Trump Consciousness
- Thread starter Jim_Smith
- Start date
There seem to be conflicting reports about whether they will call witnesses in the impeachment trial. They only need a majority vote to do so and with the Republican's slim majority and a few Republican senators facing tough re-election races this fall it is not clear whether witnesses will be called or which ones.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...n-of-minorities-better-under-trump-than-obama
Race relations and ‘position’ of minorities better under Trump than Obama
by Paul Bedard January 27, 2020
“Americans' average satisfaction rating for the 27 issues Gallup has tracked consistently since 2001 is now 47%. This is up three points from a year ago and is the highest since the January 2005 poll.
“Today's average satisfaction is roughly on par with the level of the early 2000s. Only in 2002 was the average for this metric substantially higher than it is today.
2:05
David:
'Kay um, what was it that made you first be like, "Oh I don't think I like the Democrats"?
Olivia:
... I realized something, I realized on social media, after the election, was that the first people to always attack people and the first people to start being really vile were always Democrats. And Republicans were always throwing out facts it was always an article or you know, oh a statistic, it was always something that you could kind of fall back on. And then, so, I started seeing this and that's really when I started reading different articles and I was like, "Wow like maybe they're onto something". So I started reading these articles that I saw there people posting. I started seeing people fighting and arguing, and then I'd see some really respectful people kind of just giving their opinions and like, "Oh well look at this, well look at this let's compare these" and then I was like "Wow like maybe I was kind of wrong. Maybe these people that I've been around are wrong". I think what first started it was right before the election we actually got into a fight at our job. Like an actual fight, an argument. And I think we were both kind of mean to each other in different ways and then I was like wow and we kind of opened up and talked about it and then one day I was like David you're right there are bigger things to worry about. And so we kind of talked about all these different issues and I started watching TV and videos I was like oh my gosh this is like Who I am now like this is how I have been.
https://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2017/09/15/lilla-after-identity-politics-review/
As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the conservatives are far more likely to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas and principles. Young people on the left are much more inclined to say that they are engaged in politics as an X, concerned about other Xs and those issues touching on X-ness. And they are less and less comfortable with debate.
Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X…This is not an anodyne phrase. It sets up a wall against any questions that come from a non-X perspective. Classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. What replaces argument, then, are taboos against unfamiliar ideas and contrary opinions.
https://newbostonpost.com/2017/11/09/undoing-the-dis-education-of-millennials/
I teach in a law school. For several years now my students have been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast majority of them want to learn. But true to stereotype, I increasingly find that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are enslaved to their appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by elite culture and their undergraduate professors.
They cannot learn until their minds are freed from that prison. This year in my Foundations of Law course for first-year law students, I found my students especially impervious to the ancient wisdom of foundational texts, such as Plato’s Crito and the Code of Hammurabi. Many of them were quick to dismiss unfamiliar ideas as “classist” and “racist,” and thus unable to engage with those ideas on the merits.
Last edited:
That was a brilliant idea not”spreading trump everywhere”
For me it's really sad that skeptiko has in large part become a political conspiracy oped rag. Trump consciousness and global warming are predominately the leading threads which have become an echo chamber between a couple of posters which dump an endless number of fox news and other right wing articles. And of course anyone can do as David suggests and choose to ignore content we find reprehensible but for me it has undermined the credibility and viability of what I considered the primary mission of skeptiko which “was” to promote research and exploration into the paranormal,spirituality and other psi phenomenon. Of course this will inevitably intersect with our political and religious ideologies but for the moderator and a primary poster to use skeptiko as a mouth piece for controversial right wing political agendas I feel has been a big mistake!
Being on the left as a large percentage of us are, if I tuned in to the Skeptiko forum for the fist time I would be out of here in a heart beat. I think if we are to ever achieve the paradigm shift we all or most of us claim to want we need to not to get bogged down in divisive political/ideological cul-de-sacs and stay focused on the big picture as much as possible.
Thanks
Larry
For me it's really sad that skeptiko has in large part become a political conspiracy oped rag. Trump consciousness and global warming are predominately the leading threads which have become an echo chamber between a couple of posters which dump an endless number of fox news and other right wing articles. And of course anyone can do as David suggests and choose to ignore content we find reprehensible but for me it has undermined the credibility and viability of what I considered the primary mission of skeptiko which “was” to promote research and exploration into the paranormal,spirituality and other psi phenomenon. Of course this will inevitably intersect with our political and religious ideologies but for the moderator and a primary poster to use skeptiko as a mouth piece for controversial right wing political agendas I feel has been a big mistake!
Being on the left as a large percentage of us are, if I tuned in to the Skeptiko forum for the fist time I would be out of here in a heart beat. I think if we are to ever achieve the paradigm shift we all or most of us claim to want we need to not to get bogged down in divisive political/ideological cul-de-sacs and stay focused on the big picture as much as possible.
Thanks
Larry
Last edited:
Paradoxically, Larry, I was on the Left in the 1980s and 90s. I don't think my views have changed, but that the 'Left' has been taken over and perverted into a movement that plays scant regard for world peace, or indeed for the welfare of poor Western people, and concentrates on 'manufactured' issues such as Climate Change, Trans rights, etc. This has been done slowly and utterly cynically but fortunately people are seeing through it - hence the election of President Trump and our two votes that have given us Brexit. The Democrats basically hate the President because he has seen through the phoney Left, and is teaching more and more people to see through them too.
In a way, it is a bit anomalous to discuss this at length here on Skeptiko, and yet I feel that a mass awakening is taking place, and maybe that will spread to other areas of life. Quite apart from the fact that I want Trump to win big and get something moving to improve relations with Russia, I think the topic is fascinating because it shows how it is possible to slowly pull the wool over people's eyes, until there is a revival of free thinking - the point we are at now.
David
In a way, it is a bit anomalous to discuss this at length here on Skeptiko, and yet I feel that a mass awakening is taking place, and maybe that will spread to other areas of life. Quite apart from the fact that I want Trump to win big and get something moving to improve relations with Russia, I think the topic is fascinating because it shows how it is possible to slowly pull the wool over people's eyes, until there is a revival of free thinking - the point we are at now.
David
Last edited:
Alex doesn't support Trump as far as I'm aware so I don't think a single Trump thread can be said to represent the forum, also its high post content is almost entirely a couple posters and twitter reposts at this point which inflates its apparent importance. Threads like these exist because the forum is mostly unmoderated (and that's a good thing in my opinion). Imo either ignore the thread and move on, or engage with the source material rather than the medium it's posted on. Also I don't think it's reasonable to avoid posting on a forum because of a single Trump thread being on the list.
In my opinion the disagreement between leftists and rightists about Trump come down to a fundamental difference in morality being employed and reflects more often than not our tribalist tendencies. The difference I see that is employed is that people on the right are okay with Trump if he 'wins' in the end despite how he got there, while the left will despise him for his methods. This is moral competition between Deontology (How you do things matters) and Consequentialism (how you do things doesn't matter if the end result is good). Now to get back to tribalism, I think we see people play by one of the two standards when their team is the one being challenged. When Obama was under fire he was attacked for the ethics of his actions, when he was defended the consequences of his actions were relied upon. Then with Trump we have the same thing, but reversed by the parties, the democrats will attack his ethics (he's sexist, racist, imperialistic) while the republicans will point to the wins (no war in syria, de-escalation of N.Korea, no war in Iran). This is not to say that this distinction is writ in stone, but the majority of either party will follow one of these strategies depending on if they're playing offense or defense. So we see the two sides are playing two seperate games, however I would argue that we should actually be judging world leaders by their ethical temerity and not primarily by what trophies they win us, especially when we're on the same 'side'.
I hope we can all agree here that Trump does many things that are bad and many things that are good, some of those bad things outweigh much of the good, while some of the good things outweigh much of the bad. While it is impossible to quantify ethics, and easy to quantify results I personally feel that the three things I cited as wins from Trump earlier (no war with Syria, Iran, N.Korea de-escalation) are very good things which outweigh much of the bad. I am sure at this point thanks to the Oded Yinon plan and the report from general Wesley Clark, as well as the constant attempts at framing the Syrians for gas attacks that the military industrial complex of the USA desperately wants to draw us into more forever wars which I find to be the greatest moral abomination a country can suffer, so I am very thankful Trump hasn't started war with any nations... however, he has still committed horrible acts of war against many countries. At this point in time, we know that sanctions kill untold thousands of civilians. We know that drone bombing kills civilians yet he continues to do both, furthermore the assassination of a General for arming guerilla fighters (a crime we are equally guilty of) is a horrific act of war and a war crime which will surely go unpunished.
On sanctions, 40,000 Venezualans killed http://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/venezuela-sanctions-2019-04.pdf
potentially 500,000 Iraqi children killed according to Unicef https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2000/mar/04/weekend7.weekend9
2/3rds of sanctions fail to achieve their purpose https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/seven-fallacies-of-economic-sanctions/
I can think of no act more cowardly and disgusting than waging war against a foreign nation by attacking its civilian populace. I do not support Trump, but no more than I detest the entirety of our current political atmosphere here in America, where we are economically squeezed to tacitly accept the indiscriminate slaughter of foreign populations on behalf of a handful of oligarchical interests within the military industrial complex. Our entire leadership has shown they are ethically unfit to represent the population, and if they are accepted? So too is the blood on their hands on all of ours as well.
I hope we can all agree here that Trump does many things that are bad and many things that are good, some of those bad things outweigh much of the good, while some of the good things outweigh much of the bad. While it is impossible to quantify ethics, and easy to quantify results I personally feel that the three things I cited as wins from Trump earlier (no war with Syria, Iran, N.Korea de-escalation) are very good things which outweigh much of the bad. I am sure at this point thanks to the Oded Yinon plan and the report from general Wesley Clark, as well as the constant attempts at framing the Syrians for gas attacks that the military industrial complex of the USA desperately wants to draw us into more forever wars which I find to be the greatest moral abomination a country can suffer, so I am very thankful Trump hasn't started war with any nations... however, he has still committed horrible acts of war against many countries. At this point in time, we know that sanctions kill untold thousands of civilians. We know that drone bombing kills civilians yet he continues to do both, furthermore the assassination of a General for arming guerilla fighters (a crime we are equally guilty of) is a horrific act of war and a war crime which will surely go unpunished.
On sanctions, 40,000 Venezualans killed http://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/venezuela-sanctions-2019-04.pdf
potentially 500,000 Iraqi children killed according to Unicef https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2000/mar/04/weekend7.weekend9
2/3rds of sanctions fail to achieve their purpose https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/seven-fallacies-of-economic-sanctions/
I can think of no act more cowardly and disgusting than waging war against a foreign nation by attacking its civilian populace. I do not support Trump, but no more than I detest the entirety of our current political atmosphere here in America, where we are economically squeezed to tacitly accept the indiscriminate slaughter of foreign populations on behalf of a handful of oligarchical interests within the military industrial complex. Our entire leadership has shown they are ethically unfit to represent the population, and if they are accepted? So too is the blood on their hands on all of ours as well.
You haven't been reading this thread closely as it has been like pulling teeth to get any Trump supporter to agree with any criticism of Trump no matter how minor. Part of why Larry's post resonated with some. This thread has not been a critical discussion of "Trump Consciousness" but rather a dumping ground for propaganda. That, in my view, is what has seemed most out of place in this forum.
If someone started a thread on "Sanders Consciousness" and spent endless hours linking posts from Twitter and other sources, would that be appropriate? Would moderation take the same stance as they have with this thread? Interesting to think about.
If someone started a thread on "Sanders Consciousness" and spent endless hours linking posts from Twitter and other sources, would that be appropriate? Would moderation take the same stance as they have with this thread? Interesting to think about.