Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

Sucking Up Will Get You Somewhere

 

platonictrumpSo a bit more on Vox Day’s adoration of Trump.

A Trump rally in Chicago was disrupted by protesters to the extent that the Trump campaign cancelled the rally. Scenes between police, Trump supporters and anti-Trump protesters became very loud and tense i.e. the protesters had turned up in sufficient numbers that they couldn’t just be thumped, shoved, manhandled away.

Obviously lots of photos taken including this one of a Trump supporter apparently doing a Nazi salute:

https://twitter.com/ejwamb/status/708493054060040192/photo/1?ref_src=twsrctfw

Ooops. Now fair is fair – the semiotics of that can get a bit wonky and there is a high chance that the Trump supporter was trying to suggest the protesters were Nazis. Random person doing unfortunate stuff is not what is wrong with the Trump campaign it is all the other racist and semi-fascist stuff but…yeah…not a good look for Trump.

[ETA: New York Times has some quotes from the woman in the photo here http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/03/12/trump-supporter-who-made-nazi-salute-explains-why-she-made-the-gesture/ ]

Among others, Vox Day Tweets that said lady giving a Nazi salute is maybe really a Bernie Sanders supporter up to no good!

https://twitter.com/voxday/status/708639280722276352

His grounds for doing so seem to be that 1. they are both women and 2. both white and 3. both have grey hair. It isn’t a great spoiler to reveal that, no they aren’t the same woman.

But Vox has got noticed in what he presumably sees in terms of some alpha, beta,…iota,…upsilon male social hierarchy of guys with wealthy dads:

https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/708672077654532096

The New Republic has a piece by Heer Jeet on the whole thing https://newrepublic.com/minutes/131495/following-fathers-footsteps-donald-trump-jr-retweeted-white-supremacist

And John Scalzi has a couple of things to say as well http://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/03/12/the-thing-about-that-photo-from-the-trump-rally/

All stories are now converging – it is the rabidpuppygamergatedonaldtrumpsingularity!

[Update] Vox has said more on his website: http://voxday.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/honest-mistake-vs-media-libel.html

It was, he claims, a honest mistake that he spread a claim based on no more evidence that he finds it hard to distinguish one person from another was a left-wing provocateur. The way to avoid such ‘honest mistakes’ is to use a modicum of critical thinking.

Meanwhile he is cross that journalists have called him a ‘white supremacist’. His argument is that he isn’t a white supremacist because of his ancestry, which, is a fallacious argument. He’s not *technically* a white supremacist because he is more specific in his theories of genetic supremacy: i.e. he seems to think it is specifically English genes rather than European genes in general. As a defense goes not being TECHNICALLY a white supremacist is not a great place to be.

 

camestrosfelapton

42 responses to “Sucking Up Will Get You Somewhere”

  1. You don’t think it’s worth noting that a George Soros backed group is the one that organized this brawl?

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    • Not really. What would that change about any of the events I discussed? I didn’t discuss the funding of anybody else involved. Or are you implying that Soros is attempting to undermine Trump in the same way he acted against the Communist governments of central and Eastern Europe?
      That actually sounds like an interesting proposition for an essay. I’d be interested to here your thoughts on it.
      Soros and I do share an interest in Karl Popper’s political writing but sadly Mr Soros has never sent me any money.

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  2. Huh. Didn’t know that Soros isn’t a bogeyman outside of certain Middle Eastern/ Muslim-majority nations. Lucky 10,000 I guess.

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    • Sorry, that should read “Didn’t know that Soros *is* a bogeyman outside of certain Middle Eastern/ Muslim-majority nations.” Morning, coffee, lack thereof.

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      • You should investigate the funding arrangements behind “environmental” groups who are blocking the development of pipelines and fracking in Canada. Mr. Soros’s name keeps coming up, along with a variety of other orgs who figured prominently in the Chicago thing.

        These are issues of national significance in my country. Foreign interests working against the economic well-being of Canada, and -me-.

        That these same interests are working against Mr. Trump is a point in his favor, IMHO. I still think he’s a New York limousine liberal, but at least he has the right enemies. Unless this is all BS, and Trump is having dinner with Soros and co. behind the scenes. That could be a thing too.

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        • Do you mean ‘Mr Soros’s name keeps coming up’ when funding sources are actually listed or do you mean ‘Mr Soros’s name keeps coming up’ in unsubstantiated comments?

