Also, I think it’s pretty difficult to measure the bigger or the biggest gangsters from that list. It’s at least open to debate.

While I’d say our foreign policy is the most destructive in the world over time, when it comes to individual responsibility and its implications, it gets trickier. As in, the blame is spread around in our system more than it is in Russia’s.

On just the wealth issue, Putin crushes the four presidents mentioned. He’s reportedly worth 200 billion or more, and he gained all of that money while being a “public servant.” He has near total control over his military and intel agencies, unlike our presidents, so when they act, it’s pretty much directly on him.

Trump, the next richest on the list, likely isn’t worth as much as he claims, which is more than 10 billion — it’s more likely in the few hundred million range. Bush in roughly in the 100-200 million range. Clinton in the 30 million range. Obama in the few million range. Maybe five.

So on money alone, Putin has from 500 times to 50,000 times the Americans listed, and, again, he has far more direct control over foreign (and domestic) policy.

I guess this is a bit like arguing over who was the best running back in NFL history, though with obviously far greater stakes. But I thought your comment was worth one of my (typically annoying) responses, nonetheless.

;>)

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

He does the ‘context’ thing. In the context of what the US does regularly, the russia thing is just not a major story.

I have to say I don’t buy that either.

I didn’t ruin any democracies abroad. Some american governments did that. I would like to vote against that kind of thing in fact. So I don’t want the system I vote in to be screwed so that it serves the interests of yet another autocratic imperial state, and I don’t concede anything to that other autocratic state and give up on the idea of voting and being invested in democracy just because some american governments I opposed did stuff too.

Speaking just for myself but I also think echoing the sentiments of many others, I don’t live in a glass house when it comes to that. So I can throw all the stones I need to. At Trump, at Nixon, at Pinochet, at Putin. I don’t feel like excusing any single one of them.

…

I agree with all of that. I can’t understand why we’re supposed to just take it on the chin, directly, we the people, because of what our government has done in the past. How does it make any sense for us to go fetal with regard to our own election system and social media, because of the history of conflict between nations? The belief that “hypocrisy” is strong enough to force that upon rank and file Americans strikes me as bizarre at best, and at least self-indulgent and self-serving as theory. And it’s mostly in that realm, IMO. In the realm of abstractions, not the concrete.

Oh, well. I’m rambling.

I hope others add their thoughts tonight and tomorrow. It’s an important topic.

PA Ram wrote:

I think this is very disturbing for many reasons.

But the worst thing about this is that I think it pushes us CLOSER to military conflict with Russia. There is already a huge backlash coming and if it isn’t this congress, it will be the next president who will feel the need to be VERY tough on Russia to make up for this. This may even be an extreme reaction which will cause a bad reaction. And who knows where it goes from there.

Trump is moving the goalposts for what is acceptable by Russia. Putin will test that.

And then? Who knows? It won’t be good.

Me? I think the sole purpose for that meeting, in private, without witnesses, was because Trump needed more help from Putin. I have no doubt they spent most of that time cooking up ways to keep Trump out of jail, to shift the blame to other parties, especially the Dems, and that this will involve the creation of new waves of “fake news” and a “false flag” or too.

And I don’t see the above as hyperbole or paranoia. I see it as just being realistic about our sociopath in chief.

It’s not that Trump has chosen Russia over America. It’s that he, as always, chooses himself and his business interests over any country. His time with Putin is purely transactional, from his point of view. He desperately needs outside help and Putin is more than willing to give it to him — in exchange for things like the end of sanctions, the erosion of NATO, the erosion of the EU, which Trump likely wants regardless of Putin anyway. He actually called the EU a foe of America in recent days.

We live in mad times.

To me, good writers think in terms of how their writing works as speech, as spoken English — if English is the language in question, of course. They think in terms of breaths, rhythm, structure, flow, and how others hear that. They think about the best way to make this comprehensible for the listener.

Both/and. Written and spoken. But reading it aloud is a great way to make it work for both. With exceptions, a sentence, a paragraph, a page that sounds good, looks good on the page too.

One of the patterns I see in this kind of bad, academic writing is the lack of any concern for that. There is almost no concern for breaths, rhythm, flow. Most sentences are way too long, virtually breathless, and contain too much proposed information for the sentence structure to handle/support. They need to be broken up. Antitrust lawsuits should apply.

