pointing out that Haley is relying on Democratic Votes.
Although, she's a perfect microcosm of the Republican party:
1. Knows better
2. Knows her only pathway to not having to go back to upstate New York is Trump
3. Chooses that route for her own personal gain and access to swanky Washington life
4. Rinse, repeat
Even the insane clown posse wouldn't go that far.
This is an example of when the decline is complete. All done.
The attacks on him have to be different. I think Haley should attack his manhood. Attack his lack of intelligence. Loser. Loser. Loser. He's not evil. He's deranged. He's mentally incompetent. He's not tough. He's terrified people will find out that he's lost his marbles. He's afraid of tough women because he's scared of them.
Given the field on both sides, she's about the only one who can do it.
It she probably could have thrown in something like “kind of sad, isn’t it? We need a president who is above childish name calling. Usually adult men have grown beyond grade school bully tactics, it as Dirty Harry said, a man’s gotta know his limitations.”
I just think they have never hit him where it does the most damage. His fragile sociopathic ego. Nancy Pelosi did from time to time. Opponents have shied away from the obvious stuff because they know the cult don't care. They like that he's "tough."
But we all know he's not tough. He's a big fat p*ssy and one big, fucking loser.
Unfortunately, she would have to sacrifice herself to do it. It *might* mortally wound his candidacy, but she'd have to sit out for a while and hope to have a redemption arc when Trump's is done and seen through sober eyes.
She's not that virtuous, though. She wants to win.
every word. No matter how deranged or nonsensical, they believe it. Opposite claims in the same sentence? No problem, both must be true for he said them. JFK Jr. lives and will be his VP? No problem. Pick MTG as VP but claim she's actually JFK Jr.? Obviously true.
That is his genius.
And those who ride along on is coattails repeat every word because the audience believes, or because the audience is as incredulous as you are. It matters not to the riders for it garners clicks and eyeballs and newspaper readers. Does the "MSM" mention something like this and move on? NO! Every word must be repeated, every outrage of the truth must be dissected and studied in depth, every twaddle must be both quoted and duplicated for fear that the audiences outrage will not be sufficient with a mere paraphrase.
This is his genius, and genius it is, to drive ratings up. Those who love him hang on every word and believe it. Those who hate him (raises hand) read many of the words and grieve for the nation that is so willing to listen - no, not listen, to hang on, to revere, to worship - every syllable.
It is a struggle, but my goal is to not see these videos, to not read these articles, to deprive him of what he needs the most: an audience.
There is so much anger and resentment out there among GOP-types, especially those with little buffer to absorb the perceived whims and vanity projects of the establishment. Trump is a big middle finger and sucker punch at those running the establishment carnival.
Example: I met a former commercial fisherman from MA while in NH on summer vacation prior to Trump's first term. The guy was pissed at the system -- he had been a lifelong 2nd generation commercial fisherman, and was having his business managed by MA State bureaucrats examining his catch and telling him what he could and could not fish. His was a catch-as-catch-can (no pun intended) existence to begin with, and then on top of it all he had some fresh college grad from a boutique liberal arts school with a degree in environmental something or other who had never spent a day on a working boat telling him about fish species and fishing zones and rejecting half his haul. As he told it, the MA official couldn't even recognize the species of fish he was talking about. The fisherman said screw it, sold his boat, and moved to rural ME and got licensed to work as a guide. He was all in on Trump, because the system had gotten too silly, and he wanted someone who was going to speak truth to nonsense, and blow the whole thing up. He was one of many with a similar anger and resentment I met that summer. I can only imagine where he's at now with the more recent culture wars and activist cause-de-jour; he was, back then, already concerned by the creep of the MA education system.
Trump is a poor man's idea of a rich, successful man; but at the same time someone who has no respect for the system or cultural elites. His supporters apparently don't care that he's batshit crazy or full of shit himself, as long as he's their voice in saying enough already with the nonsense. They aren't seduced about policy or progress in some grand sense; they just want the nonsense to stop, and they'd prefer Trump's cloddish bullshit over the day-day nonsense they see creeping into their schools, impacting their businesses, etc.
Trump, for his part, doesn't know or care how stupid he is. He doesn't have any sense of what his ideals are. He doesn't understand the importance of institutions; his true north is the camera and the microphone.
A true deal with the devil.
what or who does not matter. Anger = Good.
My eldest is in the business of lining old pipes with composite systems down in Florida. He was educated only in the school of hard knocks, having dropped out of high school (probably just in time to avoid expulsion) as a teen. Or at least I think he dropped out.
He shares this anger, albeit not sufficiently to support (as far as I know) the ex-president. He focuses it on more local targets including engineers and the corporate executives who send him truly stupid sets of instructions. I understand, because both sets of people have never been down in a manhole in their lives and have no idea what the work is actually like.
He feels comfortable sharing this anger with me, an engineer and therefore obviously an idiot, because I spent my share of time in manholes back in the '70s and understand what he's bitching about.
I'm sure that fishermen have the same worldview of the government folks who are there to help them (!) as my son does. It is, generally, with good reason.
...the government is forcing a cultural agenda into institutions, or looking the other way as other organized groups do the same.
And I say all of this as a registered Democrat, and graduate of elite schools, who was thankful that a handful of elite schools were called on the carpet to account for their contributions to cultural malaise.
for a widely unpopular cultural agenda. And I think this is more other folks, and especially institutions such as post-secondary education, rather than the Biden Administration.
Much, but not all, of that effort to change cultures is either bad or overdone. Some is being undone by the Supreme Court, see Affirmative Action, a product of the Nixon Administration that appears to have run its course. As a heterosexual Caucasian of the male persuasion, I have occasionally questioned the wisdom, fairness, and efficacy of Affirmative Action myself.
As to the university presidents, no sympathy from me, either.
as to go down into those manholes without ventilation and a back up on the surface.. OSHA has a lot of stupid regs - except for the regs which aren't stupid.
such as chemicals (the material in the liners is nasty) and confined spaces. He let me watch at a jobsite about a year ago and I was impressed by the crew's attention to things like hats, vests, putting manhole covers back on when not using them, nobody alone, etc.
He's pushing 60 and has seen first hand what ignoring the regs will do. And don't ask what he's seen. Even in words, you can't unsee it.
grasp of the world, his displaced anger makes perfect sense. (The classic conundrum of fishing, hunting, woodcutting, etc.: how to manage the catch to make a profit without risking extinction of the resource. Hard to convince people, I guess, to avoid short-term thinking when their livelihood depends on living paycheck to paycheck/harvest/catch etc.)
I file this datum under the heading of the war against expertise. Yeah, we hate the know-it-alls, but the differentiation of knowledge made us dependent on them a long time ago. Even on this board I am flummoxed at the anger against a dedicated public servant like Fauci.
I think some of what you call a war on expertise could be characterized as a critique of myopic expert opinions that fail to account for (or undervalue) the effects of their policy positions more broadly. I think most of the criticism of Fauci and other public health experts during COVID falls into this category.
borrow the passive voice. Expert opinion is hardly infallible and I for one cut people like Fauci a lot of slack as they felt their way to solutions to an unprecedented crisis (well, unprecedented for a century anyway). This topic has been flogged to death on the board, so I don't want to reopen it. But it, the war on expertise, is surely a factor behind Trumpism, which is the subject of the thread. I guess the best spin to put on the hostility is when arguments descend to mere appeals to bureaucratic authority, as if it were a military chain of command. But do we have any alternative to informed trial and error and self-correction?
We are a large country and one size does not necessarily fit all. I think the concept of subsidiarity would help tremendously. However, that would limit the ability the activists and radicals (not suggesting that Fauci is one) to impose their agendas on others against their will.
...i.e., short-term profit over long-term sustainability of the resource and business.
His retort was something along the lines of: "...I've been fishing for 25 years, my entire community fishes, do you really think we don't know what the hell we're doing and we're going to torch our future...".
I get his point, but at the same time, I have no problem wondering whether or not shareholder-oriented big business would torch itself chasing short-term profits over longer-term value add.
I'd like to think smaller, family-held businesses (especially those rooted in a culture/shared identity) have a better sense of responsibility and the future. Maybe MA commercial fishermen would qualify. But don't have a data point on the broader point aside from Philip Scranton's work on New England bulk-production textile factories turn of the 20th century vs. Pennsylvania valley production of family-owned batch-production factories (where the idea of "sufficiency" and quality reined in the forces which drove big-textile).
...explained religious bans on eating beef in Hinduism and pork in Judaism: In rural India, the water buffalo was the main source of traction for subsistence farmers to plow their fields. Eating your cow would be like eating your tractor. Short term pleasure would be followed by long-term misery. In ancient Israel, raising pigs was apparently not economically feasible as the caloric inputs would exceed the outputs, due to the climate allowing mostly for the raising of scrawny swine.
Supposedly the ancient civilization along the Indus River occupied land that was heavily forested until they cut down too many trees to fire kilns to make brick. I don't know if modern historians still say that, though.
This discussion of fishermen in New England make me want to look at the obscure book, Farmers & Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850, which got a cultural bump in the movie "Good Will Hunting."
where investing is concerned. Not to sound like a jerk, but could you rewrite that sentence? If you mean that big money is not different when it comes to following quarterly returns vs. long-term planning, I couldn't agree more. From my uninformed perspective, it seems that American industry prefers keeping the stock up to investing in R&D. I'll leave it to ufl, jt, BI, and others to correct that if I'm wrong.
Interesting report on textile production, though. I knew none of that.
and the share of it done by business has soared while portion by federal government shrank from nearly 2/3rd to 20% in that time.
The US is #3 behind Israel and South Korea for R&D spending % GDP of all countries.
The US dominance in tech and health related is unsurprising in this context. 35 years ago people talked of Japan dominance and then later on China dominance in these key industries. It hasn't happened.
There are certainly companies that will milk their R&D but the market pays most for growth - short and long term. And competition is way too intense to let up.
In the 80s. As technology gets better, it gets easier to catch more and prices fall. You have to catch more to make as much money the population crashes etc.
That's a tale as old as time and I don't think small family operations guard against that.
For some of the fisheries, the single, large, out for weeks at a time industrial fishing vessels received a larger share of the fishing quota (and harvested a larger portion of the take). As margins got smaller, the 'fishing at scale' drove the smaller boats out - and international concerns don't give a flip about local economies. It's still going on - South American countries are dealing with Chinese fishing vessels off their coasts, often illegally.
That this is something where regulation is especially necessary. And the stability generated by appropriate regulation makes people feel like it's not necessary.
help foster that stability. Imposed regulations, or unevenly applied regulation, foster cheating and 'end arounds'. Having the Ivy league observer on the small boat with the 200 lb catch while the Chinese trawler 20 miles away rakes in 200 tons is an example of the latter. The Ivy league and the locals advocating for changes to the quota allocation laws is an example of the former. Comes down to respect between the parties (something something consent of the governed)
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/23/home/matthiessen-surfmen.html?scp=47&sq=packing%2520light&st=cse#:~:text=MEN%27S%20LIVES%20The%20Surfmen%20and,339%20pp.
My great-uncle was a boater and when I was a kid, we went out on the Sound with him a number of times (most memorably in 1983, when the family joked that Ed was partially responsible for the I-95 Mianus river bridge collapse, since he'd taken us in the van with the boat in tow over it the evening before it collapsed). The stories he and his generation told seemed unbelievable - talking about hidden fishing spots and swimming in the Hudson.
Some of my siblings still live in the area - the massive shift in the half century since are even more profound. I need to find Men's Lives to see what was going on above my ~10 year old head.
Is that rather than working to change regulations (banding together as an interest group, working on representatives) the solution is to give the middle finger and call the system corrupt.
You might even want to make the regulator jobs better payed/desirable. You get what you pay for in government.
Trump Biden debate this fall.
"Ordinarily at this point in the show, we'd be doing a skit featuring the Presidential debate this past week. James Johnson and Mikey Day would step up here as caricatures of President Trump and President Biden and offer a satirical spin on the fumbles and flubs from Tuesday night. But we can't. Lord knows we tried. We reached out to some of the finest comic minds in the world. We've spent four long days living on HoHos and Churro Frappacinos trying, desperately, to come up with something. But between Don's rambling and Joe's whispers...we can't. . It was like a damned Abe Simpson lookalike contest out there. You can't do satire when reality is so bizarre...."
Here's hoping that the pace and pressure of the trials are enough to bring him to a full Captain Queeg moment - ranting about strawberries and rolling steel balls in his hands.
Knowing his background that's what I'm going with
of the past 24 hours but if the speculation is true it makes Melania forcing him to ride in a second car make sense.
If he ever had it. He's got good medical coverage and is a germophobe.
He eats like garbage, doesn't read, is proud of how little sleep he can get and function. Those are both pretty good set ups to lose your wits as you age.
Another mob boss.