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If we are a democracy, any attempt to suppress him is unamerican.
If we are not a democracy, who is the censor who determines which voices can be heard? And what is their interest?
Right now the censors are the Koch Brothers et al. Their interest is to buy the government.
Government created censors have their own agendas which history has shown not to be healthy either.
At this point the near universal outrage against Trump for his statements rings false from most of the people making the claims:
Netanyahu? Really? The way muslims and palestinians are treated?
The rest of the republicans who can't wait to get their hands on the trigger for WW III? Afraid of being thrown off the gravy train?
That leaves democracy as the best option, which means attempts to demonize Trump (and the large number of people he speaks for) are no more acceptable than attempts to demonize Bernie for being a socialist.
There is more danger in trying to write Trump off than in engaging him. The people he speaks for will not be suppressed.
You are NOT a Democracy and, outside of the alternative media, have been censored and propagandized for decades, only it's Corporate Totalitarianism -linked with the power-players and groups really running the country.
I'd bet that if (Gawd forbid) the Trumpet ever assumed full power, he'd instantly quash ANY dissidents and critics
1. You should read more closely what I wrote.
2. What is your solution, suppression?
3. How is Trump suppressing dissent any different from the suppression we have now?
These issues need to be engaged.
Too much flailing faux outrage gets no one anywhere.
I am well aware of American history and the anti-democratic institutions of the Senate and the Electoral College.
I agree these are issues that need to be addressed: the electoral college should be dissolved and the senate should be reconstituted.
Those are important issues tangential to the current discussion.
Trump is very savvy in his use of the media, but it is all to no avail if nothing he says resonates with the public. That resonance is a problem which needs to be addressed. All the hand-wringing going on among hypocritical national and world leaders devolves to nothing but so much crocodile tears. The fact is 2/3 of republican voters like what he says.
How to change that? I suggest if Trump's anti muslim comments invoke so much hatred, rage and violence the solution is in teaching comparative religion from nursery school through high school. He can only feed on ignorance we have created with poor educational policies.
30% of republicans in a field of 14 candidates is huge.
More importantly, if you have been following the polls you will know his popularity rose significantly after his anti-muslim comments.
AND: 65% of republican voters agree that we should not allow muslims into the country.
There is no white-washing these results.(pun intended)
Remember the Third Reich was elected too -- by a people far better educated and more technologically advanced than the U.S. was at the time. Remember also that as it was U.S. capitalists who financed the Nazis' rise to power, so it was U.S. politicians, generals and bureaucrats who, after the war, embraced with open arms a huge contingent of Nazi war criminals. And some of those criminals made no secret of their intent to turn the U.S. into the Fourth Reich.
Now, relative to the world today, the U.S. is the most ignorant -- and by far the most savagely oppressive -- of all the industrialized nations. Indeed its prisons, the total surveillance by which it polices its citizens and its ever-more-obvio us agenda of global conquest proves it is already the de facto Fourth Reich. This makes Trump's appeal to the Moron Nation masses all the more terrifying -- and his election as the USian Empire's (first) Fuehrer all the more probable.
Note too the obscene phenomenon of the self-proclaimed "progressives" who turn out to be as maliciously anti-union as any Scott Walker reactionary. The (real) Left, meanwhile, has been so marginalized by the same process of moronation that we had basically been reduced to modern Cassandras.
However, the times are most assuredly changing. Bernie Sanders' campaign is giving new relevance to socialism generally. And from that introduction -- especially given the advent of an intensity of capitalist savagery that now fully reveals the knowing embrace of moral imbecility mandated by capitalism's doctrinal core -- there is also a burgeoning interest in the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin.
The Seattle victories of Kshama Sawant, who publicly declares her Marxian ideology, are harbingers of things to come. So is the partial victory of 15 Now in Tacoma, whereby a Marxian coalition won a $12 minimum wage for workers within the city. The Big Lie campaign to suppress the historical truths of class struggle is clearly failing.
Indeed there is an entire generation -- in the U.S, and across the globe -- awakening to the fact that only socialism will enable us to save our species and our planet from capitalism.
