Is Donald Trump's Campaign A Spoof?

[phart]

39 minutes ago, aaid said:

Thplinth here, the day after the Manchester bomb happily scoring political points.   And that's not mention wild speculation as well and - in hindsight - demonstrating extremely pish judgement.   I wonder what's changed in 18 months?

Whee's the political point scoring? Just highlight the appropriate bit.

"If it was a suicide vest I am thinking this means they have access to military explosives in the UK now. Very bad news if so. How are they getting it in... If they have that they will have assault rifles as well I expect.

As for targeting kids - did people not read the details of the Syrian bus bombing recently. They lured dozens of children out of buses offering them treats from a car which contained a bomb. Once they were all around the car they blew them up. There are no limits anymore. Utter depravity is the norm."

[aaid]

5 minutes ago, phart said:

Whee's the political point scoring? Just highlight the appropriate bit.

"If it was a suicide vest I am thinking this means they have access to military explosives in the UK now. Very bad news if so. How are they getting it in... If they have that they will have assault rifles as well I expect.

As for targeting kids - did people not read the details of the Syrian bus bombing recently. They lured dozens of children out of buses offering them treats from a car which contained a bomb. Once they were all around the car they blew them up. There are no limits anymore. Utter depravity is the norm."

Suggesting that the attack was more sophisticated and organised and the potential threat more severe than it actually was based on limited to non-existent information all of which was later proven to be incorrect.   

[phart]

1 minute ago, aaid said:

Suggesting that the attack was more sophisticated and organised and the potential threat more severe than it actually was based on limited to non-existent information all of which was later proven to be incorrect.   

[aaid]

4 minutes ago, phart said:

Plastic straws, bad for the environment.  Didn't you watch Blue Planet?

[phart]

2 minutes ago, aaid said:

Plastic straws, bad for the environment.  Didn't you watch Blue Planet?

Single-use

[thplinth]

I don’t think he can read and comprehend the word ‘if’ either but that is the least of my concerns at this point.

[aaid]

4 minutes ago, phart said:

Single-use

Another Collins word of the year - although given it's hyphenated, it wouldn't qualify in a round of "Words ending in 'use'" on Pointless.

Anyway, to your substantive point.   Inflating the threat of terrorist attacks is a tactic used by those with an anti-immigration agenda to justify strong immigration controls.  Remember the claims a few years back that ISIS were smuggling in loads of people into Europe from Syria disguised as refugees - remember Farage's poster during the Brexit campaign?   Funnily enough, exactly the same tactic Trump has been using in the last couple of weeks against the Caravan, except in that case it's not terrorists but gangs and general non-specific "bad guys".

I'm not saying for a moment that there isn't a serious threat from ISIS or other inspired Islamist terrorists but, you know, scale & context.   

[aaid]

12 minutes ago, thplinth said:

I don’t think he can read and comprehend the word ‘if’ either but that is the least of my concerns at this point.

Now that really is clutching at straws.

[thplinth]

11 minutes ago, aaid said:

Now that really is clutching at straws.

Does this sound clever in your head?

Rather than continue to make a berk out of yourself trying to make a point out of nothing why not just go address the Tanya article that highlighted your evident racism? That is what this is really all about but instead of taking it on head-on you try every strawman out there. I wonder why. Weird.

[aaid]

6 minutes ago, thplinth said:

Does this sound clever in your head?

Rather than continue to make a berk out of yourself trying to make a point out of nothing why not just go address the Tanya article that highlighted your evident racism? That is what this is really all about but instead of taking it on head-on you try every strawman out there. I wonder why. Weird.

Genetically, ethnically, biologically, physically and generationally, I am about as "gammon" as it is possible to be and that's the problem with your -  or Tanya's theory.  

Even if you accept Gammon as a racist term - and I'm not sure that it is - You can't be racist about your own race.

 

[thplinth]

I think we have seen from a few news clips on here that some white people are now some of the most racist folk on earth when it comes to white people. Ones who are coincidentally imbued with deep alt-left politics it seems... like you.

If your defense rests on being the same race it is no defense. 

"You can't be racist against your own race"... wow. Yeah, you are. 

My position is a bit more nuanced than Tanya but you are such a fucking coward you never took her (arguments) on.

