Forum Replies Created
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It might be worthwhile to explore what the alt-right IS.
It’s a very definite thing, and Trump went out of his way to court them and include them.
Every other republican candidate steered clear of them. Or at least in terms of visible actions, kept them at an arms distance. Trump sought them out and made them important in his inner circles. He treated them like allies, and that’s openly.
So then…who and what are they.
It is worth investigating if people are willing to surf sites like 4chan and the likes. It’s a disturbing movement, but it’s not anything new. It’s just old school bigotry with a man-bun. Hillary’s mistake was spotlighting it and stirring it up to somehow make a point about Trump himself. Had she just left that alone, and let Trump try to fend off the allegations of his indirect ties to that movement (laughable in and of itself), then she would have been much better off. She, herself, and not Trump, was the likely cause for their turnout at the polls, IMO.
He has direct ties, X. He chose one of its leaders as his campaign chair, as already mentioned. And it’s a lot more than just 4chan and the Men’s Right’s folks. Its primary bloc is white supremacists, who use the Orwellian phrase, “white nationalists” to hide that a tad bit. Breitbart, WND, Alex Jones — those people and groups, etc.
His ties to them are direct, and he wouldn’t have won the EVs without them, without the white militias like the Oath Keepers, etc. etc.
Only you Billy would claim I was wrong. The mass appeal of Trump despite the 17 month savaging he received from the establishment is something which cannot be denied. I’d say he had more supporters that didn’t vote than Hildabeast did. Next time don’t nominate a corrupt traitor.
No, bnw. I think any objective person would look at the results of the election, and all the data prior to it, and the exit polls, and all the video and audio of Trump’s racist, xenophobic, misogynistic statements/policy ideas, and the 4,000 lawsuits against him, and his six bankruptcies, and his bragging about being a sexual predator, and his endless lies, and reach the same conclusion.
As for your last sentence: I didn’t nominate her. I’m not a Dem and don’t vote in Dem primaries. And there is no proof she is a “traitor.” That takes intent. You have to prove she intentionally exposed classified documents with malicious intent. Just being tech-stupid, arrogant and careless doesn’t add up to “traitor,” unless you’re a part of the right-wing lunatic fringe.
His list of potential cabinet appointees include women, gays, and blacks. So much for being a racist, or homophobic, or a misogynist. And please. You can’t honestly believe that Killory is THAT stupid that she didn’t understand the lucid instructions given to her about the handling of classified information. Careless? lol. Intentionally defiant would be a more apt description. Let alone lying about it. Let alone allowing someone without security clearance (her maid) print out and view classified materials. And yes, that falls under the category of traitorism.
Do you honestly think that just appointing a diverse group of people negates all the vicious things he said, or the obvious oppression of minorities implicit and explicit in his policy ideas? Come on, man.
Also: The bar for “traitor” is a hell of a lot higher than that, bnw. Again, it takes “intent.” It takes purposely trying to undermine this country’s security, in that particular case, and there is zero proof that she did that.
I’m not defending her actions, at all. Again, I think she likely acted with arrogance and a sense of assumed privilege, and was tech-stupid to the nth degree. She also made things worse by going shields up during the GOP’s witch hunt. But none of that rises to the level of “treason.” Not in the real world. On the ultra-paranoid, ultra-partisan, lunatic right, yeah. But not in the real world.
And how much more of a deterrent do you want than our total domination in military matters? We’re the world’s undisputed hegemon. The Cold War is long gone. We don’t have several hegemons. It’s just us. And doesn’t the desire to increase our military power contradict the desire to stop being the world’s policeman, not to mention “making other nations pay their fair share”?
We have all the deterrent we need times a thousand. And we actually have more active ships now than we did under Dubya.
Our surface Navy is outdated. Both China and Russia have brought online weapons systems that will destroy our surface fleet within 14 days of fighting. Our anti-missile defense is overhyped and rendered archaic to the latest offensive systems of Russia and China. Our sub fleet should fare much better though with both Russia and China actively upgrading both BeiDou and GLONASS military satellite systems with BeiDou far more accurate than our GPS and slated to go global. All three nations are actively pursuing space weapons to defend? their satellite systems.
When one of our carriers is lost with its 4000 member crew, how long do you think it will take for the conflict to go nuclear? Wouldn’t it be better to modernize and upgrade both the Navy and Air Force to dissuade an aggressor?
bnw,
None of that is true. We’ve poured trillions into modernization. No one comes close to our military — not for advanced tech, capacity, speed, or any other metric. Do you really think the Military Industrial Complex ever misses a chance to score major contracts with endless updates? Come on. You’ve just bought into Trump and the GOP’s despicable fearmongering and scapegoating. In reality, we have long spent waaaay too much on behalf of Corporate America, and that didn’t change under Obama.
