✮✮✮ !Trump Dump! ✮✮✮

lowenz on 14/2/2024 at 13:06

It's just the daily delirium we were used to with Donald, I don't know who would accept this for 4 other years......

Nicker on 14/2/2024 at 19:01

Quote Posted by lowenz

I don't know who would accept this for 4 other years......

A consistent 30% of Americans, apparently. They think that 1776 was an experiment which has now failed. Time again for tyrants. Make America Grovel Again.

demagogue on 21/2/2024 at 02:24

For reasons, I looked into the origins of Trump's antipathy to NATO, and his earliest recorded rant against it, the same one behind last week's "Let Russia do whatever the hell they want", was a full page ad he made on it from 1987. If you dig into that, it becomes pretty clear the context of that was the construction project he was lobbying for with the USSR at the time. Why else spend $90K on a full page ad out of the blue right after a meeting about that project? And similarly, I think the obvious reason why he's back on that rant now is because he has legal debts to pay, and the Russian oligarchs have always been his most reliable benefactor since the 1980s.

Does anyone really still question how quickly Trump is gunning to sell out his country & Western civilization as we know it for a quick buck? Does anyone seriously think he even cares about NATO allies paying their fair share or the US carrying a large share of European defense spending? It's laughable to think he has any real opinion about Europe at all beyond selling it out for money.

Anyway, I wrote a post on it that wasn't even worth posting where I wrote it for (some people thinking there's a serious debate to be had about European defense spending as if Trump wasn't just parroting whatever his Russian benefactors wanted to hear to enrich himself), but I may as well put it here for now.

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In case anybody is wondering where this recent slap against NATO by the GOP ((https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/10/politics/trump-russia-nato/index.html) Trump & (https://www.ft.com/content/3c87ef13-122f-4e78-a7af-54c75c30a91d?segmentId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9) his minions) to drop support of NATO allies that "won't pay their fair share" is coming from, it's obvious to me it has everything to do with Trump needing to shore up his most reliable income stream following the $80 million and $150 million legal penalties he has to pay.

Quote Posted by "Business Insider"

Source: (https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-cultivating-trump-asset-40-years-says-ex-kgb-spy-2021-1) Business Insider, Russia has been cultivating Trump as an asset for 40 years, former KGB spy says

The book's author [journalist Craig Unger] said Trump became a target for the Russians in 1977 when he married his first wife, the Czech model Ivana Zelnickova.

"He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we're going to develop this guy and 40 years later he'll be president," Unger told The Guardian.

Unger added: "Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election."

Trump's 1987 book, "The Art of the Deal," described a visit to Moscow to discuss building "a large luxury hotel across the street from the Kremlin in partnership with the Soviet government."

In fact, [former KGB operative Yuri] Shvets said, Russian operatives used the trip to flatter Trump and told him he should go into politics. Shvets told The Guardian that KGB operatives were then stunned to discover that Trump had returned to the United States, mulled a run for office, and taken out a full-page ad in several newspapers that echoed anti-Western Russian talking points.

It's talking about (https://apnews.com/article/05133dbe63ace98766527ec7d16ede08) this ad in 1987: ''Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America's politicians as we protect ships we don't own, carrying oil we don't need, destined for allies who won't help.''

Cipheron on 21/2/2024 at 03:49

Quote Posted by demagogue

As for his economic record, note that he's a mercantilist, as in the 17th Century philosophy that all economic relations are zero sum and it's impossible for free trade to benefit both sides, a position that was already debunked in the late 1700s. I'm pretty sure he's literally incapable of understanding Ricardian economics. He thought cutting off trade with China, Mexico, and the EU, the largest market on the planet and the US's two largest trading partners, was or would be great for the US. (9_9) He thought Brexit was great for the UK. He did his damnedest to kill the US economy with the China trade war and his death-wish war against covid relief. Only the windfall from the Obama era cushioned the fall.

Yeah, Trump's economic credentials are pretty mid. More jobs got added in the three years leading up to his election, than the three years following his election, which excludes the Covid crisis completely.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_Donald_Trump_administration)

Quote:

President Trump inherited an economy in January 2017 that was already at a record level on many key measures, such as the number of persons with jobs,[19] real median household income,[21] household net worth,[22] and stock market level. It also featured a low unemployment rate of 4.7%, very low inflation, and a moderate budget deficit.

Quote:

A key part of Trump's economic strategy was to temporarily boost growth via tax cuts and additional spending, with mixed success.

Increase deficit spending when the economy is looking good? That's like anti-Keynesian. It's *exactly* when you should be reducing spending and deficits.

What Trump did is like saying well, this year is going good for the family, but we could live even better if we whip the credit cards out and spend big on luxuries. Sure, the family will *appear* to be wealthier, at least in the short term, but it's not being a responsible adult.

Quote:

The Treasury Department expects the deficit to exceed $1 trillion in FY2020. The budget deficit has increased nearly 50% since Trump took office and has increased for the past four years. This is contrary to Trump's promises to eliminate deficits within 8 years. The 2019 calendar year deficit exceeded $1 trillion.

