Apropos of nothing, here's another political Chad Mitchell Trio song I liked. Still have the record. "Barry" is Barry Goldwater for you younger folk. Though the year was 1964, a lot of it sounds eerily familiar:
In a sense Bradley is entirely correct and your response is pretty meaningless. Your categories of repeating events are so broad as to have little meaning. Sure, there's been more than one war, but many of these wars are fundamentally different from one another, especially when we're looking over longer time periods.
Santyana, who said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," often comes up in discussions like this, but I don't believe that's true, either. I believe history repeating itself, like war, is inevitable. There's no meaningful difference in a war between Cro-Magnons beating each other over the heads with clubs over prime hunting grounds and modern armies clashing over oil fields. The specifics and details are inconsequential compared to the overriding repeating patterns.
Saying that wars repeat is like saying history is the same because it's just people doing things over and over. Well yes, but the things are different.
Are they really so different? Is assassination with a fire-hardened stick all that different than with a ricin-coated pellet jabbed into a leg using an umbrella? Are the human motivations that different.
One of the things we can learn from history is that similar situations play out extraordinarily differently when the social, technological, economic and political background in which it takes place has changed.
Not really. At heart it's really just human nature playing itself out in front of different backdrops.
I think the most accurate saying is, "There is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9.
Gee, check the news at halftime and you never know what will pop up. In this case it's an editorial by Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post: The ‘stable genius’ isn’t even functioning as president. She cuts through all the excuses and nonsense to deny even Trump zealots any notion of shutting their eyes to the obvious. Here's the first sentence:
quote:Like clockwork, on Saturday around 7 a.m., no doubt feeling the sting of widespread discussion that he is as his own advisers described to Michael Wolff for his book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House a dope, a moron, a man-child, a semi-illiterate, President Trump confirmed it all with a tweet.
What can you say about someone who, when they're charged with mental instability, responds, in effect, "Am not, nah nah"?
Halftime's over so this has to be short, don't miss this editorial from the New York Times: Trump’s Petticoat Government
"Petticoat Government" refers to when Mrs. Woodrow Wilson was the de facto president of the United States for several months in 1920 while her husband lay ill after a serious stroke. No one in a position of sufficient responsibility was willing to point out the obvious, that the president was incapable of carrying out the duties of his office. In essence the cabinet ran the country while Mrs. Wilson acted as go-between between the cabinet and her bedridden husband.
Who is Stephen Miller, you might ask? He's Trump's senior advisor for policy. What does a senior advisor for policy do? As near as I can tell he advises the president on political positions, actions and initiatives. For example, according to Wikipedia, he worked with with Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon "to enact policies restricting immigration and cracking down on sanctuary cities." In response to court rulings on the travel ban he has asserted that the president's powers override the judiciary. He has ties to white nationalists.
Stephen Miller is also very argumentative, assertive, and verbally aggressive, as seen here in this very recent interview on CNN Jake Tapper's show State of the Union. I know it's 12 minutes, but watch it, you won't regret it because of the insight it provides of the kind of person who is giving toady advice to our president:
Apparently, after the interview the exchanges continued, Miller was asked to leave the set, refused, and was eventually escorted off by security. Let me repeat that. A senior policy advisor to the president of the United States behaved so badly that he had to be escorted off a premises by security.
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. ― Winston S. Churchill
Misattributed quotations are so common that I looked this one up. Every page I checked on the Internet credited Churchill, though some said it was only attributed to Churchill. This page had the most detail, finding the quote in Esar’s Comic Dictionary in 1943, and not finding it attributed to Churchill until 1952. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations includes it, but where it might normally say, "Letter to so-and-so" or "Speech to House of Commons" or some such it just says "Saying," while not defining what that means.
My guess? Churchill never said it, and if he did say it then he didn't originate it.
During the 2016 election Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called Trump a "xenophobic, race-baiting religious bigot." He also called Trump "a kook", "crazy" and "unfit for office." Today on ABC's The View Graham reversed course and said, ""No, I don't think he's a xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot as president."
What evidence is this Senator looking at? If there's anything that's eminently obvious is that Trump is the same person he was during the election, even more so. If characterization as a "xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot" was true in 2016 then it was just as true in 2017 and 2018. My God, he just ordered 200,000 Salvadorans out of the country. That's xenophobic. He's still grumbling about the courts overturning his Muslim travel bans - that's religious bigotry. Then there's his comments about "very fine people on both sides" after Charlottesville, and that's race-baiting.
So what evidence is Senator Graham looking at? Obviously no evidence at all. He's become another Trump toady, another Trump pod person.
Sidenote: Graham is one of the two senators who wrote a letter requesting that Christopher Steele, the former British MI6 operative who authored the Trump dossier, be criminally investigated.
Stephen Colbert Interview with Michael Wolff, Author of "Fire and Fury"
Here's the YouTube copy of the Stephen Colbert Interview with Michael Wolff, Author of "Fire and Fury". I've seen several interviews with Wolff, and he's often bumbled his explanations of why his book should be believed. If you want a good sense of how Wolff resolved the many conflicting accounts he gathered from White House staff, this is the best explanation I've seen him offer so far.
There's no meaningful difference in a war between Cro-Magnons beating each other over the heads with clubs over prime hunting grounds and modern armies clashing over oil fields. The specifics and details are inconsequential compared to the overriding repeating patterns.
