So apparently, contrary to dribs and drabs on napkins, supply-side economic theory actually works and comparative advantage in international trade extends to asymmetric information held by non-cooperative agents exhibiting moral hazard.
Also, freedom does flow like a mighty stream, except in Moscow, where it flows like the Don, and the FSB is a multi-National Enquirer. More interesting is the disinformation generated by a strategy of tension that continues as US governance gets corrupted by its usual kleptocrats.
Intelligence chiefs told Obama and Trump of unsubstantiated reports that Russia had salacious information on Trump https://t.co/WQ2AGOKHdL
“All problems must be solved through dialogue, through talk. The use of violence is outdated, and never solves problems.”[61][62]
www.lionsroar.com/… Many Asian Buddhists may hold views that clash with Western visions of religious pluralism. For many Buddhists in Asia, the buddhadharma is not a “religion.” This distinction is exemplified in the reflections of Taiwanese immigrants to the United States, who have noted how they “became” Buddhist once they arrived. There was no identification for this in Taiwan. What is at stake from the perspective of many Asian Buddhists is not their religion but their basic identity and way of life. This difference between Western Buddhists’ and Asian Buddhists’ perspectives of the buddhadharma has become prominent in the current Burmese crisis.
I have written before on Buddhist Warfare, the text by Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer on pre-emptive Buddhist violence. There are other paths to happiness that still appreciate a message against inequality and injustice.
The oncoming Trumpian regime will feature an up-tick in violence, state-sponsored in military and police actions, just and unjust, plus the randomness of micro-aggression-based violence, escalated by threats of firearms use. Death and destruction are inevitable, and their scale and scope should be seen in the context of ideological understanding that are more about faith than its institutions.
Resistance, whether civil disobedience or other actions will have passive-aggressive elements and bringing that effort into a harmonious direction will take considerable strategic and tactical planning if we are to survive one of the greatest capitalist challenges to democracy, one that however it is reliant on neoliberalism, also makes appeals to anti-capitalists in its demagoguery while remaining anti-democratic in its political economy of inequality.
Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum, so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in your brainpan, feel free to add a comment. ___________________________________________________________
Birthdays make me take a look around. I checked out a bunch of quotes on Life, and the one above is what struck me. In another year, it would be something completely different, but for January 2017, this is the one.
“Ronnie doesn’t dye his hair; he’s just prematurely orange.” – Gerald Ford, on Ronald Reagan,
Who knew that Trumpism has theoreticians … much like deplorableness might have its swamp and isn’t theory just an “inside joke”. The real problem is that ideas are subordinate to concepts in terms of developing theory, and Trumpism is barely coherent as a conflicted noise that erupts when rationalizing a series of RWNJ memes, like all those tea-bagger cliches.
The Easy-Bake Oven is a working toyoven which Kenner introduced in 1963, and which Hasbro still manufactured as of late April 2016.[1] The original toy used an ordinary incandescent light bulb as a heat source; current versions use a true heating element. Kenner sold 500,000 Easy-Bake Ovens in the first year of production.[2] By 1997, more than 16 million Easy-Bake Ovens (in 11 models) had been sold.[3]
So there’s this Millenial, Julius Krein, willing to try to theorize Trumpian thought without cracking a smile, much like Reaganism from Bonzo’s point-of-view.
Krein will be wasting RWNJ cash on a quarterly publication to theorize the rationalizations represented by the Flight 93 Election website. In that narrative, Trumpians were willing to stormfront the cockpit to save America from HRC and since 9 November 2016, managed to take control of the flight deck, a goal beyond their falsest consciousness.
In Kreinian theory, Trump is apparently a class-traitor to the nouveau riche, which pretty much explains Trump Steaks and Mar-a-Lago.
Trumpism as a bastardized conservatism will be the Easy-Bake Oven approach to an isolationist pragmatism, tempered by ethnic-nativism, and only a Molotov cocktail away from producing heat much less the light of a used flashbulb. Like the Steve Forbes flat tax, it can be put on a 3 x 5 index card and have the same falsifiability. Except that thin-skinned Orange Gazbag seems incapable of reflection upon theorizing his hegemony.
My point there is you beat ideas with ideas. You can challenge the “theoretical foundations of ‘conservatism’” (perhaps starting with an explanation for why you put it in scare quotes) or you can defend a theoretical program. Unless you’re just going to defend Pragmatism and/or the instinctual, infallible, wisdom of Donald Trump in all cases, you’ll either need your own theory of the case or you’ll need to allow for writers willing to criticize Trump outright. There’s nothing wrong with that, except American Affairs is being launched to defend Trump and Trumpism.