Also — and I admit this is a personal bias — the “verbing” of words is overdone and distracts from the points made. For me, it actually obscures those points. This is different from using field-specific jargon like scientific and mathematical terms, where no other word suffices. I think it’s a conscious effort to throw things out of whack with no real gain in overall understanding for the reader.

They need to cut that out!!

;>)

wv wrote:

Ok, one of youz smart people — dum this down for me. What does it say?

“….A decolonial approach would necessitate moving past the individualistic liberal ontology underpinning much of feminism today, including some strands of intersectionality. This entails problematizing the assumption that the subject is always erased from the analysis, thus producing a myth about universal and objective knowledge. Instead, “critical border thinking” can be employed, which is a form of subaltern epistemology that does not hide the epistemic positionality of the subject speaking.[5] This allows for decolonial interpretative communities to be produced that challenge Western notions of universality, neutrality and linear evolution. By critically deconstructing Western concepts and structures that have been normalized, the first step towards dismantling them has been taken.[6]…”

Just going by that quote — I didn’t click on the link yet — I’d say the writer is a really bad writer, and thinks they can make up for their lack of language skills with waves of jargon. Judith Butler used to win awards for this kind of thing. Awards that you’d generally want to avoid.

I’m feeling like quite the curmudgeon today, for some reason!!

;>)

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

My own take is that Trump’s rationale for making nice with Russia is essential to consider. It makes the attempt beyond empty for me.

It’s also vital, IMO, to consider what he’s done around the world. It’s not as if he’s tried to reduce tensions anywhere else. In fact, he’s raised them, threatening Iran with regime change, Venezuela with military invasion, even Mexico with the same.

He drove us to the brink of nuclear war with North Korea, prior to kinda sorta defusing the crises he created. And he’s attacked our allies without mercy, throwing much of the world into chaos.

If he were an actual peacenik, I’d feel much differently about his overtures to Russia. But he’s anything but that. Who hasn’t he attacked or threatened, other than Russia?

===============

I dont really care about his ‘rationale’ (I assume it is always just a reflection of his narcissism, etc). All that matters to me is Russia’s nukes. I want the threat of nuclear war to be reduced.

And i think he’s done that. I think he met with putin and he said “hey, whats with this election interference?” And putin goes, “Seriously? You people have been interfering all over the world for decades, LoL”. And trumpy goes, “I know, I know, now lets tell the press weve discussed it and the world is safe from nuclear war.”

So far, I’d say Trumps foreign policy is better than Bush’s.

w
v

But does Trump’s personal overture to Putin do that? I really don’t see how. I can’t see how his personal connection changes the nuclear dynamic at all, given the fact that so much exists outside Trump’s actual control — as in, any president’s. The massive amount of weapons are there. The Pentagon is still there. Our thousand bases around the world are still there. Our history of conflict is still there.

How does Trump’s acceptance of Putin’s help/cyberattack alter any of that? If Putin is crazy enough to launch nukes in the first place, I honestly don’t think Trump and Putin playing nicey nice will stop him.

Also worth considering: No American president since Kennedy has come remotely close to “going there.” At least that we know about. HRC wouldn’t have struck first either. It would mean the end of the world. MAD, etc. So, really, how is Trump better on this issue, if nukes are the key factor?

wv wrote:

I’ve been reading a lot about the american FBI in my book on the Black Panthers. The FBI basically were murderers. Just flat out, murder. Hoover felt he was at war with radicals. He called them the biggest internal threat to the US in existence.

I dont see any reason to think they are better now, than they used to be. I mean why would they be?

I am at the point where i wouldnt trust a single solitary thing that comes from the F.B.I. I mean, I’m sure they tell the truth sometimes, but how would i know when?

Thats just me, of course. I know that view is not shared around here, and thats totally cool. Just sharing my own disgust with that subpart-of-the-System.

w
v

Thing is, they’ve been under Republican control since before it was even called the FBI. They’re famously right-wing, even hard right — which Trump is too.

So, to me, the entire attempt to claim a “deep state conspiracy against Trump” is absurd (Not saying you’re doing this, WV). If it (the deep state) exists at all, the vast majority of it is going to be more sympathetic to Trump and the GOP than their political opponents.

