I come not to bury c99 but to praise it.
Having been called an asshole by one of our communitarians provides the impetus to comment. Sob, sob (I feel better now, thank you). Sticks and stones, et cetera.
But please take into account several confounding variables, as they say in statistics land. One is, as mentioned the climate change induced by the Klown Kavalcade. This in my limited sensibility will be the most fun of 2019. The ultimate Dem nominee will certainly be a Debbie Downer (or more likely a Hillary Downer). At that point, I may consider getting my passport renewed.
The second point, which has been under-appreciated to date, is the presence of a communitarian who seems to be pro-Trump. For which reason I say, hurray for us, c99. The fact that such an individual and perhaps others as well, are tolerated here is a glorious statement of this site's civility. Sometimes pro-Trump sentiments produce snide remarks from others here--but they have not crossed the proverbial Red Line (or, as we used to have, many of us, the Orange Line).
My most recent foray into community annoyance has been about Trump playing the Dems for the complete fools that they are. Unfortunately, as my admiration for El Trumpo grows in respect to his political genius, my contempt has grown apace because of his--yes, I'll say it--deplorable policy decisions. Talk about being conflicted.
I can't wrap my head around Trump in any way which translates to my mental coherence. To remedy the situation, I have grown a second head, hoping it will do as well as the first one.
Thanks again, JtC, for all you do.
Comments
Trump's just a flim-flam man...
And the Media are the morons who are so smart that they can't possibly fall victim to his tricks. OH MY GOD, LOOK AT HIS MOST RECENT TRICK!
You get the idea. These kids really need to brush up on what Trump was doing his entire career... and realize that there are consequences to dumbing down your content while pretending you're still smart as ever...
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eA4pXV2Jsw]
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
Trump is no flim flam man.
I have to admit, I am completely flummoxed why so many here seem so flummoxed by Trump. At some point in time, it seems some genuine understanding would happen. Yet, it still hasn't happened.
He is most assuredly not a flim flam man. If you knew anything of his history, you would know that policies he promotes as president are policies/issues he had talked about for years. Years.
Some people here refuse to give Trump a drop of credit for anything, demonstrating their own bias, fear, and hatred arising from their own lizard brain, the very lizard brain they so easily perceive in so many others.
How is it possible that a liberal like me can support some of Trump's policies?
Let's get to the basics.
First of all, people have to eat. If one cannot eat, nothing else matters. Not race, not sexual identities, not the environment.
Second, people need shelter. And so on.
Government policies supported by dems and repubs have for years eaten away at the basics.
People knew and understood what was going on. They knew, understood, and watched as that giant sucking sound cited by Ross Perot wrecked their foundations.
Some politicians actually ridiculed the basics, like Obama did. "Those jobs are never coming back." Too bad, your life is gone. Get used to it.
Trump is trying to reverse those overall forces, and regular working people understand this.
It really seems to me that many on this site are simply safe with the basics in their own lives and do not understand how the people on the other side might think differently about the basics surrounding their lives.
dfarrah
First rule of being a con artist. Make people think
you're going to give them what they want.
Then don't. And have a good excuse. Then have another excuse, then another, then another...
And if people call you on it, THEY have the problem. Clearly they're the one with issues and refuse to give any credit...
And then change the subject to talking about successes. Maybe a few photo diaries. Next thing you know, Trump's talking about how everybody just wants a Pony... And isn't everyone tired of hearing about his damn Interview... (Wait for applause and Trump to nod approvingly...)
/snark
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyF8RHM1OCg]
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
Any comment with good RnR on it gets my upvote
Got my upvote on this.
But, to show I am not completely supercilious:
But...but...but...I WANNA PONY!
and Ima gonna throw a goddam tantrum if you don't get me a pony right now. Right now, you hear?
Moments later, a four-legged gift arrives with a horn on one end and a small tail on the other. A pony, you say, excitedly! No, a rhinoceros which is charging you.
Fuck it, anyway. Ride the Pony
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDvRaUqZWvk]
Trump isn't the con artist
he's supposed to fool you into thinking he is. The con artists are the oligarchs who own both parties and the media.