Well that's just silly. Is there any difference between Trump and Obama? They're both Presidents and they both speak - what does it really matter if there are different words?
Is there any difference between Trump and Obama, you ask? It depends on the category. Is the category people? They're both people. Is the category people who have served as president? They both fit. Is the category political party? They're both different. Is the category scumbags? One is, one isn't. In my example the category was wars over access to resources, a recurring theme throughout history.
If your only point was that there will always be conflict, then it's not a response to the original article, since I very much he was arguing anything so obvious.
No, my point wasn't that there will always be conflict (though I do think there will never be an end to war). My point was that history, contrary to the claim in the article (What Trump does and doesn't have in common with Hitler), does continually repeat itself. Wars over access to resources was just an example of a recurring pattern of history.
'People engaging in conflict' is not a pattern;...
I would disagree that wars over resources are not a recurring pattern throughout human history, but more generally, that there are patterns throughout history is not a novel or fringe idea but is widely held. The phrase "patterns of history" is familiar to everyone. Check out historic recurrence over at Wikipedia. Type "patterns of history" or "history repeating itself" in to Google.
...and the specifics and details are enormously consequential. The specifics and details are what decide whether this or that conflict will erupt into a shooting war or not; and if so how that war plays out and what are it's consequences. Is it a short, sharp affair; a decades-long conflict; localised, global? These things matter.
I of course agree.
You may see no meaningful difference between two people getting into a fistfight and a global nuclear apocalypse, but you would understand if no one else agrees with you.
I wasn't taking that position, but if I did then I would disagree with me, too.
I have a theory, which I may have mentioned before. Trump is purposefully being as newsworthy and controversial (yes and stupid and racist) as possible in order to distract the public from the actual Republican Agenda and to lure public opinion into focus on him exclusively. Any other explanation couldn't begin to describe his errant behavior.
There's an old aphorism (looking it up it apparently has a name, Hanlon's razor) that goes:
quote:"Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
Trump is impulsive, ignorant, manipulative , bullying, arrogant, narcissistic and a pathological liar - these are the primary qualities that render him incompetent and unfit for the office of president by a magnitude unsurpassed by any previous president, including his entirely appropriate (for him) hero, Andrew Jackson. These qualities rule the expressions of his defective character, which include misogynism, homophobia, bigotry, white supremacy, racism, xenophobia and greed.
Interesting week for Trump, ever by the standards of the previous week when the Fire and Fury book came out. I didn't have time to post about these during the week, so here's a summary:
Monday:
Mueller announces he wants to interview President Trump about the Russian election influence investigation. Trump says he's willing to meet with Mueller.
Tuesday:
In a meeting with congressional Republicans and Democrats about immigration, Trump expressed a variety of contradictory views and opinions, seeming always to agree with whoever addressed him last. He both endorsed and rejected pure DACA. He both endorsed and rejected including the Wall as part of the legislation. He both endorsed and rejected a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. He both endorsed and rejected comprehensive immigration reform.
Later on Tuesday a Federal judge put a hold on Trump's executive order cancelling DACA.
Wednesday:
Trump walks back his expression of willingness to meet with Mueller, reiterating many times that "no collusion" has been found. Why he thinks that's meaningful to say about an investigation that is still ongoing and hasn't announced any findings is baffling.
Thursday:
In vulgar terms, Trump disparaged El Salvador, Haiti and the entire continent of Africa, calling them "shithole countries". Worldwide condemnation of Trump followed. Republican Senator Linsday Graham, present at the meeting between Trump and a Senatorial delegation of three Republicans and three Democrats, reportedly retorted, "America is an idea, not a race." Later in an interview he said, "I've always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals."
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin said:
quote:"In the course of his comments, (Trump) said things which were hate-filled, vile and racist," Durbin said. "I use those words advisedly. I understand how powerful they are.
"I cannot believe that in the history of the White House and of that Oval Office, any president has ever spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak yesterday. You've seen the comments in the press. I have not read one of them that's inaccurate."
Friday:
There's the old joke, "If his lips are moving he's lying," but amazingly we seem to have elected president someone for whom this is literally true. It's actually a bit more nuanced than that, but not much, and it includes both verbal statements and his Tweets. He's either lying or being misleading or being self-contradictory. At one point during this past week Trump was described as having a Twitter debate with himself and losing (this about the Internet surveillance program.)
On Friday Trump Tweeted and lied, claiming he hadn't used the language that has been confirmed by multiple news outlets to have actually been used.
In other news, it was confirmed Friday that just a month before the election the Trump campaign paid a porn star $130,000 to keep quiet about an affair she'd had with Trump in 2006 while Melania Trump was pregnant with their son Barron.
Here's a link to the New York Times webpage enumerating Trump lies through last November: New York Times Trump Lies Page
The Washington post has its own lies page, but you need a subscription to view it with Javascript: Washington Post Trump Lies Page
quote:It’s a classic example of how D.C. and New York react versus how the rest of the country reacts. What people in the media class still don’t understand is that this guy talks like a normal person and that’s why he won in the first place. I’m sorry if it offends the media’s delicate sensibilities but the reality is more Americans speak like President Trump than speak like [CNN anchor] Jim Acosta.
About that last sentence, I do not think it true that "more Americans speak like President Trump than speak like Jim Acosta." I think it would be more accurate to say that the more uneducated, racist, bigoted and xenophobic someone is, the more likely they are to speak like Trump.
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