          Fracking is an interesting one, isn’t it? I’ve met a few anti-fracking campaigners who are basically right-leaning farmers concerned about the potential threat of contamination to water sources from accidents.

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      • ** munches on raspberries, sits down to talk to the Phantom **

        Phantom, it’s hard to tell tone via internet so let me first say that my comments are straight-up and not sarcastic. The business about Soros and [scare quotes] “foreigners” is hypocritical and a red herring. The oil industry long since sold itself and many other Canadian natural resources to China, so [scare quotes] “foreignness” seems not to be a genuine issue. All of Canada is falling over itself to bring in Chinese, Saudi, Brazilian money, Koch money. Whoever’s got it, we seem to want it.

        This brings me to what I perceive to be the root issue of your hostility as hinted at in your post above, which is to say that something macro-economic (and perhaps micro-economic) is having an impact on you personally. I’m not sure that can be wholly laid at the organic hemp door of the [scare quotes] “environmentalists”. The oil and gas industry is suffering from world prices and other international pressures. The Alberta economy lost an opportunity to diversify itself when it was flush in cash; the politicians instead preferred to send everyone in the province cheques that took the various names of “Prosperity Bonus,” and “Resource Rebate” etc. Given that resource-based economies go through predictable booms and busts, it would seem imprudent not to diversify and plan for that very usual event, the trough of which we are passing now. Ontario is its own bundle of dysfunction (usually well-intentioned but expensive and corrupt).

        I share your concern with the overall composition and health of the economy, even if I am coming at it from another direction. I just think you are misguided in your direction of blame. We only have one environment and it is meant to sustain us all. The notion of sustainability is crucial. Unchecked growth of the 20th c may prove to have been an exceptional state and now we may all have to readjust our expectations and behaviours to reflect new realities. Is that not what conservatives believe? Live within our means?

        The 21st century is precarious for most of us – life used to be hardscrabble for people in the lower classes or far away so we didn’t have to think about it because we worked hard and did well and played by the rules and went to school and thus could expect to be insulated from hard times, mostly. Turns out that is not the case and the ruthless capitalist machine comes for us all eventually. It’s disorienting and scary and I share those fears, both for myself and the young people in my life.

        So my genuine and honest questions to you (assuming you come back to read this) are twofold:

        1) If you are indeed a free market capitalist on the right-wing, can you explain to me in a way that I can understand why it is that the people in those industries that are currently suffering market effects should be protected from the consequences of their over-concentration? Shouldn’t we expect them to adapt or die? I’m genuinely confused why the market is viewed as the arbiter of all that is good, up until the time that it isn’t.

        And

        2) If you do favour companies and enterprise over government action – how can we get them to actually create and keep good paying jobs as we are always told they are better at doing, but rarely see any evidence of that fact. Quite the opposite. The current euphemism is “labour flexibility” but there is a marked trend toward: short-term contracts, unpaid internships, vastly overloading existing employees, layoffs and subcontracting and outsourcing. Governments have lowered taxes dramatically since the 1970s and have given all sorts of concessions to the manufacturing industries but it still has not helped to create and keep jobs at livable wages. When do we get to the point to admit that this blind faith in private enterprise may not be working? (I myself think the past 40 years is enough time to make that call). What is your recommendation for improvement?

        Camestros, sorry for the long post. I am intensely interested in this subject and none of my friends here want to talk about it. I’ll back off now, but I am genuinely curious in the Phantom’s world view, acknowledge his anxieties and want to hear his ideas.

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      • “I’ve met a few anti-fracking campaigners who are basically right-leaning farmers…”

        I guarantee you’ve met very few if any actual right-leaning farmers campaigning against fracking. Actual farmers don’t have time to fuck around with that, for one thing. Another is that anti-anything activists are generally a pack of liars. Fracking particularly is rampant with this, as -all- the objections are obvious lies. Double for pipelines. We had a major demonstration/brawl here in Ontario because Trans Canada Pipeline was going to reverse the flow in one of their lines. Yes, reversing the flow direction in an existing pipeline was going to be a major enviro-diaster and little children were going to die.

        Said brawl paid for by the TIDES foundation, some Soros backed groups, the Sierra Club and so forth. All foreign money, as discovered in an official government criminal inquiry. Same goes for the various idiots protesting pipelines in British Columbia and Quebec. Foreign. Money.

        Same thing as if the Chicoms start paying for anti-uranium protests in Oz. It’s not a lawful protest if the crowd is bought and paid for.