Quoth Shirer: "What (the Ruling Class) wanted was an authoritarian Germany which at home would put an end to democratic "nonsense" and the power of the trade unions and in foreign affairs undo the verdict of 1918..." (pg. 186). "The Germans imposed the Nazi tyranny on themselves" (pg. 187).
Yeah, but 31 out of 54 Republican Senators are supporting him. That's a lot more than 30% in the U.S. Senate.
You can't be serious. Bad as it is now, Trump has made it clear he'd like to make it worse. A wall on our southern border, and the Mexican government strong-armed into paying for it? Muslims banned as immigrants and perhaps even as visitors? Gagging the Internet? What's next? "Postponing" the next election after he's in the White House (if he gets there)?
I wasn't criticizing you; just pointing out a too often misused cliche in self-descriptio n of this Oligarch.
So donn-a get-a yo' knickers in a twist bro' or sistah; I usually concur with you.
it's Corporate Totalitarianism -linked with the power-players and groups really running the country.
Of course, Reiver is correct. We must do all we can to elect almost all Democrats who are the lesser evil and many times the greater good. How much media time could have been devoted to the climate conference if Trump hadn't been hogging the airwaves. Btw, too much time is also devoted to the terrorist attacks--hours & hours. I'm tired of looking at the faces & lives of the latest couple who have achieved their goals: killing/publici ty. We need to hear & see substance on more topics, not mind-numbing repetition on Trump et.al. The more fear Trump promotes, the more people think and act irrationally. Fear and greed: both primitive emotions as people search desperately for security, ironically in the richest country in the world.
I think you were misundertstood by many, not knowing you were speaking as a resident (citizen?) of Canada. I doubt guomashi was speaking of of the USA as a democracy EMBODIED, but rather as a possible locus of democracy. In that I side with guomashi, these are time where, even if this is only part of the alternative media - now - some of the ideas and critiques seen here will leak and are leaking into the mainstream.
I'm a resident citizen of Scotland/UK/EU.
But I've been in and out since the 1970's and resident by virtue of having married two American ladies (NOT at the same time -I aint no Mormon) and although being unable to vote but being a taxpayer, feel obliged to be knowledgeable and active in ANY county I live in, including many countries around the world who are in actuality, or much closer to being actually, active Democracies as opposed to Oligarchies in Democratic clothing.
This I think, gives me a broad perspective and I feel, the right, to make the comparison.
I'd be happy to be a dual-citizen if the US would permit it but it's officially one way; "You're either with us or against us", as a certain dimwitted illegally-selec ted president put it. Although I love where we live, I'm not about to give up my citizenship in a country/contine nt that has Universal Healthcare among other social benefits, for one without.
I hope that explains my perspective.
This is a superficial gloss over the fact that no matter how much attention he gets for anything people agree with what he says. That agreement isn't going away. Blaming his personal clown car or the media attention does not address the problem.
What planet did you say you were from?
Donald Trump.
I think it's just marketing, I think he's laughing his butt off and skipping to the Republican nomination. I don't think he'd ever seriously consider half of the ideas he's throwing out there. The guy is too smart.
have a nice day
If Trump did not exist, the cynical media in the US would have to create someone just like him. Trump is a gift from God to the American mass media.
It is a bit of fun watching the republican party squirm like a half squashed worm.
Donald Trump is the epitome of what Postman is talking about -- the TV-savvy pitchman who may know nothing about the world but does know how to entertain. And that's what makes him so effective and so dangerous.
In the foreword to his book, Postman compares Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World: "Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think."
Postman, writing more than 30 years ago, predicted that Huxley's vision would prevail. Donald Trump's ascension bears him out.
Yeah, better check your bong. And go clean your room.
Actually, as a "Furriner", I consider Obama relatively humble, with a good, sometimes self-deprecatin g sense of humor, especially when you consider what's gone before him (Clinton's seemingly sunny disposition was the velvet glove over the steel-clad fist, especially if you were poor; (let's pass quickly over Dimwits/Torquem ada Cheney's ghoulish crowd)
I never expected anything but a slightly right-center Pre's and Ob' isn't perfect -who is-? but I'd never consider putting him in the "Narcissist-ego maniac" category by a long shot and he's from a multi-cultural background, well-educated and worldly wise. A nice change from an incurious ignoramus and his hubristic, arrogant, head-in-the-san d dehumanizing cabal of chicken hawks, neo-cowards and war criminals.
