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FOCUS: How You Help Trump |
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Monday, 28 May 2018 10:23 |
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Lakoff writes: "Without knowing it, many Democrats, progressives and members of the news media help Donald Trump every day. The way they help him is simple: they spread his message."
George Lakoff, 2012. (photo: Wikimedia Commons)
How You Help Trump
By George Lakoff, Medium
28 May 18
 ithout knowing it, many Democrats, progressives and members of the news media help Donald Trump every day. The way they help him is simple: they spread his message.
Think about it: every time Trump issues a mean tweet or utters a shocking statement, millions of people begin to obsess over his words. Reporters make it the top headline. Cable TV panels talk about it for hours. Horrified Democrats and progressives share the stories online, making sure to repeat the nastiest statements in order to refute them. While this response is understandable, it works in favor of Trump.
When you repeat Trump, you help Trump. You do this by spreading his message wide and far.
Nobody knows this better than Trump. Trump, as a media master, knows how to frame a debate. When he picks a fight, he does so deliberately. He tweets or says outrageous things, knowing they will be repeated millions and millions of times. When the news media and Democrats repeat Trump’s frames, they are strengthening those frames by ensuring that tens of millions of Americans hear them repeated over and over again.
Quick: don’t think of an elephant. Now, what do you see? The bulkiness, the grayness, the trunkiness of an elephant. You can’t block the picture?—?the frame?—?from being accessed by your unconscious mind. As a professor of brain science, this is the first lesson I give my students. It’s also the title of my book on the science of framing political debates.
The key lesson: when we negate a frame, we evoke the frame. When President Richard Nixon addressed the country during Watergate and used the phrase “I am not a crook,” he coupled his image with that of a crook. He established what he was denying by repeating his opponents’ message.
This illustrates one of the most important principles of framing a debate: When arguing against the other side, don’t use their language because it evokes their frame and not the frame you seek to establish. Never repeat their charges! Instead, use your own words and values to reframe the conversation.
When you repeat Trump, you help Trump.
In the coming weeks and months, I’ll use this space to provide simple, practical advice on how Democrats, progressives and conscientious journalists can use the principles of effective framing to expose and undermine Trump’s propaganda. Knowledge is power! We must arm ourselves with the fundamentals of effective political communication. We must know our values and frame the debate?—?and avoid helping Trump.
When you repeat Trump, you help Trump.
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Trump's Massive Mission Creep in Syria |
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Monday, 28 May 2018 08:38 |
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Cole writes: "The US is warning Syria against attempting to recover lands lost to rebels south of Damascus."
Syrian government forces shell a rebel-held neighbourhood in Daraa last week. (photo: AFP)
Trump's Massive Mission Creep in Syria
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
28 May 18
 he US is warning Syria against attempting to recover lands lost to rebels south of Damascus.
Some of those rebels are ISIL or affiliated in some way to al-Qaeda. That is, the US is now doing the opposite of what it said it was going in to Syria to do.
It is often alleged that US military presence in Syria is illegal in international law, and that it is not even constitutional.
The Obama administration sent special operations forces into northeast Syria to help leftist Kurds take on ISIL. ISIL has largely been defeated, but the troops (some 2,000 plus a rumored further few thousand mercenaries) are still there.
Obama’s lawyers maintained that the US has a right to go into Syria in self-defense, to defeat ISIL, which was plotting attacks in the United States.
The standing congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force is looking pretty long in the tooth. That authorization spoke of hunting down the people responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks. ISIL was formed in 2012 and it is a little unlikely that virtually any of its members were involved in 9/11.
So the US has now helped create a very large eastern and northeastern Kurdish enclave in Syria (Kurds are about 10 percent of the national population).
Apparently, the US special forces and the US Air Force are committed to now protecting the territory taken by the Kurds (much of it inhabited by Sunni Arabs). To that end, they have fought Syrian government troops, and even a small Russian mercenary battalion.
But how is fighting Syrian government troops part of the US mission in Syria? Only by virtue of mission creep. You had to stand up the Kurdish force to fight ISIL, now you feel the need to defend newly Kurdish-dominated territory.
The Pentagon is saying that since the US was part of the negotiations leading to the deconfliction zone south of the capital, it has the right to intervene there to maintain the cease-fire.
Some observers suspect that the US is simply running interference for the Israelis, who have occupied part of the Golan Heights and the permanent annexation of which the US is preparing to recognize. The Israeli government does not want Syria going south because they don’t trust Damascus to keep the Lebanese Shiite militia, Hizbullah, away from the Israeli border. The de facto Syrian side of the Golan is largely held by the a group (formerly known as Nusra Front) with ties to al-Qaeda.