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        • I’m quiet confident that they really were farmers, right leaning and anti-fracking. They strongly objected to gas companies having free access to their land and/or had strong fears about the dangers to the water table as a consequence of feacking (some of those fears were baseless IMHO but others less so) and the general danger to clean water supplies.
          Farmers depend on water absolutely. Farming is also a very risky business – and farmers don’t take potential threats to livelihoods lightly. They also tend to have a very long term view of the places where they live. They also tend to be less impressed by corporate city types selling flim-flam and looking like bankers.

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      • Archbishop Laudanum asks: “I’m genuinely confused why the market is viewed as the arbiter of all that is good, up until the time that it isn’t.”

        Because it isn’t “the market” that is killing the oil price, it’s OPEC. Otherwise known as enemy action.

        “why it is that the people in those industries that are currently suffering market effects should be protected…?”

        The purpose of government is:
        1) Keep the peace.
        2) Court of last resort to enforce contracts.
        3) Protect the nation from enemies foreign and domestic.

        In as much as the government’s job is protecting Canadians (and their companies) from foreign threats, and the oil price is being manipulated by OPEC, oil companies should be getting said protection.

        Besides which, what’s going to happen in five years when there are no drilling rigs in Canada, and all our oil companies are bankrupt? Canada can’t afford to replace all that stuff and all those people every time OPEC kicks up their heels. This is a small country.

        “Unchecked growth of the 20th c may prove to have been an exceptional state and now we may all have to readjust our expectations and behaviours to reflect new realities.”

        Or, the exceptional growth of the 20th C was due to the introduction of several astounding technologies, namely the internal combustion engine, electric power, heavier than air flight, anesthetics, telephones and so forth. My mother remembers when rural Ontario first got electrical power, my Grandfather was a boy when the Wright Brothers flew. He lived through the beginning of flight and the moon landing.

        Whenever somebody says “unchecked growth”, that’s a statement of a political nature, not an economic one. “Unchecked” implies Somebody Should Be Doing Something About This. No, they shouldn’t. No one can. It’s impossible to have central control of a national economy. Stalin proved that for all time.

        “Governments have lowered taxes dramatically since the 1970s and have given all sorts of concessions to the manufacturing industries but it still has not helped to create and keep jobs at livable wages.”

        That is untrue. Taxes and government income are higher now than at any time in history. Half or more of the economy goes directly to tax, one way or the another.

        Ontario is a mess because regulations make it impossible to do anything here. That’s the bottom line. Anyone who hasn’t left for the USA or China has a Special Deal, and is basically being paid to stay. You can’t buy a hockey stick that’s made in Canada. No one makes them here anymore, not even Sherbrook.

        Livable wages are another favorite political football. A ‘liveable wage’ used to be a dollar a day. What happened? Inflation, that’s what. Inflation is a government policy. They borrow money one year, pay it back ten years later. If the value of the dollar went down 2% a year for ten years, they save a bundle of cash. They can do shit like this, because they print the money. Print more, dollar falls, government makes out. It’s a -tax-.

        “Turns out that is not the case and the ruthless capitalist machine comes for us all eventually.”

        What institution deliberately killed a hundred million people in the 20th Century, Mr. Laudanum sir?

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      • Ms Phantom… thank you for entering into the conversation in the spirit that I intended. I don’t want to clutter up our host syllogisms’ comment page too much with a debate that may not interest CF at all, but let me just say a couple of things that are important, I think, to address in your comments.

        It’s not not true that taxes have gone down. They have gone down, a lot. Here, look at the tables in these official statistics:

        Click to access tax_e.pdf

        Your list of what the government’s role is, not surprisingly, different than mine. But, a necessary shared starting point is that we agree that it does have a role to play. It’s not entirely fair to compare the current expectations and tax revenue required/expended to the past. In the early 20th c, as you rightly pointed out, there were no roads, airplanes, large-scale utilities, mass education etc that required financial support. It’s not the same world so a comparison with the past is probably only helpful in a limited sense.

        It’s not correct to conflate oil rigs and Canada. You are muddling the public and private interests there. It seems to be that there is a good case to be made for stronger government direction in a small country like Canada where the culture tends to be a little more passive and risk-averse in general. There is a vast spectrum of possibility re: regulations and I don’t think we need to jump to visions of Stalinism right away.

        And, my mention of “unchecked growth” was not at all intended to be political, although I could see where that perception might come from. The emphasis was on the growth part, not who is doing the “checking.” The environment has natural limits. We live in a finite world. That was my point. In a world of finite resources, something has to do the “checking” and I’d prefer it be us and not the furies of nature. How and what form that checking takes, is, of course, a political discussion.

        There is enterprise possibilities in Ontario, too, Ms Phantom. At least to judge from what I’ve seen and heard of friends there. They might be smaller or different than the ones that have left, but people evolve, business environments change, and adaptations must occur. Ironic that the leftist seems to be advocating the market position here.

        Again, sorry CF, for the length and extended debate on your page. And thanks, Ms Phantom, for taking my queries seriously.

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      • Archbishop Laudanum said: “It’s not not true that taxes have gone down. They have gone down, a lot.”

        Common error, you have mistaken tax rates for overall taxes. The size and scope of government has not shrunk since the 1970’s, it has grown. The number of people employed by government, at all levels, has grown. The amount government at all levels takes in, by all sources, has grown. City, province, federal. All much bigger than the 1970’s.

        The famous Harper Tax Cuts were not a cut in taxes. They were a reduction in growth. A small one.

        “It’s not correct to conflate oil rigs and Canada. You are muddling the public and private interests there.”

        It is difficult for the nation to collect royalties on rigs when there are none. In the final analysis, there is no public sector. The entire public sector is a TAX on private production. If a rig owner can’t make a buck in Alberta (and he can’t right now) he will load that bitch up and move it someplace he can make a buck. Because he has to. Debt must be paid. Today, that place is North Dakota. Or he goes broke, and some guy in North Dakota buys the rig super cheap. Same result.

        As you can see from our $0.50 US-Canadian Dollar, Canada cannot survive without oil income. How are you going to pay your social programs if there’s no income? You won’t, of course. Then all those dependents will suffer and most likely die. Canada has winter.

        “In a world of finite resources, something has to do the “checking” and I’d prefer it be us and not the furies of nature.”

        I notice you didn’t answer my question about the 100 million innocent dead. Not uncommon among fans of Big Government to skip that one. Myself, I will take the furies of nature any time. Famines are usually political in nature, in this day and age.

        Ask yourself when the last legit famine was in India. There hasn’t been one since they booted out the Ghandis. Compare and contrast with the Great Partition.

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      • I enjoy chatting with you Phantom. Really though, to avoid excessively befouling CF’s comment section with more such long post back and forth, I think it’s best for me to acknowledge that we would need more space and time to work through some of these things together. Our operational definitions are just too far apart and comment threads are not the place for nuance (I live for discussions of nuance!).

        For example, while it is true that the automation, mechanization and manufacturing have brought the cost of consumer goods down dramatically, I am correct when I say that life in general costs more. Minimum wage has not kept up with the cost of living or productivity gains, so real incomes have fallen while essential things like rent, the price of food, etc have gone up in proportion to take-home pay. Work itself is more precarious which adds another pressure. Thus it costs a greater proportion of the average income to meet one’s bills than it used to in the past and one is less secure – which is an absolute drag on an advanced capitalist economy that relies on consumer spending. That is the essential structural problem we find ourselves in now. In 1989, I could survive on my measly wage of $5500 per year. That would not be remotely possible now on an inflation-adjusted equivalent of $10,508. A haircut in 1933 in rural western Canada was $0.35, a fun fact I learned last month. That’s $6.38 in today’s money. See my point? Sure, it may be possible to buy manufactured cr*p much more cheaply now, but is also wears out sooner, and that doesn’t take into account all the non-manufactured things that still have to be purchased.

        The thing about the cheap manufacturing is that along with the ever-downward pressure on prices (desirable in theory), it has also meant that there has been an even-more brutal downward pressure on wages – because the manufacturing industry has no national loyalty and they took the jobs elsewhere (not so desirable). I know you will blame the unions for this and likely call them a kind of tax too – but Camestros does not need us to venture down that minefield so I won’t. *** Imagine I am singing The Internationale along with Woody Guthrie as I write this 🙂 **

        In another example, the state has withdrawn educational subsidies from higher ed, so those costs have been pushed on to private individuals (I imagine you see that as acceptable as a private good; I view education as a public good so it bugs me – but the fact remains that it costs more than it did 20 years ago). My tuition in 1989 was $1093 which would be $3,133 today but the current tuition for that program is nearly $6000 so it has doubled proportionately speaking.

        There is a whole raft of these costs that accompany modern life – some of which are optional and yet kind of not – cell phones, internet, dental care, toll highways, transportation etc. User fees and even some new taxes are also part of it, I’m not too dogmatic to acknowledge the sleight of hand that get played by governments (like Ontario’s deceptive “health levy” that went into the general budget and not actually to improve wait times as promised). Those things to add to the cost of living but it is not the main driver. Economies are complex and profit is a major driver of price.

        It’s not tax that makes Toronto, Vancouver, London, Sydney, Honolulu, Istanbul, New York, California etc expensive places to live; it’s land scarcity, the seemingly insatiable demand from domestic and foreign buyers, 0% interest rates with low or no down payments, and very well-connected building lobbies. Taxes fall well down on the list of cost drivers in the housing market. Seriously.

        Harper cut revenues at the exact moment when we were in the middle of a massive global economic recession. Deficit spending is the correct thing to do in a downturn – counter-cyclical stuff. You must surely remember that Canada was one of the few countries to come through that pain event relatively intact – thanks to the careful protective measures of the previous government and the characteristic Canadian cautiousness. We were praised as a model at that time because of the government regulation that prevented meltdown. In fact, it got Mark Carney the big job as head of the Bank of England. That’s not an effective example for your anti-regulation argument.

        Venezuela is a mess, no disagreement there, which was why I mentioned Norway instead. The simple fact of state ownership/direction does not say anything meaningful about the nature or success of a particular government’s actions though. Venezuela has a very long and distinct violent and schismatic history that makes it neither Canada nor Norway, and Chavez was not a Canadian or Norwegian leadership figure. It’s fine in the abstract to name regimes according to the textbook terms of Political Science 101, but that leave out the messy parts of contexts of place and time and history which is what really matters in practice. If you think there is no difference between communism, fascism, islamism (if that latter is even a thing) and a Commonwealth-style liberal democratic service government, I am afraid we are just going to have to part ways again at that point.

        I am not trying to change your opinion, you certainly know your own mind, but I do take your points seriously and want to understand where we might be able to meet at least part-way.

        Ooops. Sorry CF for perpetuating the Foul League of Befouling when I said I wouldn’t. It seems I get started and can’t stop. Occupational hazard, I guess.

        ** goes off to twirl with some fish **

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      • 🙂 Well OK then.

        I could ask Timothy who he thinks appears to be winning, but then I remembered that I don’t actually care about winning. It’s another of the many things that interest me in this puppy/SJW feud business. I myself have no desire for awards, so it’s curious to see how much they matter to others. *shrugs* *slopes off into the night*

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      • Timothy is da bomb.

        And, I’m given to understand, he also likes bombs, bomb-making, bomb-throwing. Whether that counts as a plus or a minus on the Felapton Towers airbnb site, I don’t know

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    • HI Phantom: I didn’t necessarily address all your points because I didn’t want to clutter up CF’s page with a giant wall o’ text. I think some of our differences will be found in, as the saying goes, “unresolvable taxonomic arguements.” You say the entire public service is a tax on the productive sector; I say that public sector workers are valuable and have always existed since the time humans started to gather together. Religious figures used to perform what we think of today as social services and had tithes etc. I find the whole recourse to cries about “but, but… taxes” to be reductionist and tiresome (sorry!).

      The realistic fact is that life in general costs more. The government has to pay to do a lot more now than in the past and it needs to raise revenue (safety inspections, roads, air traffic control, diplomatic stations, child protective services etc). These are services that did not exist in the past but are deemed standard now in the 21st century iteration of the service state. You and I may disagree about where and how much, but “taxes !!!1!1!!!!” as a universal cry of outrage and persecution are just never going to get far with me. I benefit from living in a society that has regulated water systems (ie: not Flint MI), safely maintained highways, an educated citizenry etc. I am willing to chip in my share. In fact, if there was a way I could pay more and head off the looming elder-care tsunami that is coming, I’d vote for that in a heartbeat (sorry to drag your money along with me but you might need them someday for your parents or self or loved one)

      The issue with taxes is, indeed more complex than I mentioned above. Those charts were the corporate tax rates, which I mentioned because they have gone down and I was addressing your claim that we have taxed businesses out of the country. We have not. I realize that there are many more taxes and, more nefariously, “user fees” than there used to be. I remember before they added the PST and GST, for example. I also remember when my savings account as a little kid had 8% interest. Things change. Harper cut the GST and it was barely noticeable in the pocketbook (1 cent) but it blew a hole in the budget. Bad (but ideologically-driven) move

      My point about the rigs is that diversification is the way to go. And, if it is too tough to make it in Canada, since we are a small country, nationalise the oil industry. I hear people mentioning Norway as a model, a similarly small and resource-dependent country.

      Finally, I didn’t mention your point about 100 million dead because I don’t really know what to say about it. The number is mind-boggling, to be sure, but the thing is… if you are counting that as Stalin’s body count, I think it is grossly overstated (I’ve seen more like 50 million) but that includes not just the famine in Ukraine etc but also WWII dead. Mao certainly killed his share of people, and so did totalitarian regimes like Pol Pol Pot and others. But 20th c mass violence has not all been linked to leftist regimes. There were ethnic conflicts (Balkans, Rwanda), rightist military regime gassings and state murder (Iraq, Kurds, Latin America) and racial ones (Holocaust). I should mention too, that increased population mobility has meant that pandemics like the early 20th c Spanish flu and others have greater lethal potential now too.

      So, the 20th century was an exceptionally deadly with mechanized warfare, atomic bombs, politically disastrous economic experiments, and biological stuff. I am really not sure what you mean by mentioning India, but there are serious issues there with starvation, poverty violence and other things. Partition with Pakistan and Bangladesh was the cause of a lot of deaths and the source of ongoing tension. And Gandhi was not such a saint, have you read his memoir “My Life”? Not a nice man. The 20th century was a lot of things, and one of the things it was, was deadly. And yet, at the same time, overall population numbers have shot up exponentially in most of the formerly-colonized world in the course of the past 100 years. It’s more complex than merely hurling around a figure like 100 million dead. And, if you are trying to claim that the Canadian governments very ineffective regulatory regime runs any risk of heading in a murderous Stalinist direction, I’ll probably just remain as silent as before.

      Good to talk with you. Thanks for your patience CF. I imagine there are some syllogisms (syllogi?) in there that I am overlooking logic-wise.

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      • One man’s “unresolvable taxonomic arguements.” are another man’s uncomfortable truths. Government workers do not create money. They do not, for the most part, produce anything. They are a -cost- to the economy. Since they are a cost enforced at gunpoint, which does not change no matter what the economic conditions may be, they are a tax.

        “The realistic fact is that life in general costs more.”

        This is not even faintly true. Every kind of manufactured item or foodstuff costs an order of magnitude less than it did when I was a kid, and two orders of magnitude less than when my father was a kid. Mass production, mass shipping, mass communication has reduced the cost of everything produced by the human race for the last 200 years at least.

        Life costs more in Canada due to punitive taxes, stultifying regulations, and corruption so widespread we don’t even see it anymore. What drives real estate prices? Tax. The only place you can store value is the house you live in. Result, multi-million dollar houses in Toronto are the norm, not the exception.

        “Harper cut the GST and it was barely noticeable in the pocketbook (1 cent) but it blew a hole in the budget.”

        No, Harper reduced the GST, and Mr. Dion forced him to overspend the budget in 2008/09. I remember wishing Harper would grow a pair.

        “nationalize the oil industry”

        That’s working well in Venezuela right now.

        “Finally, I didn’t mention your point about 100 million dead because I don’t really know what to say about it.”

        I know. You don’t know what to say because 100 million is the low end of people deliberately killed by their own governments in the 20th Century. Not war casualties, not victims of natural disasters, but people murdered deliberately by the governments of the countries they lived in. Communist, Fascist, Islamist, all the same.

        The proper road to a safe life and a prosperous future is -less- of that. Not more.

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      • Phantom, government workers are a tax? Well, they’re paid via taxes, so yes. Why did you think you were getting an argument on that point? The method(s) of funding the public sector are quite well known.

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  3. ** pokes head in. Wonders if George Soros wants to fund the conspiracy channel **

    The best part of that photo is the casual way the Trump Nazi is holding her smoke, as though this is Bourbon Street after last call.

    The amused and bemused look the hipster is giving her affirms my faith in the future. The kids are alright.

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  4. When teaching the rise of fascism in the 1930s, this is the clip I use to capture the spirit of the age. I turn it up really, really loud and dim the light. It has the intended effect, that’s for sure.

    “If I had my way, I’d have all of you shot” ** crowd cheers **

    I remember seeing this film in a theatre at a midnight showing when it came out. Intense, man.

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  5. Vox’s retraction seems to be the Twitter equivalent of the “correction on page six”. If he’d been able to put it in a really tiny font he’d have done so, but as he couldn’t the next best thing was to make lots of noise about something else…like demanding retractions from other people.

    On the odd farming sub-topic, the ones around here are as politically minded as anyone else, as they are essentially highly-specialised business people whose income can be badly affected by legislative changes or infrastructure changes. They get appropriately worked up when they think their interests are threatened, and are usually little-c conservatives at a minimum.

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    • Erm, you’re going to need to connect the dots here. I think the original question was, what’s the _relevance_ of a Soros link. I mean, the situation helps show that US politics is badly skewed by funding issues, but that’s on all sides.

      The question of how and why Soros might oppose Trump is interesting given that Trump is staking out some interesting positions on trade and finance, but the article also states that that org is pro-Sanders, so which of the two is their main motivation?

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      • Mark, when there is a mass demonstration and riot that somebody paid for, as in they paid money to have people show up and riot, the guy who paid the money is relevant. Soros is the guy.

        I would speculate that Soros has a Super Special Deal going with Hillary and does not want to re-negotiate with The Donald.

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      • Ah, right, dots suitably connected. You think the protesters were there because someone Soros-connected paid them to be. Not because they oppose a presidential nom candidate who polls show to be deeply unpopular with a fair segment of the US population.
        And you think there was trouble because the Soros-connected org paid for that trouble to be caused, and not because large opposing groups sometimes get into it with each other when they meet in charged circumstances.
        Right. And by “right” I mean “well obviously I think you’re wrong.”

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      • Mark-kitteh, being a foreigner, I feel it incumbent upon me to tell you that the Washington Times is not only a right-wing newspaper (and not a very successful one, either in terms of subscriptions or influence), but that it was founded by Rev. Moon.

        It is literally the house organ of the Moonies, who we all know are models of sober rationality.

        You might have known that, but I thought you should have all possible info.

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  7. The people who wanted to block the Keystone XL pipeline (which had the sole purpose of sending Canadian oil to the “Chicoms” — talk about foreigners!) included a lot of farmers. Nebraska and Kansas are basically a few cities and towns in between miles and miles of farms (I’ve lived in one and traveled extensively in the other, and still have friends in both). They opposed having a lot of dirty oil traveling across the land they’ve inherited from their fathers and grandfathers. Their ancestors held onto that land during the Dust Bowl, and they’re stewards of it just like the Good Book says.

    And they are very, very conservative people. They’re rock-ribbed Republicans, faithful church-goers, hunters and fishermen in their spare time, with extended families that have lived in the same places since white people arrived there. One of my Nebraska friends is a Methodist minister in a small farming town; his congregation goes back to the 1860’s and was founded by the ancestors of the people he serves today. The babies he baptizes have the same last names as the oldest tombstones in the cemetery.

    They’d no more bow to the Clintons or Soros or any left-wing ideologue than they’d bow to Satan! They ARE the Heartland, the real Americans.

    And yet, they too opposed it. Because they remember the Dust Bowl and all the droughts since. Because they want to pass those farms along to their children. And they know uncontaminated water is the only way that can happen. So they protested, and gathered, and sent letters to their state and federal representatives, and talked to the media, and some of them even went to D.C.

    If farmers can do that, I’m pretty sure they’re putting in just as much or more effort into protesting fracking. After all, there was a chance the Keystone pipeline wouldn’t leak and ruin the water. There’s NO chance that fracking doesn’t ruin the water.

    I can’t imagine Canadian farmers are any less political when it comes to their interests than American or British ones. As Mark-kitteh says, British farmers are ever willing to protest if something’s going to affect their livelihood, like with hoof and mouth and badger culls. And a lot of them vote Tory, yes?

    ————————————-

    At least Teddy’s turning the old adage on its head. You know, the one about how “I can’t tell those X-kind of foreigners apart, they all look alike to me!” He can’t even tell white people apart. Or at least white women.

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  8. Besides liking the cut of his jib, maybe Teddy’s hoping if he sucks up enough to Drumpf, he can get a presidential pardon for his felon daddy?

    (Which I doubt — is The Combover sympathetic to those who get *caught* by the IRS? Nope, those are Losers, and we know how he feels about them.)

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