Quote:

However, job creation was 23% faster in the three years before Trump took office (8.1 million total) than during the first 3 years of the Trump Administration (6.6 million total) through January 2020.

So he massively ramped up spending but somehow managed to make *less* new jobs. This is exactly what happens when you inject money into an economy but you only put that money in at the top, rather than putting money into things that actually create jobs and thus increase consumer spending.

Quote:

CBO explained in January 2020 that budget deficits averaged 1.5% of GDP over the past 50 years when the economy was "relatively strong (as it is now)." However, the budget deficit was 4.6% GDP in fiscal year 2019 and was expected to average 4.8% GDP over the 2021-2030 period.

That shows that it wasn't natural or sustainable growth, and the relative lack of new jobs created as a result reflects that, too. The reality is that Trump only cared about temporarily moving economic indicators like the stock market, so that he could go for re-election with booming stock market values.

That's why Trump was so loathe to take leadership on the Covid issue: something that was a no-brainer for a lot of other politicians as an easy way to get votes. It messed with his plan to create a stock market bubble and get re-elected that way.

lowenz on 21/2/2024 at 10:38

Quote Posted by demagogue

Unger added: "Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election."

Why 'muricans can't understand basic psychology? Oh yes, the "american dream" ideology *generates* tons of those guys turning natural children narcissism into something destructive and disruptive at *ADULT* social level.
And just for clarity, "minor" narcissists follow the big ones in a dreaming state (because the big ones keep the lesser into a comforting detachment from the harsh reality, so the big ones keep feeding the lessers with the kool aid / soma and the lesser ones sustain - politically - the big in a very disfuctional socially-wise manner and I mean VERY disfunctional)

It's how in USA the election process is basically hijacked from the start and why I call that demoNcracy.

Nicker on 21/2/2024 at 13:43

Quote:

Why 'muricans can't understand basic psychology?

Many Americans do but tRump loves the "poorly educated". As do all fascists. They love people who are poorly informed, hate the work of thinking, believe experts to be inherently corrupt, and want Daddy to tell them what to do, all the while crowing about liberty.

Americans aren't alone in this. The problem is, while most countries internalise the problem, the USA has the clout to export it at an industrial scale.

Cipheron on 21/2/2024 at 16:05

Quote Posted by DuatDweller

I was reading yesterday about Gorbachev, and came about a part that mentioned that the USSR took Crimea from Russia in 1954 and gave it to Ukraine.

So I guess they do have some claims to that part of land.

It's important to understand the full history of the region. Dates and figures are here:

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Crimea)

The Russians conquered the region in 1783. At that point the population was almost entirely Crimean Tatars. (85% of the population, with 2% Russians as of 1785).

After 1850 that started to shift as the Russians brought in large amounts of their own people as settlers. (about 80% Tatars, 7% Russians in 1850, with the Russians still under 50% by 1939).

The final blow for the Tatars was in 1944, when the remaining 20% of the population who were those guys were mass-deported to the Gulags. So the period that the region was actually majority-Russian and part of Russia was only the 10 years from 1944 - 1954, mainly due to them deporting most of the remaining natives to slave camps.

So the question is whether we reward ethnic cleansing here. Sure, the Russians who live there now shouldn't be blame for what their ancestors did. But does that mean we should we reward a government who did that stuff with control of the land just because the people that they replaced the natives with are the same race as them?

You might as well say that England still has ownership rights on America then, because it's full of English.

lowenz on 21/2/2024 at 17:30

That's precisely why Medveded say "anglo-saxons" and never "americans".

heywood on 22/2/2024 at 16:49

Quote Posted by Nicker

There is no need to export, it's growing organically everywhere in the world.

Quote Posted by lowenz

That's precisely why Medveded say "anglo-saxons" and never "americans".

You might be reading too much into that. I'm from the US, but I lived in Australia for 3 years and briefly in England, and I've traveled to the UK and Canada many times and New Zealand once. To me, the cultural similarities are obvious. I felt more at home in Sydney than in half of the US, so I understood what Julian Assange was talking about when he said that Australia is a suburb of a country called Anglo-Saxon.

lowenz on 22/2/2024 at 18:20

As I've said before, it's all about varangian guard origin (anglo-saxons+proper varangians that russian elites are "instructed" by the cultural elites to see as their proper ancestors, just like romans for italian fascists), being the Varangian Guard the "praetorians" of bizantyne emperor.
Russian elites see theirselves as "legitimate cultural heirs" of byzantine empire "thanks" to Orthodoxy, it's why Putin love so much the "spiritual" (not strictly religious) aspect of all this situation.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard)

It's just XXI century "noble" racism where "anglo-saxons" refused their cultural legacy (->jews corrupted them, it's what tsarists like Girkin believe) and now they're "decadent" but "varangians" (today hypothetical ethnic russians) reclaim that heritage for the "good of humanity".
Now corrupted "anglo-saxons" want to extend corruption to the little russians (ukrainians) and that's why this war is a necessity (=not avoidable)

They really believe in this shit, when you'll realize this you'll know what enemy we are facing.....