Ironically . . . this may be changing — somewhat at least. No serious research to back this up, so I’m just winging it here. But it seems like the latest wave of Dem candidates includes a lot of ex-military. Yeah, it includes the Ocasio-Cortezs too. But she’s, tragically, an outlier. I think the Dems are doing their best to own “the center” and they see the military as a great place to start.

My own take is that Trump’s rationale for making nice with Russia is essential to consider. It makes the attempt beyond empty for me.

It’s also vital, IMO, to consider what he’s done around the world. It’s not as if he’s tried to reduce tensions anywhere else. In fact, he’s raised them, threatening Iran with regime change, Venezuela with military invasion, even Mexico with the same.

He drove us to the brink of nuclear war with North Korea, prior to kinda sorta defusing the crises he created. And he’s attacked our allies without mercy, throwing much of the world into chaos.

If he were an actual peacenik, I’d feel much differently about his overtures to Russia. But he’s anything but that. Who hasn’t he attacked or threatened, other than Russia?

nittany ram wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Perhaps the way to bridge that gap is to say: Democratic socialists are more than willing to push social democratic policies, on the way toward achieving actual socialism — Medicare for all, a living wage, cradle to grave free public education, etc. etc. But they still have the ultimate goal of fully democratizing the economy and socializing ownership of the means of production. Social democrats don’t have those goals. They are fine with Scandinavia as end-goal.

We socialists want more.

Democratic socialism vs social democrat…

What we want vs what is achievable.

I became interested in democratic socialism in college. But it is no more of an achievable goal than it was way back then. If anything, less so. Capitalism is too imbedded in our society to be rooted out. Not in my lifetime anyway.

So it comes down to the practical versus the illusory hope.

I think forcing a muzzle on capitalism is at least theoretically doable. I think that’s an attainable albeit really ambitious goal. The millennials are sorta sniffing around that hole already.

You’re free to disagree of course, BillyT.

Perhaps social democracy can be a waypoint on our way to democratic socialism – the ultimate goal. When asked about the Vikings’ defensive philosophy, Keith Millard used to say that they tackle the RB on the way to the QB. 😉

Hey, Nittany,

I definitely think it’s important to remember what is doable, versus the theoretical. But recent times have shown that what we once thought was impossible no longer is. See the entire Trump presidency.

The left (in general), IMO, fails by holding back, always holding back on the sphere of the Imagined, though it never comes close to the Dems in this regard. The Dems in power are positively afraid of their own shadows. They’ve got people holding their thumb in the wind to find out if it’s okay to send other people out to hold their thumb in the wind, etc. All that does is preempt any discussion of alternatives to our present nightmare. It just cedes victory to the bad guys.

To me, it’s “negotiations 101” to always ask for more than you think you can achieve. By sliding back to that and asking just that, you’re going to get less, which means less than you’d get if you ask for more, typically.

(I’m betting that was clear as mud!)

Anyway . . . I also think this is the case right now: Even social democratic reforms are a tall task in this atmosphere. Next to impossible. So why not push the Overton Window as far as we can beyond that. Wouldn’t that make those SD reforms appear closer to the “middle”?

wv wrote:

“we in america became anti-intellectual about socialism…”

This video was interesting too.

O’Donnell has said, on air, that he’s a democratic socialist. But I disagree with a couple of things he said here. To me, the conventional wisdom that asserts “We need capitalism” is absurdly wrong, and any close look at economic history proves this.

America wasn’t a “capitalist” society until after the Civil War, and the entire human race somehow managed to survive roughly 300,000 years without it.

I think too many Americans confuse it with commerce, trade and “business” in general, when it’s a specific economic form, not commerce itself, etc.

Capitalism is a specific social, legal, economic form of commerce that cedes all control of commerce to the few, the people who hold “capital.” In this system, capitalists purchase labor power (as a commodity) to produce commodities for money. C-M-C and exchange value. It’s all about who controls this, not about commerce itself, or production itself. Who calls the shots? Who owns all of this? Who gets to decide everything along the way? That’s what makes “capitalism” unique and unprecedented.

