Month: August 2017

 
Wondering why a few conservative friends are less than impressed.

 
From Jonathan Bernstein:

The real reason for it is that Trump, from the very start, has refused to act as head of state, and so no one except for his supporters is willing to treat him as such. That was the story of the Boy Scout brouhaha. It’s related to his tweeting, too. Because Trump refuses to adhere to normal rules of decorum, no one can trust how he’ll behave in any situation.

Either he just doesn’t care about that part of the job, or he’s so inept (or so self-involved) that he’s unable to do it.

This goes back to the very beginning of his presidency.

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From Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara at Principled Perspectives:

The fundamental issue surrounding the pro- and anti-Confederate Statues is philosophical. Donald Trump’s response was wrong on several counts, including his moral equivocation of “both sides”—the pro- and anti-Confederates—and of Founding heroes George Washington and Thomas Jefferson with Confederate reactionaries Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

But he was right on the issue of violence.

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From PZ Myers:

There is a monument to Christopher Columbus at the Minnesota capitol in St Paul? I had no idea. He was an evil old monster, I’m all for removing anything like that — and there is a petition to remove it and replace it with two statues, one of Prince and another of someone chosen by the Indian community. I like that idea.

But then, I think we should regularly change art anyway. The Columbus statue isn’t exactly equivalent to Michelangelo’s David. It was bought and paid for by an association of Italian-Americans about a century ago, and so what it really represents is a wave of self-promotion by an ethnic community that had been discriminated against (which is a fine thing to do; it’s just too bad they picked such a terrible hero), and isn’t necessarily high art.

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From @bjork55 at Bjork Report:

Don’t waste too much time focusing on the bigotry and hate. Keep your eye on the Trump-Russia prize. There’s good news–that spells bad news for Trumpsky–coming soon from a certain Washington, DC newspaper.

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A President who reads, constantly reads…

Wondering why a few conservative friends are less than impressed.

• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz has urged caution in the privilege of opting out of the messy work of justice. Now he suggests personal balance: personal things we must not forget while resisting. Like life.
   
• Atheist professor PZ Myers appreciates Charlottesville clergy for the nucleus of resistance to white supremacy, urging fellow atheists to link arms with religious folks of good will.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, former pastor and current atheist Bruce re-introduces us to the use of scripture in 1960 by the late Bob Jones to defend segregation as ordered by God.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil counts down the many many reasons to regard Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio as a scumbag. The reason Joe was held guilty was that he continued to order his officers to arrest motors who looked Latino in case they might later turn out to be illegal immigrants. A court had told him not to do that anymore, but he persisted (to coin a phrase).
   
• President Trump is against removing monuments celebrating Confederacy’s heroes. Next we’ll be tearing down statues of Washington and Jefferson. “Where does it stop?” Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara at Principled Perspectives considers my President’s argument and is having none of it. “Indeed . . . where does it stop—that is, where does the display of blatantly anti-American symbolism end?” I have expressed a similar thought.
   
• E.A. Blair at MadMikesAmerica brings back some largely unknown history from the late John Denver, including an anti-fascist song now re-written as the ‘I Am Not Alt-Right Polka’.
   
• Green Eagle ponders yet another instance of Trump folk lying about trivial things. In this case it concerns the rally in Arizona and is, once more, about crowd size. Photoshop and image substitution are exposed. Can the supporters of this alt-President get more petty?
   
• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from The Washington Post. A minor league baseball team in Pennsylvania hosted an Alternative Facts Night, complete with exaggerated claims.
   
• Frances Langum watches and records as Morning Joe takes on my President’s threat to shut down the government if Congress does not pay for his wall.
   
• Andy Borowitz reports as a growing number of Americans demand that an offensive symbol of racism be removed from public property. Whatever could they mean?
   
• nojo at Stinque reviews Trump actions and notes a sad fact of human history. We who were needlessly impressed by dumber parts of Larry Niven’s Ringworld once called it tanj: there ain’t no justice. nojo says it better.
   
• Jon Perr at PERRspectives is unimpressed with the minority of Republican office holders who boldly criticized our President’s bland defense of the “fine people” marching with Nazis and white supremacists. He reminds us that these same brave few conservatives were said and did nothing when it mattered most.
   
• Tommy Christopher goes to the transcript to show how Paul Ryan had to have his arm twisted into admiting that Trump bigotry is simply wrong. Even then he had to put a universal qualifier on it. We can all do better?
   
• @bjork55 at Bjork Report has a plausible explanation for why the Speaker cannot bring himself to ‑ um ‑ speak out more directly.
   
• Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass seems to have lost patience with lazy rich folks who attack those struggling in poverty for being too lazy to struggle harder.
   
• Infidel753 explains a nuclear flashpoint, virtually unreported, but more immediate than the Korean peninsula. This is serious.
   

Military Trump Doctrine: Demanding Not to Have His Feelings Hurt

We have a new US military doctrine.

Fire, Fury, and Power now serve to warn friend and foe alike:
Do not hurt our President’s feelings.

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From John Scalzi at Whatever:

The friend was talking (basically) about how he was annoyed that the fans of a certain person insisted that person was a genius when my friend saw that person’s output as largely just okay. I wrote:

Calling someone you’re a fan of a “genius” is mostly just second-order complimenting of one’s self (because you have the good taste to be a fan of a genius, you see). Most of the people I’m fans of are not geniuses, they’re just really really good at what they do, and because they are, they sometimes make great and/or enduring art.

And I think that’s true. “Genius,” in the context of creativity, is bandied around a lot and is typically used as shorthand for “that person/group I like who does stuff I really like and which for some reason I have incorporated into my self-identity.” There’s also often but not always a whiff of “and they do something I don’t know how to do myself” in there. In short, “genius” means “people who are highly skilled and super-talented in their creative field, who produce high quality material that speaks to me ineffably.”

I think being one of those people is nice work if you can get it, but I don’t think it equates to being a “genius.”

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From T. Paine at Saving Common Sense:

Once again it seems America has come completely unhinged, with the help of the mainstream “un-biased” media there to fan the flames of our own cultural destruction. Sadly, racism has always been a problem in our nation, and around the world, for that matter. Even more sadly, it will always be present in our society to at least a hopefully minor extent. It is an inexcusable evil that, when left unchecked, has resulted in the dehumanization of others so that they could be exploited, enslaved, and even murdered. Even more sadly, the number of people enslaved today throughout the world in 2017 exceeds the numbers that were enslaved in 19th century America. Many of these slaves today are perniciously sold and used as sex slaves.

Yet despite such horrific numbers, America was doing far better with its racism problem in recent times, until the last decade or so. We even had a majority of Americans vote for our first black president. While I agreed with very little of President Obama’s policies and had seen many disturbing signs that had cracked his polished veneer while he was still running for the White House, I too was buoyed by the fact that America in its decency could indeed elect a person of color to the presidency. Indeed, I would venture that the timing in our history was such that Barack Obama’s color was absolutely an asset to his election. (Never mind the foolishness of voting for someone simply because of their color, instead of their qualifications.)

I was greatly disheartened, however, to see that rather than further unite our nation as Americans, President Obama squandered the good will bestowed on him by a significant majority and decided to insert himself into more localized incidents; indeed he was often prompted to do so by the complicit mainstream media once again. The net result was that instead of us all simply being “Americans”, he further divided us into hyphenated Americans, most especially black-Americans and white-Americans.

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