IgnE wrote:


You are almost definitely misreading me, but how about this way of putting it: rather than turning it into treacly television that suggests America is full of heroes ready to pitch in when times get really tough, maybe it should serve as a stark illustration of how cruel and exploitative the normal regime is.

You don't think David Brooks is just a nice, honest man with the conscience of a universalist conservative??

Donald Trump called a senior Republican senator from Iowa on Wednesday whose congressional committee is investigating his son, Donald Trump Jr, and promised him critical federal support for the biofuel ethanol, a key issue for the lawmaker.

Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee and a major advocate of the ethanol industry, announced on Twitter that he had received a phone call from Trump and had been assured by the US president that Trump was “pro ethanol” and was “standing by his campaign promise” to support the biofuel.

The phone call came less than a day after CNN reported that Trump’s eldest son had reached an agreement with the committee to appear in a private session and answer investigators’ questions. The committee, which has oversight of the Department of Justice, is investigating a 2016 meeting that occurred in Trump Tower before November’s election. During the meeting, Trump Jr and other campaign staff met with Russian operatives after being promised compromising information about the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.

The interview with investigators could take place in the next few weeks, according to CNN.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on what prompted the president to call Grassley and promise him support for ethanol – a vital issue for Grassley’s home state – or whether the two discussed Grassley’s oversight of the committee’s Russia probe.

In a second tweet, Grassley said that the US president “knows that ethanol is good good good”.

The Iowa senator did not divulge any additional details about Trump’s promise or whether it represented a shift in White House energy policy. Trump, like many US politicians in the throes of presidential campaigns, was a vocal advocate of the ethanol industry while he was campaigning in Iowa, a top corn-producing state.

A spokesman for Grassley said by email: “The president called Senator Grassley and talked briefly about ethanol. It was a two-minute conversation. Senator Grassley told the president he was glad to hear him voice his support for ethanol and that he would tweet about it to the people of Iowa. Nothing more specific about ethanol policies came up. The other topics that came up were Hurricane Harvey and Ambassador Branstad in China.”

Terry Branstad, a former governor of Iowa, is Trump’s new ambassador to China.

Trump reaffirmed his support for ethanol producers in a speech in June in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, saying he would save “your ethanol industries … just like I promised to do in my campaign”.

It is not clear, however, how Trump will make good on his promise to Grassley. Bloomberg reported in June that US ethanol producers were concerned that oil industry lobbyists who oppose important biofuel mandates could hold sway over Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, one of the regulatory bodies that sets important standards on the use of biofuel.

Grassley has emerged as an important potential ally for the US president given his position on the judiciary committee, one of several congressional committees that is investigating allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Last week, investigators on the committee interviewed Glenn Simpson, a former journalist and head of GPS Fusion, a private investigative firm in Washington that produced a controversial dossier detailing alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

The dossier was written by Christopher Steele, a former British spy, and is believed to be a significant area of interest in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of alleged Russian interference in the US election last year.

Grassley said in a town hall meeting in Iowa last week that he would consider sharing a transcript of investigators’ closed-door questioning of Simpson, which lasted for ten hours.

Grassley was asked about it at a town hall meeting and said he would put the matter to a committee vote.

“I presume that [the transcript] will be released,” Grassley said, according to an account in the Washington Examiner.

The timing of the president’s call is most noteworthy because it came just as the committee’s forthcoming interview of Trump Jr was publicly confirmed. A specific date has not yet been released, but investigators are expected to question the president’s son about the nature of a 2016 meeting, which Trump Jr attended after being promised he would obtain compromising information about the Clinton campaign.

The meeting was attended by Paul Manafort, Trump’s then campaign manager, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer, and Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer.

The president’s son has said he was only promised compromising information about Clinton, but that he never received it. Instead, Trump Jr insisted that Veselnitskaya wanted to discuss changes to the 2012 Magnitsky Act, a law passed by Barack Obama that infuriated Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and was designed to punish Russia for the 2009 prison death of the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.

The 2016 meeting continues to be a critical area of focus of congressional investigators.

On August 31 2017 09:36 xDaunt wrote:
Despite my loathing of all forms of identity politics, I really am not interested in hearing someone like David Brooks moralize on the issue. He and his "conservative" ilk are the whole reason why white identity politics has become a thing. Let's take a look at the key part of his op-ed:



Just look at this hand-wringing fool whine about how during the good old days of the 80s and 90s, white identity politics wasn't a thing, and then it just seemed to come out of no where in the 2000s. All the while, he conveniently skirts around the root problem: the limp-wristed and utterly ineffectual opposition that he and other "conservative" political and intellectual leaders put up against the rise of Leftist identity politics. Fuck, just look at that section that I bolded where he talks about white identitarians applying Marxist and Leftist theories to themselves, and laugh at how David Brooks equivocates on whether such use could be "right or wrong." He still won't attack the roots of identity politics, yet he has no problem singularly shitting on white people who use it. What a joke. This is precisely the kind of hypocritical shit that has given life to the term "cuck." And I haven't even gotten to David Brooks-like RINO support for the types of policies that have only further spurred white identity politics....

On August 31 2017 09:57 IgnE wrote:


lets not overreact now. everyone knows history is the history of class struggle.

now, identity struggle, that may just be a perversion of whatever "marxist roots" people may claim, and in the strictly psychoanalytic sense

On August 31 2017 10:06 xDaunt wrote:

Here's how I see it. There are two possibilities. The first, and the one which I prefer to believe, is that the rise of identity politics was preventable. The alternative is that the rise of identity politics is inevitable. When you start going down that path, there's no avoiding that you'll eventually find yourself walking hand in hand with the Alt Right.

On August 31 2017 08:37 Kyadytim wrote:

I was directly responding to your implicit challenge to find similar sentiments on clearly conservative news outlets. I doubt anything published on National Review or The Federalist will be as clear cut about white identity politics being a problem for conservatives. What I did find was articles either directly or indirectly condemning Trump supporters who are not white supremacists for doing things that white supremacists are doing or celebrating things that white supremacists are celebrating.

On August 31 2017 09:57 IgnE wrote:


lets not overreact now. everyone knows history is the history of class struggle.

now, identity struggle, that may just be a perversion of whatever "marxist roots" people may claim, and in the strictly psychoanalytic sense

On August 31 2017 10:18 Slaughter wrote:


Wouldn't such a diverse multicultural society that is democratic almost always produce identity politics on some level as long as any inequalities exist in said society? Seems like an inevitability that various groups would fight for an equal seat at the table given the tools a democracy offers to achieve goals.

On August 31 2017 10:40 xDaunt wrote:

Congratulations, you are on your way to being a member of the Alt Right.

On August 31 2017 10:47 Slaughter wrote:


I guess the difference is I don't see it as a bad thing that those groups are exercising political capital to fight for equal standing in the eyes of society. The alt-right seem to get freaked out about the tensions groups cause by pointing out those inequalities and much prefer to go back to the time where they had their heads in the dirt, ignoring the root reasons identity politics is used, and pretending everything is fine.

A federal judge has dismissed Sarah Palin's defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff said the suit, which alleged the newspaper's editorial board maliciously linked the former Alaska governor to a 2011 mass shooting, failed to put forward plausible evidence of that malice.

Each item put forward by Palin's legal team as proof of the Times' intent and ill will "consists either of gross supposition or of evidence so weak that, even together, these items cannot support the high degree of particularized proof" needed to proceed with the case, Rakoff said in his ruling Wednesday.

Palin's suit centered on an editorial the paper published earlier this summer, shortly after a shooting at a GOP baseball practice. In that piece, the editorial board drew a connection between the 2011 shooting that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and a map passed around by Palin's political action committee in 2010. The map showed several electoral districts — including Giffords' — under illustrated crosshairs, pointing out seats held by Democratic lawmakers to challenge in future elections.

The newspaper issued a correction two days later, clarifying that "in fact, no such link was established." Less than two weeks after that, the former GOP vice presidential candidate filed her suit, seeking damages for the alleged defamation.

The legal team for the Times filed its motion to dismiss the case in July.

But Rakoff was unconvinced the corrected editorial was anything more than a mistake: In the exercise of free political journalism, the judge wrote, "mistakes will be made, some of which will be hurtful to others" — but legal redress must be limited to those cases in which the mistake was made "with knowledge it was false or with reckless disregard for its falsity."

Rakoff said the evidence offered by Palin's team proved inadequate to proceed.

"What we have here is an editorial, written and rewritten rapidly in order to voice an opinion on an immediate event of importance, in which are included a few factual inaccuracies somewhat pertaining to Mrs. Palin that are very rapidly corrected," Rakoff wrote.

"Negligence this may be," he added, "but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not."