A flim-flam man like Gilderoy Lockhart
but for the last three years the reaction of too many Democrats and their friends in the media has been, “OMG it’s Grindewald — Voldemort — Russia-loving Hitler — we’re doomed — whaddever are we gonna do?”
In other words, a totally incoherent, nonsensical, self-contradictory response.
</Harry-Potter-references>
The problem with the heroes journey...
Is that everybody keeps waiting for a savior. (My beef with Joseph Campbell is that he tried to Catholicize everything into a single mythos which works wonders on keeping the peasants in line.)
Since nowadays everybody who tries to lead is by definition toxic... We have a wonderfully hideous situation where the villain has power and yet the societies response is to claim that we merely need to pick the right savior and all our problems will be solved. Every Four years... For at least two years, but this time it's been going on for almost four already. You know there's some guy sitting there making marks on the account book and praying feverently that Trump does something ELSE stupid to make people even more desperate for a savior. But of course the Savior to defeat such a GREAT evil must be exactly the opposite of the Villain... blah blah... you get the idea. I mean seriously, do a little mystic mumbo jumbo, rebrand the political parties into a magical society and you'll grab the kids in seconds...
/PUI...
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5HEo2zAWkc]
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
Great analogy.
Trump is like Lockhart with an added dash of meanness a la Umbridge and a smidgen of gluttony like Slughorn.
The dems don't need
Trump playing the Dems for the complete fools that they are. They do fine all on their own. You are right to respect Trumps prowess in swaying his followers. The republican primary had so many of their best and brightest on stage with him. All he had was bucket full of flim flam and a pocket full of lies and in the end he was the last man standing. His democratic opponent couldn't run fast enough or far enough from her record and so he won.
Sometimes you can beat something with nothing.
In fact, they say mastering the art of doing that now and then
is an absolute prerequisite for becoming a good poker player.
beat something with nothing
can't resist it.
rip.
Trump isn't
swaying his 'followers'. They've been with him all along. Trump picked up traditional dem constituencies, just like Reagan did.
Both parties start with a solid 30% and some support, and you must know this breakdown.
Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. To say those wins were seismic is the understatement of the decade or...something else big.
Oh what absolute madness overtook these states on that fateful election day, posters here ask themselves over and over and over? How could it have happened, they wail over and over?
Simple: jobs, jobs, jobs, wages, wages, wages (Maybe some here recall: Where's the beef? and It's the economy, stupid - said by the two respective winners of the presidency)
Dems hemorrhaged the working class for years, and finally tipped the scales.
And it's still about jobs, jobs, jobs, with a mixture of health care and immigration.
dfarrah
Here at C99?
I don't think I've heard anyone here at C99 wondering about what happened on election day. We know all too well what happened, and it wasn't "big bad Russia", or mean old "Bernie Bros", as the Dem establishment and their media enablers insist.
In fact, from what I've observed, you won't get a lot of disagreement from folks here on these points:
"Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep."
~Rumi
"If you want revolution, be it."
~Caitlin Johnstone
Indeed. The people here knew
...exactly what happened to the Democratic vote. There were many discussions about the Dems turning their backs on the working class.
People here saw Hillary's campaign didn't want to talk about the People's unaffordable health issues, and job issues, and suicide issues, and homelessness issues, and debt issues. Hillary wanted to talk about racial issues and women's issues, and "children" issues. Otherwise, the focus of her campaign consisted of demonizing Trump. What was her great cause? What was her platform? She dropped the ball on health care. Was against free college. Wall Street could do no wrong. Off shoring jobs was the future. She promised more of the same because Hillary Clinton was the continuation of Obama's Presidency, including his seven wars.
Trump supporters were shunned socially and marginalized by the media. They started lying to the pollsters, and made pilgrimages to Trump's ongoing rallies. Trump mocked the press, talked about the issues, and ran to the Left of Hillary. He catered to the angry working class voters that the Neoliberal Dems had allowed to flounder — jobless and foreclosed upon — while they bailed out the Wall Street high-rollers.
