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On January 23 2017 07:57 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2017 06:15 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
i don't care if Trump cheats on his taxes.
Its pretty much confirmed Jean Chretien and his Liberals either turned a blind eye towards or were an active part of "Ad Scam" screwing the Canadian tax payers out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Chretien kept the economy going so great i could give a fuck. I hope Chretien got paid what he was really worth by sticking $300 million in his pockets. If he did .. good for him.
if Trump gets the economy rocking as well as Chretien had the Canadian economy going when he was PM then Trump can skim a billion a year off the top i'll still be happy with the job the guy does. Just get the economy rolling. The issue with corruption is not just that the money the politician takes, it's that it incentivizes them to make rules that fill their pocket instead of benefiting us, and it calls into question the fairness of whatever rules they do set. Like, if David Kim was taking bribes from protosses, it wouldn't just be a problem because David Kim was getting rich, it's that the next patch Khaydarin Amulet would be back and liberators would lose their ground attack. And even if DK didn't try to favor Protoss with his decisions going forward, everybody would think he was subtly trying to favor Protoss, and the game wouldn't seem fair.
that and the fact that other people would think its okay to take bribes because DK does it.
Then you could end up having top of the food chain players throwing matches for money.
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On January 23 2017 08:06 Blisse wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2017 05:39 Nyxisto wrote:
I think the whole 'xy is biased' thing nowadays really hurts newspapers and with this whole attitude against establishment news maybe some more independent organisations wouldn't be bad. I mean wikileaks itself is basically discredited at this point.
OpenLeaks existed for a while but I don't think they're active any more. It kind of feels wrong in spite of all the general buzz but I still don't feel like this establishment bias is something to be concerned about? Like in and of itself, not in terms of the rising trend of populism. In every outlet you're going to have non-neutral parties reporting. And a broad distrust of any media establishment is a statement that all media corporations are wholly controlled by corporate interests. I don't think non-neutral reporting is a problem and I've never heard of any gross impropriety in media organizations in terms of bias as many organizations seem to specifically address that in their mission statements. I suppose it depends on your opinion about the second point. I would lump a lot of shitty media outlets in a doesn't register on my radar lump (CNN, Fox, etc.) but if that outlet represented a sizable portion of your media consumption, sure it would look bad. I could see concern if you feel that the largest audiences are reached by more liberal viewpoints from liberal-leaning outlets. But specifically how would you determine what is considered liberal-leaning as in my opinion most big outlets still report on both sides of the spectrum. I say liberal-leaning because I feel this anti-establishmentism surge is from more far left or mostly right leaning actors? I feel like I also liked the movie Contagion too much, which in short had an "alternative" news reporter put out realistic sounding conspiracy theories about how the government is suppressing information about an outbreak, which kind of sours my taste about all the populist movements. Something that Canadian ex-PM Harper mentioned in the video I linked previously is that not only does the government need to do good things, but they also need to effectively communicate how these good things help the people, which I get is one of many sources of angst in the US from people who feel left behind and are left behind. But then you could also go into how it's effective for politicians to smear the other side to recover power, who's actually left behind or not, who's responsible etc.
I've watched the Harper video and I definitely think he was right to point out that the way in which information is disseminated is one of the biggest cultural changes we have in modern times. Everyone can now broadcast and mobilise outside of established channels and institutions.
I'm not concerned about the bias itself and think it is nonsense personally, but it is being perceived as such and established institutions are rapidly losing influence. This has resulted in rightfully marginalised groups now empowering themselves through social media and anti-establishment rhetoric. And we don't really have anthing to counteract this.
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On January 23 2017 04:32 GoTuNk! wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2017 04:05 On_Slaught wrote:On January 23 2017 03:43 xDaunt wrote:On January 23 2017 03:39 Slaughter wrote:On January 23 2017 03:32 xDaunt wrote:On January 23 2017 03:29 Slaughter wrote:On January 23 2017 03:25 Gorsameth wrote:On January 23 2017 03:13 xDaunt wrote:
Trump seems to subscribe to the General Grant theory of engaging the media. Because he is dealing with the media from a position of strength, he is going to continuously battle them wherever possible. Doing so will progressively degrade the media's ability to damage him.
Yes, there is a bottom limit to how disgusted people can be with you. I'm not sure bottoming it out so you cannot be damaged any more can be qualified as 'winning'. Also what position of strength? Any illusion that the White House press would be 'unbiased' has been utterly dispelled in 2? days. This isn't something you can spin as a 'different interpretation' or 'taken out of context'. We are talking strait up bold faced lies. The only people who buy Trump's bullshit are so far down the rabbit-hole that they probably cannot be saved. Yea Trump is pretty much bottomed out in terms of likeability....most of the country hates him so how is what he is doing working? There is already a fair bit of buyers remorse floating around from Trump voters who aren't among the staunch supporters crowd. He has been engaged in open combat with the media since his campaign started, and he is now President of the United States. I think that the better question to ask is how is what Trump is doing not working? What does it gain him now? Does he intend to try to burn the GOP to the ground by making as many enemies as he can? Even though he isn't a part of the GOP his actions will affect things like the mid term elections. Depending how he plays it he could very well find a congress full of people on the left who will oppose him and people on the right who also want to save their seats by standing up to him. Keep in mind he is hugely unpopular right now. Unless he can actually turn it around the strategy he employed during the election won't carry him as a sitting president. Trump understands that his biggest and most dangerous enemy is the truth. His continuous muddying of the waters of "journalistic truth" has been tremendously damaging to the media, while simultaneously galvanizing the support of his base. Trump has always come out ahead in these exchanges, and I don't see that changing any time soon. Fixed that for ya. Though by extension it does make the media as an institution his enemy. The irony of calling the media as the bearers of truth is appaling.
Well let's compare who is closer to the facts between, say, the Guardian, and Donald Trump.
"The media" is by definition the vector of information. There are good ones (the Guardian, the Economist etc...) and bad ones (Breitbart, MSNBC, Fox).
the populist notion that "the media lies to us" as if "the media" was a secret society or something is beyond absurd. But I get that Trump and his goons really don't want information to circulate especially if it's close to the facts, since everything there is to report about him is how much of an abject train wreck his presidency is starting to already look.
And of course when you have made lies and bullshit your trademark, it's wildly unpleasant to have those damn journalists showing pictures of your desert inauguration or looking into the absolute clusterfuck of incompetence your nominations have been.
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On January 23 2017 05:19 LegalLord wrote:
I guess Wikileaks is trying to repair its relations with Democrats because Democrats hate them after the Russian hacking matter?
Or maybe they are trying not to look like the pawn of a ruthless dictator who used them to get a populist far right leader friendly to them elected.
Like the Demicrats will forgive them. Seriously.
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More effort on effectively communicating what's being done might be nice indeed. of course that means the gov't spending money on informing people of such things, rather than spending money on fixing the problems themselves, and some politician will always complain about that and demand the money be shifted so.
communication also requires people to listen, and a lot of the time people simply aren't that interested in listening.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On January 23 2017 08:17 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2017 05:19 LegalLord wrote:
I guess Wikileaks is trying to repair its relations with Democrats because Democrats hate them after the Russian hacking matter? Or maybe they are trying not to look like the pawn of a ruthless dictator who used them to get a populist far right leader friendly to them elected. Like the Demicrats will forgive them. Seriously.
Well the Republicans forgave them, so you never know.
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On January 23 2017 08:19 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2017 08:17 Biff The Understudy wrote:On January 23 2017 05:19 LegalLord wrote:
I guess Wikileaks is trying to repair its relations with Democrats because Democrats hate them after the Russian hacking matter? Or maybe they are trying not to look like the pawn of a ruthless dictator who used them to get a populist far right leader friendly to them elected. Like the Demicrats will forgive them. Seriously. Well the Republicans forgave them, so you never know.
they singlehandedly got their wreck of a cabdidate elected. To bullshit about his tax return as if anyone cared at that point to look non partisan is hypocritical to the point it gets pathetic.
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I would like to propose an interpretation of "alternate facts" and elaborate on the articulation of that concept within "Trumpism" more generally.
Most commentators have been preoccupied with whether or not Spicer's claim that Trump had "the largest crowd ever to witness an inauguration, period" was factually true according to a very specific interpretation of "witnessing" and a very specific spatiotemporal interpretation of "crowd". So the media fires back that Obama had something like 7 million more people watching on tv. Or that the crowds as counted by "crowd scientists" (an excavation and genealogy of that term would be interesting in itself) were smaller than some inauguration before it. But I would contend that there is an interpretation of Spicer's comments (however inexpertly worded) that is true, or more accurately, has a weighty facticity to it.
I think there is a very real sense in which Trump's inauguration was paid attention to on a greater scale than any other inauguration before it. Whether or not any particular individual actually witnessed the inauguration I think that a case could be made that the fact of it collectively weighed on the minds of more people and to a greater extent than any inauguration before it. One convincing piece of evidence that attests to this is the very fact of the women's march that succeeded it. It is hard to imagine, for example, a corresponding march in response to a Hillary inauguration organized by the other side. Attention does not have a political side, it encompasses both support and dissent.
The concept of "alternate facts" is simply a counter-reaction to the media's inevitable response to the asserted facticity of the "size of the crowds." There's a certain will to truth in Spicer's statements that assimilates both the red-hatters who showed up to see and support Trump at his nomination and the many more pink-hatters who showed up to protest that inauguration. There's a certain will to truth that functions (unconsciously) as a Nietzschean interpretation of becoming that constitutes the reality of both those who take Spicer's assertion at face value and those who vigorously protest it's "truth" value.
The media's reaction is a political reaction that is just as disconnected from the historicity of the event as Spicer's/Trump's own will to truth is. Trump is, in that sense maybe, the most thoroughly postmodern president. One description of the postmodern is it's flattening of history, or it's eventalization of every image. Trump has been hyped by almost every commentator as the "When-it-all-changed" that is the sine qua non of the postmodern. But as thoroughly postmodern, and hence fragmented, subjects, the dispute about facticity between the right and the left both signals (too late) the move toward this flattening of history that allows for Trump to declare that he had "the largest crowd ever to witness an inauguration, period" and keeps open the space for the media to object that "in fact" he did not. Both are true.
Some commentators have spoken about Trumpism as a reemergence of the "Culture War" of the 1960s, in an attempt to root Trumpism within the temporal procession of History. While maybe not inaccurate, I think such comments miss the greater insight, that Trumpism is the remanifestation of that Foucauldian inversion of Clausewitz's maxim: Politics is the continuation of war by other means.
Foucault's notion of "race war" as that roiling violence that continues under an enforced peace is a simple recognition that politics, at least in any sufficiently heterogeneous group, never goes away. That just as the French-speaking Normans embedded these relations of war within "peaceful" governmental institutions, monasteries, feudal duties, and the production and disciplining of knowledge, modern governments through the disciplining of biopower via the practice of biopolitics create power-effects that are a kind of violence.
The great illusion, I think, that Trump's victory has exposed is the crumbling of what might be called the Fukuyama-ist nationstate. "The end of history" crumbled on 9/11, at least on an international scale. But there persisted the illusion that nationstates (the US in particular) had entered a technocratic realm of post-politics, where fundamental assumptions about how to govern the population were taken for granted. There are a lot of sociological reasons for this, including the resurgence of patriotism malignantly embodied in the Patriot Act and the illusion-effects that were its fallout: the Iraq War and, more distantly, Obama's election. The reemergence of race war at a time of increasing insecurity seems inevitable. The production and exacerbation of inequalities by capitalism always leads to instabilities, to de-homogenizing and subsequent reemergence of politics. And "true" politics is always a struggle. It always involves competing discourses. It is the continuation of war by other means.
Benjamin spoke in a modernist era about the aestheticization of politics in reference to Fascism. Marx points out that "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." As pointed out earlier in this thread, it is hard to make the case that Trump is truly a fascist without generalizing or degrading the term in a way that saps it of its force, it might at least be said that Trumpism is the farcical recurrence of that fascism that took hold in the first half of the 20th century. That is not to say that farce cannot emanate power-effects, as anyone who is/will be done violence by a Trump regime can attest.
edit: sorry for typos or solecisms i should have proofread it after i typed it
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well if Trump really is the postmodern caricature of fascism we really ought to talk about Pepe again. But there's a good point in there, one of the main reasons I feel why people are pushing the fascist discussion away is because Trump simply looks too ridiculous to be a fascist. But if we're really living in the post-historic and post-political age every historic argument is bound to look misplaced because every contemporary event looks absurd.
This is probably why people rage at Moltke all the time
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we are in a postmodern return to politics. i think that Benjamin's concept of the aestheticization of politics was a sort of avant la lettres postmodern concept.
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what would be the postmodern answer to Trumpism then? Instead of appealing to scientific or journalistic truth we start counter propaganda and better aesthetics? Is the solution quite literally better memes?
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On January 23 2017 08:23 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2017 08:19 LegalLord wrote:On January 23 2017 08:17 Biff The Understudy wrote:On January 23 2017 05:19 LegalLord wrote:
I guess Wikileaks is trying to repair its relations with Democrats because Democrats hate them after the Russian hacking matter? Or maybe they are trying not to look like the pawn of a ruthless dictator who used them to get a populist far right leader friendly to them elected. Like the Demicrats will forgive them. Seriously. Well the Republicans forgave them, so you never know. they singlehandedly got their wreck of a cabdidate elected. To bullshit about his tax return as if anyone cared at that point to look non partisan is hypocritical to the point it gets pathetic.
Doesn't mean it wouldn't work.
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On January 23 2017 10:27 Nyxisto wrote:
what would be the postmodern answer to Trumpism then? Instead of appealing to scientific or journalistic truth we start counter propaganda and better aesthetics? Is the solution quite literally better memes?
The problem for the opposition is that they have missed the boat on the larger social undercurrents that are reshaping the world. In this way, "better memes" is an impossibility for them. What's at issue isn't their marketing of their message. The problem is the message itself.
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Well as to how this most recent double-down on falsehood of Trump's could (in a 7d chess way) be politically advantageous to him, I saw this getting passed around on FB:
+ Show Spoiler [Image] +
(I'd just quote it, but obnoxiously it's saved as an image file and I have better things to do than retype everything in the image)
I'm not quite sure what to think of it. xDaunt would probably argue for #1, at least. Whether "negging" works in politics remains to be seen; I would suspect that the media can get by just fine without getting to ask questions at press conferences, and insomuch as the Trump administration simply stops giving straight answers to questions from the media, that gives them a lot more license to report on negative stories about the administration without including quotes from the administration attempting to comment and tell their side.
#2 is bizarre, because I don't immediately see why it's advantageous for Trump to appeal to his base in this way. I mean, he tells a blatant and demonstrable lie. Everyone from Chuck Todd to Chris Wallace calls him out on that lie, and he just rails against the lying press and reiterates that his inauguration had the highest attendance of any inauguration ever. Some of his fans are so loyal that they believe him anyway, and they trust all dissenting media even less; other fans see the obvious evidence that he's lying, and trust him less and the media more. At the end he has fewer fans before; the remaining fans are theoretically more loyal, but they were probably always going to be loyal to the bitter end, so he hasn't really gained anything here. I suppose it helps to create a greater partisan divide, but I'm not clear on why a partisan divide helps Trump, especially if he's driving people to the other side of the divide in the process.
#3 is probably true, and relates to an idea that I've had for a long time: Trump has an advantage I've heard talked about as an advantage of Goonswarm in Eve Online. He and his supporters are exhausting and demoralizing to fight against. They're having the time of their lives, passing around memes and #CantStumpTheTrump videos, because their entire presence in the political process is essentially one big troll. Meanwhile their opponents get more and more demoralized, possibly to the point of disengaging from politics entirely. I actually think it's one of the biggest reasons he won this election, and one of the most insidious things about the Trump political movement.
All things considered, though, I think it's still probably more likely that Trump really does believe the media must be lying, because he believes he is always the Greatest Show On Earth, so surely he will win out in the end when the facts come out and it really was the most attended inauguration in history. How could more people not turn out to see him than that boring Barack Obama?
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On January 23 2017 10:33 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2017 10:27 Nyxisto wrote:
what would be the postmodern answer to Trumpism then? Instead of appealing to scientific or journalistic truth we start counter propaganda and better aesthetics? Is the solution quite literally better memes? The problem for the opposition is that they have missed the boat on the larger social undercurrents that are reshaping the world. In this way, "better memes" is an impossibility for them. What's at issue isn't their marketing of their message. The problem is the message itself.
My tentative answer to nyx's question is that the situation just has to play out. A particular interpretation or will to truth only persists when it creates "truth" conditions that allow thriving. At some point the Real's resistance to life (as embodied in Trumpists) will start to overpower the network of interpretations that we call Trumpism, and the electorate will have to find something better or die.
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Sweden33719 Posts
"It's really time for him to put in his own security and intelligence community," she said. "We really would prefer the intelligence community that's going out the door to be much more respectful toward the President."
Am i reading too much into this or is this a completely horrifying thing to say?
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On January 23 2017 10:44 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2017 10:33 xDaunt wrote:On January 23 2017 10:27 Nyxisto wrote:
what would be the postmodern answer to Trumpism then? Instead of appealing to scientific or journalistic truth we start counter propaganda and better aesthetics? Is the solution quite literally better memes? The problem for the opposition is that they have missed the boat on the larger social undercurrents that are reshaping the world. In this way, "better memes" is an impossibility for them. What's at issue isn't their marketing of their message. The problem is the message itself. My tentative answer to nyx's question is that the situation just has to play out. A particular interpretation or will to truth only persists when it creates "truth" conditions that allow thriving. At some point the Real's resistance to life (as embodied in Trumpists) will start to overpower the network of interpretations that we call Trumpism, and the electorate will have to find something better or die.
Well, yeah, all movements eventually end and die. But that doesn't change the fact that the current liberal world order is under serious assault from many different directions. We really are witnessing the birth of a new epoch in world history.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On January 23 2017 10:54 Liquid`Jinro wrote:Show nested quote +"It's really time for him to put in his own security and intelligence community," she said. "We really would prefer the intelligence community that's going out the door to be much more respectful toward the President."
Am i reading too much into this or is this a completely horrifying thing to say?
I just see it as saying, "let the current intelligence folk do the job, not the former ones."
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@Igne - Very interesting perspective, I have to say, and it certanly addresses a lot of concerns a lot of people are having.
Here are my thoughts on some of the subjects, and some of my developments. I think your argument references the philosophical concept of Eternal Recurrence, but I do think that Eternal Recurrence is an oversimplification by the virtue of a modern perspective. An interesting case study is that the first parallel people had with Lenin and Hitler during their emergence was Napoleon, and comparing these figures might create parallels, but some quite clear differences from a later observers view.
That is not to say that people don't study historical movements and develop them for their own purposes. The current post Truth environment most reminds me of the concept of the Big Lie
Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.
This I think has been coupled with post-modernist thought exercises about the limits of perception of objective truth as well as an unhealthy dose of moral relativism. Where moral relativism can be used to be a point for reflection and debate, it has been morphed into a nonconstructive partisanship tool. There are lots of Foreign Policy articles about Putin's use of it in Russia, and internet trolls are a very effective symptom of it. (The FP articles are behind a paywall, but this Atlantic piece is also worth a read)
As for Clausewitz's assertion that politics is war through other means, it presupposes that power distribution is a zero sum game. Considering that Clausewitz was a general living in the 19th century, his view points are clearly not invalid, but somewhat influenced by his circumstances. Democracies were designed to be more flexible and responsive than Monarchies, and Liberal Democracies were made to be resistant to short-sighted mob rule. Arguably, they are a victim of their own success, since successful strategies are just not reformed all that often. However, the problems you mentioned are in my opinion still best addressed in a Fukuyamaesque democratic format, and the current crisis has created better conditions for slow methodical and structural change rather than a revolutionary creative destruction format.
As a species, we don't have much room to mess up, and neo-authoritarianism might be by far the most effective at information manipulation, but it has created conditions where it's own reforms of capitalism would be incredibly difficult to carry out, because it relies on a system of entrenched capitalist elites everywhere.
TLDR: Let's learn from history, but let's not use 19th century solutions for 21-st century problems.
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On January 23 2017 10:55 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2017 10:44 IgnE wrote:On January 23 2017 10:33 xDaunt wrote:On January 23 2017 10:27 Nyxisto wrote:
what would be the postmodern answer to Trumpism then? Instead of appealing to scientific or journalistic truth we start counter propaganda and better aesthetics? Is the solution quite literally better memes? The problem for the opposition is that they have missed the boat on the larger social undercurrents that are reshaping the world. In this way, "better memes" is an impossibility for them. What's at issue isn't their marketing of their message. The problem is the message itself. My tentative answer to nyx's question is that the situation just has to play out. A particular interpretation or will to truth only persists when it creates "truth" conditions that allow thriving. At some point the Real's resistance to life (as embodied in Trumpists) will start to overpower the network of interpretations that we call Trumpism, and the electorate will have to find something better or die. Well, yeah, all movements eventually end and die. But that doesn't change the fact that the current liberal world order is under serious assault from many different directions. We really are witnessing the birth of a new epoch in world history.
oh come on dauntless. i wasn't merely saying that all movements eventually end and die as if Lachesis acted through the mechanical shrinking of telomeres and Atropos set off the apoptotic death knell. my entire point was that the current liberal world order's will to truth has been overtaken by that of the Trumpists, but it seems clear to the majority of the world's population that this Trumpian weltanschauung has serious defects. evolution doesn't always progress one foot in front of the other. sometimes it staggers backward, as if intoxicated.
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EPT![[image loading]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2wCbaBXAAApIyq.jpg:orig)