That doesn’t sound like self-defense.
So de facto, the US and Israel are protecting some al-Qaeda fighters (among a large number of non-extremists).
Mission creep can go very wrong very quickly, as the US discovered in Vietnam.
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We're Making Undocumented People Wear Yellow Bracelets Now |
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Monday, 28 May 2018 08:30 |
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Krueger writes: "Not only are we ripping families apart for the unthinkable crime of crossing the border, immigration officials are also apparently making parents wear yellow insignia to denote their status."
Children at the border. (photo: AP)
We're Making Undocumented People Wear Yellow Bracelets Now
By Katherine Krueger, Splinter
28 May 18
 nother day, another nauseating peek into the hellish, unfeeling bureaucracy our country has created for undocumented parents and their children.
The latest glimpse comes from a story in the Arizona Daily Star, which reported on Thursday about Operation Streamline, a fast-track program to prosecute undocumented people for crossing the border.
The report includes this heart-wrenching scene (emphasis mine):
Alma Jacinto covered her eyes with her hands as tears streamed down her cheeks.
The 36-year-old from Guatemala was led out of the federal courtroom without an answer to the question that brought her to tears: When would she see her boys again?
Jacinto wore a yellow bracelet on her left wrist, which defense lawyers said identifies parents who are arrested with their children and prosecuted in Operation Streamline, a fast-track program for illegal border crossers.
Yes, that’s right: Not only are we ripping families apart for the unthinkable crime of crossing the border, immigration officials are also apparently making parents wear yellow insignia to denote their status. They couldn’t even pick another color!
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office told the Star that Customs and Border Protection started referring families caught crossing the border for prosecution weeks ago, after Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a directive for prosecutors to adopt a “zero tolerance” policy. In real terms, that means a lot of kids being separated from their parents:
On Thursday, Efrain Chun Carlos, also from Guatemala, received more information than Jacinto when he asked Magistrate Judge Lynnette C. Kimmins about his child during Streamline proceedings.
“I only wanted to ask about the whereabouts of my child in this country,” Chun said.
Kimmins responded she didn’t know where his child was and suggested he ask officials at the facility where he will be detained.
While their parents are being prosecuted, children are deemed unaccompanied minors, an innocuous term that President Trump is nevertheless doing his best to turn into something menacing. Many of these children are then put into foster care—“or whatever,” as White House Chief of Staff John Kelly infamously put it—where, the government has admitted, hundreds of them simply fall through the cracks and disappear.
We’re going to be hearing a lot more about combatting the terror of MS-13 as the Trump administration tries to expand and make this process even more efficiently brutal. But this—separating desperate parents from their children—is really what it’s all about.
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We Will Continue to Fight for Our Democracy |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=40776"><span class="small">Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Sunday, 27 May 2018 13:40 |
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Rather writes: "Despite the storms that rage across our political landscape, despite the threats to the norms of our democracy, our Earth continues on its cosmic dance around our brilliant sun."
Dan Rather. (photo: USA Today)
We Will Continue to Fight for Our Democracy
By Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page
27 May 18
 espite the storms that rage across our political landscape, despite the threats to the norms of our democracy, our Earth continues on its cosmic dance around our brilliant sun. And the seasons change. The forces of nature are bigger than all of us.
The official start of summer is a few weeks hence, but unofficially many of us are already on its doorstep. We are in what euphemistically we call a "long weekend"- this one of course made so by Memorial Day. For me, it is always a time of churning and mixed emotions. I seek out the cool rivers of the blossoming fishing season. I tune the old radio to the familiar patter of a summer ball game. But I am also aware that this Monday marks a solemn day in our calendar, one in which we should all really pause from our pursuit of pleasure to reflect on those who have died in service to our country.
This year, my shoulders seem to be bearing the added burden of trying to make sense of so much dysfunction. But I am resolute. To the best that I can, I will choose to reconnect with family, nature, and my broader country. I will seek out walks, and books, and chats over perhaps an adult beverage or two with those I love.
Meanwhile, in my thoughts, will be those whose lives were cut short, often in distant battlefields and on far-flung seas. Many died before they could taste much of life. They fought not just for a land, but for all of us - citizens of an ideal as well as a physical home. We can honor them by vowing that we will continue to fight for our democracy, in our own neighborhoods, cities, towns, farms, and country. And especially at the ballot box.
This is a moment of reckoning. It will require vigilance and stamina. But it is summer - a time when optimism seems to be the order of nature.
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ow that Donald Trump has punked out on peace in Korea, it’s time to give that Nobel Prize to the guy who really deserves it: Dennis Rodman.