Posters here may have been unnerved by Hillary's loss, but there was no confusion about how it happened.
They, too, had been betrayed and jettisoned by the Neoliberal Dems, just months earlier. They witnessed Trump's victory but were not surprised by it.
dfarrah has confused this community with another, where the surprise and denial have never ended. Where truth has not gained a foothold.
IMAGINE if you woke up the day after a US Presidential Election and headlines around the the world blared, "The Majority of Americans Refused to Vote in US Presidential Election! What Does this Mean?"
your
Baghdad Bobbing about “jobs jobs jobs” is as pathetic, comical, as listening to a flat-earther. No one with a functioning cerebrum any more attempts to advance the four humours of “economic anxiety” as cause for The Klansman’s victory. All the data supports what was obvious at the time to all but willfully blind white denialists: from the moment The Klansman waddled out his birther ass to chunder about “Mexican rapists,” his appeal was all about race, and it was race that was the prime motivator flocking the volk to his klavern. Those who were seeing most clear in fact predicted the victory of The Klansman based on that truth: to wit: “I’ve got three words for you: scared white people.” I realize that presenting such data to people like yourself has no more effect than trying to reason with members of a cargo cult, that though your numbers are now as few as those WWII Japanese soldiers remaining behind on jungled islands, insisting their country was still at war, and winning! so much winning!, nothing will rock your true-believing. That’s just the way it is. With the people of Harold Camping.
But out in the real world:
Don't be so certain
Go Bernie
Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole...
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
Wicked song
Wickedly bad song. Love that beat. Who's the band?
A. Ed, that's John Cale playing piano on Pablo P.
Cale also produced that album and covered the song himself on his Guts album. Here's a somewhat recent live version:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFSbLwAy5BQ]
I'm taking your word on this
I just amaZoned his Live at the Rockpalast DVD. In a few days, I might have more to say.
I've seen parts of the Rockpalast concert on YouTube
And was there for the live Sabotage album at CBGB's. He was pretty drugged up on smack in those days from what I've read but it was an incredible show.
@Wally
I much prefer this version:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjUrvusb1c]
It's got that hypnotic beat
Headphones--check
Kick feet up--check
Get transcendental if you can't get horizontal--check.
Do both of the latter--much better!
Okay, gang I am ready for this beat all day.
The Modern Lovers were a band out of Boston
in the late 70s to 80s. They were well known in the punk/alternative/new wave scenes, but never really hit the mainstream.
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
Okay, since nobody has properly answered, I will.
That is Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. The song is his, not Cale's.
Richman was (and is -- he still tours, i saw him a year or so ago) an oddball protopunk. If you've watched Sesame Street much with kids or grandkids, you might recognize two of his most whimsical tunes, I'm a Little Airplane and Hey There Little Insect (at least, I think that's the title). Most of his songs are clever, witty and whimsical, covering topics like ice cream men, malted milkshakes, guitars, neighborhood gossip, cars, the preposterousness of love, and of course, insects, airplanes, and pablo picasso; some are more moving -- for example, he wrote one about Vincent Van Gogh, after visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
The other guitarist in the Modern Lovers was Jerry Harrison, who later joined Talking Heads.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Richman wrote the music for Something about Mary
'
this is cool at Joey Ramone's birthday party.
I remember him singing Walter Johnson live in Houston.
Gee- got into this because I saw reference to Modern Lovers and did not know band.
Thanks!
" he was loved and respected"
all true about Johnson
This might be what you're thinking of...
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
didn't know that one, actually.
Here's Vincent Van Gogh:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo0oNRvdkPQ]
Not to be confused with Don McLean's amazing Vincent, which many people think is called Starry, Starry Night, leading them to also think that the name of the painting itself is Starry, Starry Night, when in fact it is only Starry Night, or The Starry Night (apparently, Sterrennacht in Dutch ... I can't confirm whether that's what VVG called it, or whether somebody just back-translated Starry Night).
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsePsTEgiqU]
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Good one
I didn't know that one.