I liked Kulinski’s discussion about the differences between democratic socialism and social democracy, though it needed much more fleshing out. At first, I thought he was a proponent for the former, then he said he was a social democrat instead. I think he’s right to note the differences, especially that democratic socialism is a post-capitalist philosophy — one that calls for an end to capitalism, which is absolutely necessary in order to democratize the economy/extend democracy to the economy.

If the economy is democratized, it is no longer “capitalism,” by definition. It’s something else.

Social democrats prefer to keep capitalism in place, but seek reforms and a stronger social safety net. They want the Nordic model, basically.

But he confused me by saying that, whether we like it or not now, the two terms are interchangeable. Personally, I don’t see how that’s possible, given the ginormous differences regarding capitalism.

wv wrote:

Well I’m not disagreeing with your big-picture-points, Billy, but the FBI Agent handed them this stuff on a platter. Very unprofessional. You canNOT be texting private-negative things about someone you are investigating. Any lawyer would impeach a cop if he did that to a defendant.

Again, I’m not addressing the big-picture stuff. It just irks me that the agent was that stupid. Cuz…it…was…stupid. I’d have fired him just to send a message. Its a big big mistake. Not a little one.

w
v

I agree that it was stupid. Seriously stupid. He never should have done this on government equipment. But, to me, the hypocrisy levels are off the charts, because Republicans were saying far worse things about Trump at the time, and many from his own administration have as well. It appears that the norm is to call him a moron and worse, especially if you work for him.

If saying “mean things” about Trump were a firing offense, it would have cleared out half of DC back then — for good or ill.

I’m also not a fan of private communications between consenting adults being selectively leaked/the subject of a hearing, unless there’s probable cause before their disclosure of crimes being committed by said consenting adults.

There weren’t any.

As in, why no concern for Strzok/Lisa Page’s civil rights and civil liberties? The Republicans held hearings concerning Carter Page’s and FISA warrants, which were re-upped four times by four Republican judges. Of course, they never even mentioned the possible abuses of that system against anyone but Carter Page — not the truly powerless who get caught up in the net of government surveillance, etc. etc.

Oh, and to put a cherry on top, the day before that hearing they reauthorized the FISA program.

Only in America.

I don’t really know why I put myself through it, but I watched a good deal of the hearings too.

Key takeaways for me:

1. The Republicans hounded Strzok for nine hours, repeatedly going back to the same exact aspects of the case, with the barest of deviations in language. I suppose they were trying to get him on a “gotcha” moment of inconsistency, but it was deeply frustrating to watch.

2. I didn’t realize this was fair game, but Republicans often handed off their allotted time to their more aggressive and determined peers, which generally meant the same two or three designated attack dogs. I didn’t see the Dems do this, though I didn’t watch the entire nine hours.

3. I don’t think there is any way around this fact, but it never fazed the Republicans, and the Dems appeared not to bring it up, at least while I was watching:

If the FBI can be accused of taking any actions to influence the election, it was all to the benefit of Trump and against Clinton. If Strzok had wanted to hurt Trump, he would have leaked that Trump was under federal investigation, but he didn’t. Comey did tell the country, twice before election, that Clinton was being investigated, but would not say that Trump was too. And we also know that FBI agents in the New York office leaked info regarding Clinton to Giuliani, which he promptly spilled on Fox News. That office was called “Trumpland” for its “bias.”

This follows a more general pattern for the GOP in their endless hearings about supposed “bias” against “conservatives” and now Trump. Don’t mention, don’t investigate the fact that government departments are filled with a wide array of differing political views, or that the Law Enforcement sphere has always been dominated by the right. Whether it’s the IRS or intel or DOJ, make sure not to look at “bias” in favor of Republicans, or bias against their opponents, etc. Just narrow the frame to work solely in their favor.

Wikileaks, of course, helped tremendously here, concentrating solely on the Dems.

4. It’s amazing to me that Congress chooses to have hearings on private texts between two adults, which included perhaps “mean things” about a president that both Republicans and Dems despised at the time . . . but won’t hold hearings on the Trump administration’s kidnapping of babies at the border, endless corruption within the Trump executive, the destruction of the environment, the selling off of millions of acres of formerly protected wilderness, and our endless wars — for starters.

Our politics have never been much to brag about, but I think they’ve reached new lows. This hearing was an example.