You are frightened of her which is why you are bleating like a lost lamb to me.

Edited November 8, 2018 by thplinth

[aaid]

 

tl;dr - I think the article is pretty much a load of bollocks.

.

Quote

There seems to be an idea, most recently spoken by Owen Jones, that when the left says something – whatever it is – it is not, and never can be, hate speech. So, let me – as a Jew, shall we say? – explain why it is.

Well that's obvious nonsense as the anti-semitism row in the Labour Party has shown.  Owen Jones might think it's not the case but that doesn't make it so, nor does Tanya Gold saying the opposite make it so either.   There's been a huge amount of hypocrisy and deflection in that particular argument, but the nub is that *some* people on the left of the Labour party are anti-semitic.

Quote

Gammon is pig. And who eats pig? Not Jews and not Muslims. Christians eat pork, white and black. But gammon refers to whites only – to white Christians, then. So now white Christians have their own personal term of abuse, courtesy of the new left. 

It gets madder and madder.  To say this is a stretch is being generous.   My understanding of the contemporary usage of the term comes from this montage of members of the Question Time audience who all expressed right wing and reactionary viewpoints.   The point being that they are all" red-faced and furious", their complexion is the colour of gammon.   

 

Quote

Thank you. For what exactly? For making political discourse cheaper and more disgusting every day? For alienating potential allies in the battle against austerity? 

I seriously doubt any of the guys above are ready to take to the trenches to defeat austerity.

 

Quote

It’s like calling a Jew a k**e or mocking African Americans for eating fried chicken. It’s like calling poor white Americans trailer trash. 

Hmmm, maybe.  But then again I guess that depends on who is doing the calling.     The reference to trailer trash is interesting though, the nearest we have to that would be the term Chav I guess.   Who wrote a whole book about the demonizing of the working class?  The same Owen Jones she's decrying in the first paragraph.


TBH, I think the whole article is just another example of the internecine fighting between the right and the left of the Labour Party, I'm not really familiar with her work - and after reading this, I won't be rushing to address that deficit - but I'm guessing here that Tanya Gold is on the right.     It strikes me as an exercise in "Let's find something to have a go at Owen Jones* and his lot about" and then, lets make up a load of stuff to fit my agenda.


 

[thplinth]

Quote

 

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/what-does-gammon-mean

 There is a new term of abuse in politics: a “gammon”. It refers to a middle-aged white man of a certain political persuasion. He is a Brexiteer. He is ugly. He is a conservative. He may wear hideous trousers. And, because he is a Brexiteer and so very ugly and a conservative who may wear hideous trousers, why not call him a gammon? Particularly if you are in politics to have fun, rather than to change minds.

The term is stupid – all name-calling is. Good politics is made of ideas and coalitions and compromises. It’s hard to do, of course, it requires patience and humility, not shouting and grandstanding and undiagnosed malignant narcissism. But calling someone a gammon is not only a stupid waste of a two-syllable word, and meal. It is also, to steal leftist language, hate speech. There seems to be an idea, most recently spoken by Owen Jones, that when the left says something – whatever it is – it is not, and never can be, hate speech. So, let me – as a Jew, shall we say? – explain why it is.

Gammon is pig. And who eats pig? Not Jews and not Muslims. Christians eat pork, white and black. But gammon refers to whites only – to white Christians, then. So now white Christians have their own personal term of abuse, courtesy of the new left. Thank you. For what exactly? For making political discourse cheaper and more disgusting every day? For alienating potential allies in the battle against austerity? For making racial and religious slurs a little more acceptable, while all the time claiming to loathe them, which is, if you have no self-awareness allow me to make you aware of it, hypocrisy? For making floating voters think that socialists are screaming, useless kids who will tear down a world and forget to build another one for name-calling on Twitter? For behaving just as you say your enemies do?

I’m sure the term didn’t begin as a racist slur. It was, as it so often is, a writer trying to be funny.

No one is sure who said it first – they are hardly fighting over it. Dickens used it, but he died before Twitter, and I am happy for him. The journalist Caitlin Moran compared David Cameron to ham and I can see her point. (She didn’t call him “ham”.) The comic Nish Kumar has said “gammon”, as has the writer Ben Davis, who has since written an article apologising for it. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it is the discourse of the sewer. It’s like calling a Jew a k**e or mocking African Americans for eating fried chicken. It’s like calling poor white Americans trailer trash. So much of this sounds like American culture wars transported, horribly and no doubt eternally, to England. It reeks of class snobbery too; no wonder it is popular with the socialist bourgeoisie who, like Citizen Kane, talk about the people as if they own them.

Much of this racism is oblivious, of course, but most racism is oblivious. It isn’t all shooting people in the face. To do that, you must first dehumanise them. And I can’t really think of a better modern example of dehumanisation than comparing your fellow voter to a pig because you don’t like his politics. For saying this, I will be called a Tory and worse. I’m not. I’m Labour. Compute that, comrades.

 

"tl:dr" sort of sums you up no? The fact you hatchet the article rather than quote it in full (as I have above which is much less hassle) also does.

I am not so sure I would go as far as Tanya does but I have not had for example the same experiences that she has. Honestly, I think she is mostly right.

 

 

 

[aaid]

8 minutes ago, thplinth said:

"tl:dr" sort of sums you up no? The fact you hatchet the article rather than quote it in full (as I have above which is much less hassle) also does.

I am not so sure I would go as far as Tanya does but I have not had for example the same experiences that she has. Honestly, I think she is mostly right.

 

 

 

I cut up the article so I could respond to each point in turn - I'd have thought that much was obvious.

So you want to explain why I'm wrong then?

[thplinth]

Here is the one bit you quoted in bold...

Quote

 

There is a new term of abuse in politics: a “gammon”. It refers to a middle-aged white man of a certain political persuasion. He is a Brexiteer. He is ugly. He is a conservative. He may wear hideous trousers. And, because he is a Brexiteer and so very ugly and a conservative who may wear hideous trousers, why not call him a gammon? Particularly if you are in politics to have fun, rather than to change minds.

The term is stupid – all name-calling is. Good politics is made of ideas and coalitions and compromises. It’s hard to do, of course, it requires patience and humility, not shouting and grandstanding and undiagnosed malignant narcissism. But calling someone a gammon is not only a stupid waste of a two-syllable word, and meal. It is also, to steal leftist language, hate speech. There seems to be an idea, most recently spoken by Owen Jones, that when the left says something – whatever it is – it is not, and never can be, hate speech. So, let me – as a Jew, shall we say? – explain why it is. 

Gammon is pig. And who eats pig? Not Jews and not Muslims. Christians eat pork, white and black. But gammon refers to whites only – to white Christians, then. So now white Christians have their own personal term of abuse, courtesy of the new left. Thank you. For what exactly? For making political discourse cheaper and more disgusting every day? For alienating potential allies in the battle against austerity? For making racial and religious slurs a little more acceptable, while all the time claiming to loathe them, which is, if you have no self-awareness allow me to make you aware of it, hypocrisy? For making floating voters think that socialists are screaming, useless kids who will tear down a world and forget to build another one for name-calling on Twitter? For behaving just as you say your enemies do?

I’m sure the term didn’t begin as a racist slur. It was, as it so often is, a writer trying to be funny.

 

 What did you respond...

"It gets madder and madder."

No aaid stop being dishonest. She makes a valid point and you are a dick for using the term.

 

[aaid]

3 minutes ago, thplinth said:

Here is the one bit you quoted in bold...

 What did you respond...

"It gets madder and madder."

No aaid stop being dishonest. She makes a valid point and you are a dick for using the term.

 

And then I explain why I think it's a mad inference.  

You know what that bit reminded me of, one of the old Mason Boyne sketches where he tries to explain his bigotry and he ends up with "it's all there in the bible, all you've got to do is just jumble the words up a bit"

So again, please explain why I'm wrong  

 

[thplinth]

Ok one last try...

"No one is sure who said it first – they are hardly fighting over it. Dickens used it, but he died before Twitter, and I am happy for him. The journalist Caitlin Moran compared David Cameron to ham and I can see her point. (She didn’t call him “ham”.) The comic Nish Kumar has said “gammon”, as has the writer Ben Davis, who has since written an article apologising for it. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it is the discourse of the sewer. It’s like calling a Jew a k**e or mocking African Americans for eating fried chicken. It’s like calling poor white Americans trailer trash. So much of this sounds like American culture wars transported, horribly and no doubt eternally, to England. It reeks of class snobbery too; no wonder it is popular with the socialist bourgeoisie who, like Citizen Kane, talk about the people as if they own them.

Much of this racism is oblivious, of course, but most racism is oblivious. It isn’t all shooting people in the face. To do that, you must first dehumanise them. And I can’t really think of a better modern example of dehumanisation than comparing your fellow voter to a pig because you don’t like his politics. For saying this, I will be called a Tory and worse. I’m not. I’m Labour. Compute that, comrades."

 

Edited November 8, 2018 by thplinth

[aaid]

Explain in your own words, not cutting and pasting and putting stuff in bold.  I've explained why I don't agree with it, do me the courtesy of explaining why you think that's correct rather than just repeating it.

I'd argue that there's also more than a whiff of class snobbery from Tanya herself 

[thplinth]

I love how you keep demanding I 'explain in you own words'  like some jumped up commissar.

You did use it in a racist way is my view at this point.

Edited November 8, 2018 by thplinth

[aaid]

15 minutes ago, thplinth said:

I love how you keep demanding I 'explain in you own words'  like some jumped up commissar.

You did use it in a racist way is my view at this point.

Well I suppose using the term in a "racist way" is some form of retraction from calling me a racist, small mercies and all that.

You asked/demanded that I address the opinion piece you linked to.   I did and laid out my reasons why I don't agree with it, I don't necessarily expect you to agree with those.   I asked/demanded that you explain why I was wrong and what you disagreed with.    

All you've done is to repeat back the original text which is kind of like the internet equivalent of Brits abroad talking more loudly in English to foreigners who don't understand them and expecting them to somehow "get it".

You are obviously either unwilling to or incapable of responding to my questions and instead result to more ad hominen attacks.   From what I see that's your general modus operandi on here when challenged.

Some might say that it's very Trumpian in its approach, I couldn't possibly comment.

[thplinth]

" Well I suppose using the term in a "racist way" is some form of retraction from calling me a racist, small mercies and all that. "

Nope.

[aaid]

2 minutes ago, thplinth said:

" Well I suppose using the term in a "racist way" is some form of retraction from calling me a racist, small mercies and all that. "

Nope.

No big deal.  I got pretty angry at first but like all people whose opinion I don't value, what you think is of no consequence to me.

and with that I'll bid you adieu and stick you on ignore again.

[thplinth]

Non racist usage: "What is for dinner?" "Gammon". "Cool."

Racist usage: Using it to slag off your political opponents based on skin colour.

It is not that hard.

See you. until the next thread where you are talking pish.

 

[thplinth]

He is good at making predictions and when you are right you are right... interesting point as well about the big winner of the mid-terms was marijuana.

Piers Morgan (who I am not a fan of) also has an  interesting article in the Daily Mail...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6364195/PIERS-MORGAN-best-Democrats-achieve-two-years-need-better-2020-plan.html

"Blue wave?

I’ve seen bigger political puddles.

After two years of relentless and often demented celebrity-fuelled Trump-bashing hysteria, the Democrats sneaked back the House of Representatives with a swing of seats far smaller than the shellacking that engulfed incumbent first time presidents Bill Clinton in 1994 or Barack Obama in 2010.

(And they both went onto be re-elected..)

By comparison, the much-heralded ‘fierce resistance’ to Trump turned out to be more of a lame peashooter than a row of cannons.

The President even saw his Republican majority in the Senate significantly INCREASE, which has only happened five times in the past 105 years in the midterms.

No wonder he was so quick to tweet: ‘Tremendous success tonight. Thank you all!’

His victory claim was swiftly ridiculed, but I would strongly urge Democrats who mocked him to exercise less glee in their own celebrations.

‘Tomorrow will be a new day in America,’ said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.

But will it?

In many ways these were indeed transformative elections.

It’s great that record numbers of women and minorities were elected into the House, including two Muslim women, two Native American women, and the youngest ever woman to win a place in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

It’s also great to see the first openly gay governor elected.

But the reality of these results is that nothing much has changed to curb Trump’s actual power, and it’s quite feasible that losing the House may turn out to be the best thing that could happen to him.

Here’s why: many Democrats are now openly salivating at the thought of launching a full-blown assault on Trump with endless investigations and subpoenas to try to destabilise his presidency.

They want to go after him for everything from his tax returns to his cell phone use and connections with Russia, and now have far more powers to do so.

But such a strategy would simply play into his hands.

Trump loves a fight, and he particularly loves playing the victim of liberal efforts to demonize him.

It doesn’t take a political genius to realise he would turn these attacks into a massive electoral asset, constantly rallying his base to help him defy this concerted effort to destroy him.

Furthermore, if the Democrats actually try to impeach him, not only would it fail because they don’t have control of the Senate, but it would make Trump more popular - just as it did when Republicans in the House impeached Clinton.

So the Democrats need to be smarter than just spending the next two years lobbing investigative bombs at Trump because they will only blow up in their faces.

They also need to stop using celebrities as front line political weapons - because it simply doesn’t work.

Pop superstar Taylor Swift, very ill advisedly in my opinion given her huge popularity in middle America, broke her long-time political silence to publicly endorse Democrat Phil Bredesen in the Tennessee Senate race – but he still lost.

Oprah Winfrey, arguably America’s biggest celebrity, strongly campaigned for Georgia’s Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Adams – but she also lost.

This shouldn’t be surprising.

Lest we forget, Hillary Clinton believed star power would help drive her to the White House, which is why she constantly appeared with the likes of Lady Gaga and Beyonce at her election rallies.

The tactic backfired because many Americans resented seeing her waltzing around with privileged and elitist millionaire celebrities as they struggled to find work or feed their kids. Just as they resented being labelled a ‘basket of deplorables’ by Clinton for supporting Trump, who at least went down to see them and hear their problems.

Liberal celebrities today raced to gloat about winning back the House on Twitter, but Twitter does not represent the majority of Americans, which is why those same liberal celebrities got such a seismic shock when Trump won in 2016 and why they haven’t stopped shrieking ever since.

What they don’t seem to realise is that nobody cares what they have to say about politics. If they did, Hillary would be President.

So my advice to the Democrats is to ditch the celebrities.

And yes, of course I realise there is a humongous irony in saying this because Trump himself is himself a celebrity. In fact, he’s the biggest celebrity in the world.

But Trump achieved his fame by being a ruthless, hardnosed businessman and that’s both how he won the presidency and how he is now running the country.

His business experience makes him a very capable and dangerous competitor, communicator and campaigner.

His star power from The Apprentice enables him to suck up TV oxygen like nobody else in political history.

And for a guy in his 70s, he has incredible energy and stamina.

So the Democrats are facing a quite unique opponent.

To take him on, the party needs a winning new message and someone who can deliver it in the same clear, repetitive and hugely effective way that Trump delivers his.

And I don’t see any sign of either of those things yet.

Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 by saying he was going to Make America Great Again.

He’s pursued that goal in the most polarising, controversial, and often highly offensive manner imaginable.

Some of his bull-in-a-china-store style has undeniably worked, especially his aggressive tax cuts and slashing of regulations that have sent the economy surging and been great for jobs.

Some of it has been deeply unedifying, not least his dog whistle rhetoric about immigration.

But whatever you think of Trump, these midterm election results prove that many tens of millions of Americans are buying into his mission and don’t think he’s doing too badly.

If the Democrats are to have any hope of beating him in 2020, then they have got to come up with a better plan than screaming ‘Trump’s a monster’ or ‘Oprah and Taylor say don’t vote for Trump’.

I was pleased to see President Trump strike a more bi-partisan tone at his presser today. 

He has a chance now to pivot to a more inclusive style of leadership and I hope he takes it.

I also hope he and the media, especially my old employers at CNN, stop their mutually self-serving but increasingly embarrassing public feuding that is now turning their pressers like today into increasingly absurd WWE-style extravaganzas. 

But make no mistake: he won the midterms.

If the Democrats can’t see that, or accept it, then Trump won’t just win again in 2020, he will drown them with his own brutal, uncompromising red tsunami."

 

They are not going to learn and it will be two years of more of the same.

 

Edited November 9, 2018 by thplinth

[ParisInAKilt]

Reckon it’s easy to over analysis it. The democrats got 2 terms, trump probably will and then the democrats will get their turn, repeat.