Drill Baby Drill...the US Politics Thread (Part 3)

You ever traveled the rural south of the United States?

Isn’t it Miller?

Am totally oblivious to be truthful. A quick Google/Wiki look makes him out as a bit underwhelming and shallow.

Maga only believe in a thing they claim is important only for as long as it is necessary to make their point then flip on a dime as needed. Sometimes that is before the end of the sentence.

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He doesnt have handlers. The closest he had were moderators - Bannon, Ivanka, Stone. He has largely lost those people from his orbit this time around. What has replaced them is a cadre of sycophants and people with their own interests who understand that Trump is not paying attention and doesnt know anything allowing them to run their own plays.

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I think you might be wrong here. We just don’t know who his handlers are as MSS and KGB both are netorious for not revealing who the handlers of their agents are

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So I guess it makes him a crystalisation/product of a cultural process.

No, and I am unlikely ever to do so. From your comment, I get the you infer that Trump appeals to at least that broader community, which I understand to some extent, but still, that vote was always going to be red, how did the rest of America enable this man so willingly and complicitly.

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Yeah I think so. I said in one of my posts yesterday that while his brain has completely melted, I dont think the dementia angle is the right way to view it. It seems to me more an effect of the culture in which he has been the chief moron whisperer for the last 10 years and his takes have become increasing deranged and based on the version of reality he wants to be true and over time, with the lack of meaningful pushback from anyone and extensive reinforcement from the sycophants, he has rewritten his brain to believe a lot of it.

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It was a point I made over and over and over again during the campaign. He says everything and nothing at the same time. Taking any meaning from anything he says is like people visiting the Orcale of Delphi. It’s just gibberish and even when he manages something that might look like a normal sentence the words used aren’t meant in a way consistent with any common understanding of them. The result was everyone was free to create their own version of him in their head. It is how they developed such a big coalition with multiple factions completely opposed to each other somehow being on the same side.

The problem is our information system is broken and so the overwhelming majority of people only encountered him through short clips that filtered his insanity through the lens that was agreeable to them, but almost always completely at odds with reality. And the mainstream press utterly failed in covering him seriously. There are lots of different reasons for that, but in large part the press are driven by what they think the people think they need to hear. To them you cannot take a guy who is supported by enough people to be polling at 53% and just trash him. The results was the so called “sane washing” that gave cover for all the incredibly unserious takes about what he really meant when saying something racist/untrue/insane.

Yes there are deplorables, but not enough to win an election. The incredible swing in attitudes towards immigration lays bare the issue. They supported an immigration policy based on what Trump told them was true (it wasnt) and what he would do (he isnt) and now they see reality they are incredibly unsupportive of it. The fact it was entirely predictable (and predicted) is only relevant to people who paid attention, and those people have always been in the minority.

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When your source of info and / or truth is Fox News and X and primarily your contributions into those platforms then you’re going to get pretty twisted pretty quickly. Not to mention having the mind of a spoilt 4 year old.

Read up on Peter Thiel. Besides being one of the big tech conquistadors, he writes a lot of stuff about removing democracy (apparently not efficient enough), about removing all principles of law in order to let life freely flow without any artificial hinderance etc. etc. He’s bat-shit crazy, but is no doubt a big influence on the whole post-democratic movement.

I don’t know whether Thiel is behind the Project 2025 organization, but that’s no doubt a big part of where Trump’s influencers are.

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I think there is some irony (or equally, re-emphasis of the status quo) that, would a clearly apparent European descendent South African been accepted here.

Sounds frighteningly familiar eh…

“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.

A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.

And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”*

- Hannah Arendt,

(14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German historian and philosopher.

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

Arendt’s extensive body of work includes many nuanced discussions on truth, lies, and the nature of totalitarianism, and this quote reflects themes from her writing on totalitarianism and the nature of truth.

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:0)

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https://x.com/variety/status/1945987377039610203?s=61&t=VxX1vHU3NOwwNhlbyICG-g

This comes a week after Colbert slammed the parent company’s trump settlement. Late night isn’t what it was, but Colbert is doing well comparatively so it’s difficult to buy financial reasons for this

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WSJ publish a (creepy AF) letter allegedly from trump to Epstein from the early 00s saying some weird weird shit and including a weird doodle of a naked woman.

Trump’s denial is based on saying he doesn’t draw things. The internet is now FULL of evidence of doodles publicly know to have been done by trump :joy:

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Hopefully the Epstein thing will keep on ratcheting up. Trump is guilty as hell.

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The Colbert thing is part of a wider loss of free speech under Trump. It’s a disgrace. Hopefully Colbert gives is to Trump and MAGA with both barrels during the reminding time he is on air.

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could be colbert himself.

he might be demanding what he knows is unreasonable, in a ploy to produce his own content…

he might be even better off the leash…

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