If Krein isn’t willing to tolerate serious criticism of Trump in furtherance of Trumpism, then he should skip the journal and go work directly for Sean Spicer.
If he does allow criticism,
(a) good for him and
(b) he should be prepared for his pro-Trump journal to be denounced by Trump himself…
But when Wilson was elected, and started leading us to war, The New Republic was all over the map because of disagreements among the editors. Eventually, their old ideological hero Teddy Roosevelt charged into the offices of The New Republic like a Bull Moose to chew them out for their disloyalty. Realizing he couldn’t set them straight, TR shouted that the magazine was “a negligible sheet, run by two anemic Gentiles and two uncircumcised Jews.”
safe, bland, and minimal in expectation, more palatable than the “self-imposed intellectual stagnation” of sprayed Cheetos Ideas are always defeated by concepts like Trump is as cretinous as Epimenides.
Like most conservatism, its layered products are baked with the heat from light bulbs, with the same economic obsolescence and utility.
Conservative theory, other than its self-serving governance and individualist property rules has nothing to fear from yet another Trumpian rebranding of privileged, libertarian neoliberalism. There are so few vaccines for such trickled-down syndromes, but rather than Children of Men we have the revenge of the spray-tanned Man-Children.
“We hope not only to encourage a rethinking of the theoretical foundations of ‘conservatism’ but also to promote a broader realignment of American politics,” Krein said. It will launch in both a print and digital version, and a substantial portion of the funding will come from Krein himself. He said donors to traditional conservative institutions have been “surprisingly” receptive to his pitch, though he declined to name the additional contributors.
Some are skeptical of whether it’s possible to make sense, ideologically, of Trump’s ad hoc approach to decision making. “It will take a good deal of time for even Trump’s most gifted apologists to craft an intellectually or ideologically coherent theme or narrative to his program,” said Jonah Goldberg, a senior editor of National Review. “Trump boasts that he wants to be unpredictable and insists that he will make all decisions on a case-by-case basis. That’s a hard approach for an intellectual journal to defend in every particular.”
the suicide vest theory of GOP voting suppression and minarchist public policy
Krein isn’t starting from scratch. During the campaign, the most muscular and controversial defense of Trump came from an anonymous author calling himself Publius Decius Mus in a piece titled “The Flight 93 Election,” published in the Claremont Review of Books. He argued that there was actually some intellectual coherence to Trump’s views, even “if incompletely and inconsistently” articulated. Trump, he wrote, had taken “the right stances on the right issues — immigration, trade, and war — right from the beginning.”
Before he published the article, Decius was writing for an obscure, now-defunct blog, the Journal for American Greatness, where a band of reprobate conservative academics loosely affiliated with the Claremont Institute, a California-based conservative think tank, had gathered to mount a case for Trump…
Krein served as the blog’s day-to-day administrator while holding down a job at a Boston-based hedge fund until the site’s editors shut it down, telling readers that their audience for what was mostly intended as “an inside joke” had “expanded beyond any of our expectations.” Krein deleted all off the archives. But the Journal’s unexpected popularity, the editors said, made it clear that “many others similarly felt the desirability of breaking out of conservatism’s self-imposed intellectual stagnation.”
Well, I’m not sure “explain” is the right word for what Julius Krein and Gladden Pappin do… https://t.co/EJFhfzPa58
“You know what solves it?” he said of America’s sorry state. “When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have a [chuckles], you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.”
21 January 2017 begins an inevitable destruction of society wrought by an attempt to install a RWNj minarchy called “creative” but only in the sense that it can be seen as more arbitrary in justice, in equality, in equity, and in decency
“I don’t have to be told ― you know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day,” Trump said in an interview airing on “Fox News Sunday.” “I don’t need to be told … the same thing every day, every morning ― same words. ‘Sir, nothing has changed. Let’s go over it again.’ I don’t need that.”
SIMON: Do you have some sympathy for Donald Trump when he says he doesn’t need these daily briefings? Have a lot of people overreacted?
NIXON: Oh, I – no. No, I think that is a very dangerous, very, very dangerous idea. I really would hope that the president-elect would reconsider that because the president needs an intelligence community. And the intelligence community needs a president that’s going to support them and protect them. Case in point, if I can, if I…
SIMON: Sure…
NIXON: …And it comes back to the book. Saddam Hussein sort of behaved like that. He didn’t have daily briefings. And the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saddam never asked any of his advisers, he never asked for his intelligence community to prepare a study. He just announced it one day that he was tired of what Kuwait was doing and he was going to invade. And everybody said, oh, yes, Mr. President, that’s a great idea. And it turned out to be the biggest fiasco in, probably, his ruling career. And it was something that happened that he never kind of got out from under that.
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