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
Damn dervish. I think I love you.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
You liked that one?
Try this guy...
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
"this never happened to Pablo Picasso"
a guy played this tune on his stereo back in 1980. I was knocked out and never forgot the line. But I was too dumb to find out the the band's name.
Did see J.Richman solo in Houston in the '80s. Did a bit and find the Modern Lovers recorded this in 1972.
Check this one. Thanks for the memory jump!
Egads! I have highjacked my own thread.
So much for being the smartest reptile in the swamp. For those who get this far: the first half of the essay was about c99's civility. But, dang, I had to throw Trump into the mix. Like throwing red meat to a [carnivore of choice].
Don't worry about it.
I can already see that nobody's reading the actual responses, so No worries.
Seriously, you mention the guy and everybody suddenly has an opinion, even those of us who think he and his policies are absolute bullshit put out there to draw attention away from power...
The Orange Herring... Can't even cut down a tree with it.
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
I don't have an opinion.
Except that I already knew he was an asshole when he was Vince McMahon's best buddy the casino owner, so that's not news. And it's been obvious pretty much forever that he's far right, so that's not news either. And after the first three months of his campaign, it shouldn't have been news that he's a bigot.
Back in the 80s, when Pat Buchanan said something crazy, it didn't make the media hang on his every word, waiting for him to say another crazy thing.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
A bit lost here.
You have 5 paragraphs, the first in which you said someone called you an asshole.
So, your essay is about civility? I thought it was kind of a stream of consciousness type thing.
Is part of it somewhere else, like in another diary?
dfarrah
Look at it this way, Gator
It could have been worse. They could have called you a "Russian troll".
Just kidding. People who post here are more likely to be accused of *being* a Russian agent/stooge/whatever, than they are of throwing that accusation around, here or anywhere else.
It's an interesting idea, though. Bots disguised as alligators. Very clever. I wonder if Vlad's thought about it?
"Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep."
~Rumi
"If you want revolution, be it."
~Caitlin Johnstone
I'm not sure about Trump being a 'flim-flam' man...
But I think he does suffer from non-alcoholic dementia.
He could use a drink.
"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin
Thanks God he isn't an alcoholic dement
Like Nervous Nancy or the Evil Queen. Bill has Klüver-Bucy syndrome--look it up. Oh, wait--I'll help:
Klüver-Bucy Syndrome
[Symptoms include]
Dietary changes and hyperphagia, characterized by eating inappropriate objects (pica), or overeating, or both.[2][3][4]
Hyperorality, described by Ozawa et al. as "an oral tendency, or compulsion to examine objects by mouth".[2][3][4]
Hypersexuality, characterized by a heightened libido or a tendency to seek sexual stimulation from unusual or inappropriate objects.[2][3][4]
Make of this diagnosis what you will--but the only differential diagnosis otherwise is Personality Disorder, severe, with inappropriate alimentary and sexual appetite secondary to total hedonism and psychopathology. Check this out in DSM-V (Just kidding.)
P.S. For those of you who wish to obtain armchair psychoanalysis of your favorite political targets, please contact me at my Swamp Clinic. Toll free: 1-800-MYSWAMP. Courteous operators await your call. Please do not wear hard or pointy objects to your appointment with me. The charge is very reasonable--dinner.
@Alligator Ed I guess I'm curious on
I guess I'm curious on Kluver-Bucy. So far, only thing that I truly know would be hypersexuality. I guess I haven't followed Bill enough to know about the potential for those other symptoms like with pica or the hyperorality.
Actually, the one diagnosis I'm still wondering about is that weird seizure-like episode Hillary had talking to a reporter. Everyone just dismissed that, but you could see the reporter being confused and startled by it. Guess I'm curious on the Alligator's thoughts.
I wrote many medically-based articles about HRC's ailments
My father died of Wernike Korsakoff syndrome.
https://www.healthline.com/health/wernicke-korsakoff-syndrome
after over 30 years of heavy drinking. Liver seemed to not be bothered by it much, so it went to his brain. Even after you quit drinking, the deterioration continues on its own.
"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin