deskthority

Redmaus wrote:
Odd obsession with democrats and republicans though.

It might be instructive for you to study how, in a rigid 2-party environment, "Republicans" and "Democrats" have each managed to reverse their courses 180 degrees to be, today, precisely the opposite of where they stood at the time of the Civil War.

To help you get started, in terms of presidential elections, 2 critical moments were when the Republican Party bosses nominated Taft over Roosevelt, and the presidential campaign of Wallace in 1968.

jacobolus wrote: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ogyny.html

Yeah looks like a new low is reached:

Heidi Cruz: Not a model, therefore useless as a wife. Sad!

How Trump Happened:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... obama.html

If you listen to Trump you have no brain.
If you listen to Slate you have no brain.
Good luck.

Well put webwit

Just think for yourself, not how anyone tells you think.

But we're human, many of us like to have someone to follow and are uncomfortable with the concept of thinking for ourselves.

webwit wrote: If you listen to Trump you have no brain.
If you listen to Slate you have no brain.
Good luck.

With content like that it really does not matter where it is posted....

vivalarevolución wrote:
uncomfortable with the concept of thinking

No better demonstration than this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/postever ... posing-it/

Is this election stuff over yet? I ready for it to be.

vivalarevolución wrote:
Is this election stuff over yet?

The real fireworks show this July will be at the Republican convention.

While we were on the subject of the minimum wage, California minimum wage is going up to $15/hour by 2022, http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol- ... story.html

Don't forget California is a very expensive place to live.

fohat wrote:

vivalarevolución wrote:
Is this election stuff over yet?

The real fireworks show this July will be at the Republican convention.

Hopefully will be the best political entertainment in a long time!

Everyone loves to hate on Trump.

but for all his flaws, I support Trump, because I know the establishment needs to be shaken up.

It would be excellent if Trump made it into office. The powers that be would see the message- ordinary people are few up with the assumptions of modern politics.

Anyway all the alarmist talk about Trump starting nuclear war is just hysteria. Fohat, you and I are old enough to remember the cold war paranoia and domino theory. USA shed so much (Vietnamese civilian) blood because they were 100% obsessed with the notion that Vietnamese were going to conquer Southeast Asia. Vast numbers of people in my part of the world were massacred because they were accused of being red. No communist revolution ever took place. We've heard all this before. This is BS. Whatever his flaws are, Trump puts himself first. He won't start a nuclear war that leaves Trump Plaza a nuclear wasteland. This is way better than Cruz who will do whatever the Bible says, and way better than Hillary Clinton with her established hawkish credentials.

The more the establishment hates on Trump, the more I realize he is a breath of, well, air with more oxygen in it. Trump stinks, but at least he is pumping less-stale air than the tired lies of the establishment.

berserkfan wrote: It would be excellent if Trump made it into office. The powers that be would see the message- ordinary people are few up with the assumptions of modern politics.

Because raising fascist authoritarian populists to power has worked so well everywhere else it’s been tried, right?

USA shed so much (Vietnamese civilian) blood because they were 100% obsessed with the notion that Vietnamese were going to conquer Southeast Asia.

Absolutely nobody thought that Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese were going to “conquer Southeast Asia”. That summary is not even wrong. The Vietnam war was a proxy war between the US / Western Europeans and China / USSR. After World War II, American policymakers (with some mix of legitimate fears and paranoid fantasy) were terrified that the Soviets would gain a foothold around the world, which they would use to threaten Western economic interests and have a military advantage in the case of another “hot” war. Beyond the growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons on both sides, there was intense jockeying for power around the world, with both the Americans and Soviets backing various “friendly” governments (often nasty dictatorships) wherever they could, or supporting armed rebels in countries with “unfriendly” governments.

From the US side, the regional context was (a) the American backing of Chiang Kai-shek, who ended up on the losing side of the Chinese Communist Revolution, and (b) the war in Korea, which was fought to basically a stalemate against the (PRC) Chinese and Soviets. WWII was, to say the least, a tumultuous time, and in the 40s–60s, it wasn’t obvious to anyone that the world would settle down into any kind of stable order.

* * *

Vietnam, which along with Laos/Cambodia had been a French colony, got thrown into a bit of a limbo in the 40s, as the French didn’t really have the military strength to hold onto it, and the country came under Japanese occupation. I’m not an expert, but from what I remember, the Japanese basically brought down all the previous (French) governing structures, and IIRC the Americans (as well as the Chinese, etc.) supported the Viet Minh in opposition to Japan. After WWII, the Republic of China and Britain had some joint occupation for a while, and then the Allies wanted to give control/influene back to France. With PRC and Soviet backing, the Viet Minh formed a new government in Hanoi to fight the French and the French-backed South Vietnamese government in Saigon. The US government, in the middle of the Korean war, sent money and weapons to help the French, but ultimately decided it was too costly to send American troops. Thus through the 50s, there was a partition in Vietnam between north/south, though the south in particular was still in continuous civil war between Diem’s government and various rebel groups.

[On the other side of the world, this is the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and US and USSR tensions were high. On the other side of SE Asia, the non-aligned democratic government in Burma (a country which had up through WWII been a British colony) was overthrown by a communist military junta. Decolonization was happening throughout the world, and the US had a high-level strategy of “containment” of the USSR and China, wherein the Americans would try to avoid world war, but would work to keep the USSR or China from controlling or influencing previously friendly proxy states.]

Diem was deeply unpopular, his government was weak, and some in the US government thought he wouldn’t be able to hold on. The CIA supported a military coup in the early 60s in which Diem was murdered. A few weeks later US President Kennedy was assassinated.

It’s not totally clear to me what all of Lyndon Johnson’s motivations were (e.g. was he trying to drum up domestic support through military action?), and I still don’t think there’s a full historical accounting of what really went down in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, but in any case Johnson’s foreign policy was aggressively anti-communist, and he decided to plunge the US into full-scale war, sending hundreds of thousands of ground troops in 1965.

I’m not going to reprise the history of the war here. I think it was shortsighted, horrible, and a disaster for US interests in the region and the world. If you want you can read plenty of books about the subject.

jacobolus wrote:
It’s not totally clear to me what all of Lyndon Johnson’s motivations were

Johnson’s foreign policy was aggressively anti-communist,

Johnson was deeply religious, and he became convinced that John Kennedy's assassination was God's retribution for Diem's assassination - due directly to John and Bobby Kennedy's meddling coup planning and support via the US "dark" operations.

I think that there is a good chance that he felt "obligated" to "save" South Vietnam from the Communists, at any cost, to "atone" for what we had done.

My father, half a generation younger than Johnson, grew up in that time when he was proud to have been a participant in "The Good War" and "knew" (believed in his bones) that we were the "good guys" and that our enemies were the "bad guys" and that whatever the US did was not only justified but unarguably right and proper. The biggest fights that I ever had with my father were over politics, and he never changed or wavered in his Cold War mentality that absolutely equated post-WW2 communists with pre-WW2 fascists, and it was pure black and white to him.

Donald Trump in '97: 'I Would Probably Not Be a Very Successful Politician'

http://theslot.jezebel.com/donald-trump ... 1767535204

And that photo doesn't show signs that it was photoshopped at all. Not to say anything about the quote- other than the fact that people change in close to 20 years- but I had to point out this obvious point.

Love it when jacobolus goes on a rant. Sing it, brother!

Food for thought, Trump would be as rich or richer if he cashed out his wealth and invested in index funds at some point in the 1970s or 80s rather than actually tried to run businesses.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2 ... e-indexed-

vivalarevolución wrote:
Love it when jacobolus goes on a rant.

Yep, Jacobolus knows his shit.

Nobody on the other side ever offers any actual content.

fohat wrote: Yep, Jacobolus knows his shit.

Nobody on the other side ever offers any actual content.

Redmaus wrote: Respectfully, I disagree with what you said. Companies for the most part don't care about giving jobs to Americans, they want to max out their profits. [...]


[...] In short, the economy has changed a lot since 1968, and making the minimum wage higher will not solve the problem. You cannot solve the problem with just increasing wages. The current economic and political climate must be suited for it as well. Thanks for the well thought out reply though. I am not used to arguing at such a high level of thought.

vivalarevolución wrote: Love it when jacobolus goes on a rant. Sing it, brother!

Food for thought, Trump would be as rich or richer if he cashed out his wealth and invested in index funds at some point in the 1970s or 80s rather than actually tried to run businesses.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2 ... e-indexed-

That's not the entirety of that article. I don't have a dog in this race, but I hate argument by obfuscation and cherry-picking.

vivalarevolución wrote: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2 ... e-indexed-

Better article http://dqydj.net/donald-trump-beat-sp-500-index-funds/

Redmaus wrote:

fohat wrote:
Nobody on the other side ever offers any actual content.

Respectfully, I disagree with what you said. Companies for the most part don't care about giving jobs to Americans, they want to max out their profits. [...]

[...] In short, the economy has changed a lot since 1968, and making the minimum wage higher will not solve the problem. You cannot solve the problem with just increasing wages. The current economic and political climate must be suited for it as well.

If you are attempting to assert that the above entry rises to the level of "content" then I truly feel sorry for you.

Although the words are generally true, it looks like nothing but vague and vapid drivel to me.

chuckdee wrote:

vivalarevolución wrote: Love it when jacobolus goes on a rant. Sing it, brother!

Food for thought, Trump would be as rich or richer if he cashed out his wealth and invested in index funds at some point in the 1970s or 80s rather than actually tried to run businesses.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2 ... e-indexed-

That's not the entirety of that article. I don't have a dog in this race, but I hate argument by obfuscation and cherry-picking.

Yea, the article has more nuance than my argument. But aren't obfuscation and cherry picking the bedrock of political arguments?

I think it is clear to everyone that Trump is a mediocre businessman, at best, but he is still a beacon of success compared to Bush Jr, who was a dismal failure at everything he touched (unlike his father, a rational and intelligent man, who was quite successful in international business).

To me it seems far more instructive to look at Trump as an actor, in the footsteps of Reagan, who rode in like a cowboy with tough talk and voodoo economics to make "average" Americans feel good and ignore the beginnings of the wholesale transfer of US money and jobs overseas in the aftermath of the Vietnam/Watergate era.

chuckdee wrote: And that photo doesn't show signs that it was photoshopped at all. Not to say anything about the quote- other than the fact that people change in close to 20 years- but I had to point out this obvious point.

Got proof that it is photoshopped ? I really don't care, I'm just curious. Sorry to snub any hardcore Trump fans here.

Slightly different picture webwit. Come on now keep it real.