Whatever you say Billy since you’ve been proven to be correct despite reality. Its your thing.
bnw,
It’s beyond obvious that you were wrong about Trump’s supposed mass appeal. Again, he lost the popular vote to Clinton, one of the least liked presidential candidates ever. He lost to her. And he received fewer votes, total, than Romney or McCain, who both lost bigly to Obama.
He has no mandate. He has no mass popular support. He has his dead-ender, white-nationalist base, plus some folks who always vote for the GOP candidate no matter who it is.
Just as the Dems made a huge mistake in assuming Clinton had this in the bag, you and your fellow Trump supporters are kidding yourself if you think Trump is beloved by anything close to a majority. He’s actually despised by a majority of Americans. A strong majority said he was unfit for the office. They didn’t like Clinton either, of course. But Trump’s numbers were worse.
That’s reality.
this affirms to me why humans will never survive.
I can’t help it. I love humanity. But should we survive? If we take the proverbial “god’s eye-view” — not in the religious sense, but in the widest possible, most perfectly objective, disinterested sense — should we?
No other creature on this planet has come within light years of being so destructive. We’ve wiped out more species than all other life on this planet combined. And, unlike them, we all too often did it because it pleased us to do so. We do it maliciously and with self-conscious cruelty.
As far as we know, no other animal has that trait.
The caveat to the above, at least for me: I think the vast majority of that has happened because hierarchical societies have dominated the last several thousand years. Those at the top have ordered that destruction, primarily to protect, defend and expand their power. “The people” largely had to go along with that or die. If we are to truly end the biggest structural/systemic reason for that destruction, cruelty and maliciousness, we need non-hierarchical alternatives.
More than half of all American corporations already pay zero federal taxes. Zero. That’s with the 35% that Trump wants to slash to 15%. Those corporations, even with zero taxation here, still ship jobs overseas. Why? Cuz it’s a far better deal for them to pay pennies on the dollar for labor than even a 100% tax-free deal. Hell, we could pay them to set up shop here and they’d still send jobs overseas. The difference in labor costs is that big.
Let me ask you to focus on my question posed to you. What’s the alternative? How do you incentivize Corporations to do business in the U.S.? Are you saying there’s no reason to even bother trying? And you don’t have to sell me on the evil of Corporations. I’m aware of the dangers of Corporatocracy, and I’m not even comfortable talking about courting them. But I see no other way to boost jobs in a substantial way other than to increase manufacturing.
Let’s do it this way. If you were POTUS, how would you handle this situation?
To me the solution is obvious. But neither party is willing to do it, because they’re both beholden to corporate interests.
Direct public funding for jobs. Direct creation of permanent public works. Direct hiring of every single unemployed person in America who wants a job, and at a guaranteed minimum wage.
Since we can’t trust the private sector to employ everyone, the obvious and logical thing to do is make that happen via the public sector. Private sector wants to ship jobs overseas? Okay, then fuck them. We’ll build that stuff ourselves, do it better, pay better wages, and make sure the income is allocated in as egalitarian a fashion as possible.
In the private sector, the typical corporation pays its top execs several hundred times what it pays its rank and file. We could set up public sector jobs and make that what it generally is in that sector. Roughly 4 to 1 instead, top to bottom. That way, we can also keep prices down and increase “value” overall for customers. Instead of paying execs tens of millions, we sink that money into the rank and file and product quality instead. The more you “spread the wealth,” the better the economy performs overall.
To me, that’s the logical solution under capitalism. As mentioned, I’d prefer to repeal and replace it altogether, though.
We have all the deterrent we need times a thousand. And we actually have more active ships now than we did under Dubya.
I don’t think that’s accurate, but I’ll follow a link you give me with empirical data. It’s been my understanding that it was the lowest since 1916, and that came from Obama’s own appointed Secretary of the Navy. There have been numerous reports that the military has been degraded, but if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. My bigger worry *was* the impact that future sequestration cuts would have had on not just ship numbers, but the military as a whole, if Killary Robbem was elected.
This came up in the Romney campaign, too, and several fact-checkers debunked it then. Trying to find the one that talks about the disingenuous comparison. The number of ships is immaterial. Their individual capacity, speed, tech, etc. etc. has grown ginormously. We just don’t need as many.
Mitt Romney says U.S. Navy is smallest since 1917, Air Force is smallest since 1947