All they care about are ratings. Ratings mean ad revenue. Just think of the great ratings they will get if the Fourth Reich Fehrer is elected.
Anyway, the two things that motivate people are feed and greed. And a greedy Trump knows that his lemmings are most motivated by fear, just like the time they thought that Obama was going to kill off gun sales (after he won his second election), and they went out and bought firearms in mass, much like they are doing again, today.
With 73% of Americans living from paycheck to paycheck, and with student loans topping a trillion dollars, and auto loans (for the first time in history) topping a trillion dollars, and with ACA insurance costs expected to double over the next two years, the last thing these idiots ought to be fearing is getting whacked by a Muslim. Consequently, the last things they need to be spending on, with the money they don't, are guns These ignorant lemmings are easily manipulated by the oligarch-owned media, and Trump plays the media like Keith Moon played the drums.
However, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein said that he would be happy with either a Bush or Clinton Presidency, and one way or another, Lloyd Blankfien seems to be able to control the people, with the power, to make him happy and to keep him happy.
Donald Trump makes Herman Cain look like an intellectual. He has now gone totally mad from inhaling the toxic fumes of his hyper-narcissis m and megalomania, from the media attention he receives, and by his obsession with the idea that he could actually be elected president.
Tragically, rather than dismiss Trump as the demented Mussolini wanna-be that he is, our AD-HD news-tainment industry obediently enables him with an endless parade of TV guest spots and obsessive coverage of his every insane, repulsive utterance.
I agree with Matt Tabbi. We can't make Trump disappear, and we can't turn off the greed of TV networks, which profit handsomely when their Trump-driven ratings increase. We can only hope that this dangerous man somehow doesn't get the GOP nomination, and that, not having been "treated with [the] "respect" to which he is entitled, he runs as an independent, splitting the "conservative" vote so that the Democratic nominee is elected.
"Did not."
"Did so."
"Did not."
"Did so."
"Did not."
"Did so."
Oh, pardon me. That was not stimulating playground conversation, it was a debate between a major party's presidential candidates.
So, now some pretend not to know what a republic is. And they pretend not to know how a republic is maintained. 'Tis such a mystery. But according to the Preamble, the American Republic exists to, among other things, "promote the general welfare." But, apparently, it is better to stay in the sandbox.
The media isn't liberal as the right wing nut cases argue. It's conservative owned. Advertisers also dictate what is newsworthy. Much has been spent on researching how dumb the public is and now unsophisticated the public taste is for everything from entertainment to news.
I think that Jack London had the best observation of American character in this regard. In 1907 his novel, THE IRON HEEL (first dystopian novel) he described how the rich and the church control the message and concludes that the onus for democracy lies with the people who are obliged to question the message and the messenger. London used the 1900 Census to support his arguments in footnotes. Every American worth his citizenship must read this novel. 1907 or 2015, the environment is the same.
"How to change that? I suggest if Trump's anti muslim comments invoke so much hatred, rage and violence the solution is in teaching comparative religion from nursery school through high school. He can only feed on ignorance we have created with poor educational policies."
Absolutely correct - and the Rupugs are the last people on earth to want a better educated public. Their very existence as a political party depends on having a "dumbed-down" public.
Great comment, FIRSTNORN1.
Kudos, and thanks for the above !
- indeed! - and another thing - rump can quiet hill supports who will claim bernie can't win
also note that liberal media is a myth created by neocons, who can't get enough of fox's blizzard of disinformation - or as says - # wrknight 2015-12-10 13:09
Quoting Pops07:
If Trump gains the White House, it will be the liberal media who put him there.
What planet did you say you were from?
- as a dominant-indust ry-wide feature neocons portray it, there is no liberal media!
he employed "brownshirts", militias, to break windows and beat-up jews and other political opponents
rump appears to be headed in hitler's direction
It may also be too late to turn off the Democrat' equivalent - Clinton.
"our" government has served the interests of people with money since day one. A few people make money off of war so they can buy politicians who promote war.
"Greed is good" --- Ronald Reagan.
WAKE UP AMERICA. A huge military build up, more than "daily" mass shootings = a sign of a declining empire