Thursday, May 30, 2019
Thursday, January 24, 2019
Why The Wall Is Stupid, Cruel And Dumb
That is like saying, I am against the death penalty, but if you are going to do it anyway, let me explain to you why giving someone an electric shock at 150 volts for two hours is a really, really bad idea. They will still be alive at the end of those two hours. And, in the meantime, you just engaged in torture. Which is inhuman.
The Wall idea is stupid. It will not stop people. It will not stop drugs. It will not stop criminals. The only thing it will do is give legitimacy to racist demonizations of people from the South. Or maybe that is precisely the idea. The Wall is but a hate project.
The cruel part is explained by the lady standing in the New York harbor. That lady in green is beckoning the persecuted of the world to come hither, come now. America is supposed to take people who have nowhere else to go to. It is the oldest modern democracy of some size. The cruelty is not just towards those who seek asylum. It is also towards the very idea of America. Trump wants to be the new Founding Father to America. Guess what, democracy did not work. Let's now switch to fascism.
Dumb, as opposed to stupid?
Japan suffered for decades, then it realized it really needs to open up to immigration if it wants a vibrant economy. And it has been opening up. Immigration is not America doing favors. Large scale immigration is the only solution to America's Social Security crisis. It is the only way to keep the American economy vibrant.
But then Hitler needed to torch the parliament building. Trump needs to push America into a Great Depression to realize his dream of becoming president for life.
The stand to not fund the Wall must be taken. The longer Trump slugs it out, greater the chances Trump will lose both the Senate and the White House in 2020, if America is still a democracy. He might lose the White House well before that. Which means, when he has lost the Senate, he gets impeached. Taking the stand against the Wall is the right thing to do. It is also the right political thing to do.
Why The Wall Is Stupid, Cruel And Dumb https://t.co/ZPyUt9EyMw @AOC @_waleedshahid @saikatc @SenWarren @KamalaHarris @RepJeffries @RepAOC— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) January 24, 2019
Friday, October 28, 2016
Trump And The Bomb
his former GOP rival, Marco Rubio, repeated his earlier concerns about Trump only this week, saying America can't give "the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual."
In the atomic age, when decisions must be made very quickly, the presidency has evolved into something akin to a nuclear monarchy. With a single phone call, the commander in chief has virtually unlimited power to rain down nuclear weapons on any adversarial regime and country at any time.
would be free to launch a civilization-ending nuclear war on his own any time he chose.
The only real protection against nuclear disaster is total elimination of nuclear weapons.
Ronald Reagan expressed incredulity that he would be allowed only six minutes to decide whether to trigger Armageddon based on blips on a radar screen.
Although no president during the atomic age appears to have ever lost his grip on reality to such an extent that an insane nuclear act might have resulted, top advisers to President Richard Nixon tried to constrain his launch authority during the Watergate scandal that ultimately forced his resignation. His secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, quietly instructed the Pentagon war room to double check with him if Nixon contacted it to order up a nuclear strike. Nixon’s mental stability, and his heavy drinking, caused concern within his inner circle that he might behave erratically out of despair and depression. Alcoholism in a future nuclear monarch is of course quite beyond the pale.
about three serious false alarms in the United States and three in the Soviet Union/Russia that could have led to a very bad call by their leaders have occurred.
Both Putin and President Barack Obama are reminding each other, to a degree we haven’t seen since the Cold War, that they have nuclear buttons at hand.
As with his predecessors, Trump’s power over the life and death of entire nations would be practically unbounded.
There are no restraints that can prevent a willful president from unleashing this hell.
a common expert view that the bomb is slowly but surely spreading around the world, and that proliferation may be unstoppable unless ALL nations including the nuclear-armed countries get serious about universal nuclear disarmament.
the double-standard of the nuclear “haves,” cigarettes dangling from their lips, lecturing the “have nots” to give up smoking is unsustainable over the long term.
Altogether only 15 minutes would elapse before 850 land- and sea-based missile warheads would take flight. There would be no stopping, no recall, no turning back the salvo. In all likelihood, a return volley of Russian missiles would be triggered. The scale of the ensuing disaster defies comprehension. In a large-scale nuclear exchange, hundreds of millions of lives would be extinguished in a few agonizing hours. A global humanitarian catastrophe would ensue to seal the fate of civilization itself.
So far, most respected Republican advisers have boycotted the Trump campaign.
Trump certainly has not yet made a convincing case that we could sleep soundly with him at the helm.
2016 Is Democracy Vs Fascism
we’re in genuinely uncharted territory with Trump: we’ve simply never seen a candidate with this much disregard for typical Constitutional values get this close to the White House. There’s no precedent for what might happen if he got there. For another, if you look at how our system of checks and balances is really built, it has relatively few resources to stop an authoritarian president from violating the Constitution and getting away with it. And the third reason may be the most unsettling of all: In a democracy, the final brake on the tyrannical exercise of power is public opinion. And polls suggest the American public has never been as skeptical of democracy or as open to authoritarian alternatives like military rule as it is right now. If a President Trump really blew down the walls of our system, a worryingly wide swath of the public would likely stand behind him.
Even Richard Nixon, as close to an out-and-out crook as the White House has known, finally resigned when Congress moved to impeach him. It’s simply not clear that Donald Trump would do the same.
If he wanted to close down mosques, or have his cronies prosecute political opponents, he probably could.
The Supreme Court's role as arbiter of what’s constitutional is ultimately just a matter of tradition, and Trump has already proved his willingness to flout tradition when it happens to suit his interests.
impeachment requires both a simple majority in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate. Considering how scared most GOP officials have been of taking on a Presidential candidate with authoritarian tendencies, it is far from certain that many of them would prove more courageous in the face of an authoritarian President. And by the time the will to impeach him has built, and the highly complex proceedings completed, it would in any case be far from clear how much of the republic there would be left to save.
countries like Hungary, Russia or Iraq did have carefully designed institutions with intricate checks and balances; but because the politicians who inhabited these systems had little commitment to liberal-democratic norms, they failed to protect democracy.
it isn't primarily the legal genius of the Founding Fathers that has made American democracy uniquely stable, but, at least as importantly, the deep commitment of ordinary Americans to liberal norms like the separation of powers. It is the people's love for democracy, not the protections their democracy affords them on paper, that is the final check on the tyranny of the majority which the founders so feared.
the Constitution cannot save us from our politics
Tuesday, October 04, 2016
Trump And American Journalists
“I wonder how I would have behaved if I had been a correspondent in Germany during the early rise to power of Adolf Hitler. Would I first have tried to report his side of the story? How long would it have taken me to realize that he was all bad and that any sympathy or even-handedness would have been misplaced? The short answer is I don’t know.”
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Trump’s Only Appeal Is Racism And Sexism
The guy's numbers don't add up. His round up and deport everybody plan runs into the hundreds of billions, just on logistics. The political meltdown around the idea also has to be factored in. He has been selling the wall like it were the Brooklyn Bridge.
The dude lacks basic knowledge. He doesn't know the difference between the nuclear code and the air conditioner.
He will be the oldest person ever to become president. And he eats burgers and burgers only. This fast food maniac is a heart attack waiting to happen. His cholesterol levels are as high as one of the Trump Towers.
He has disdain for democracy itself, not just Mexicans.
The guy is offering nothing but hatred. This guy is but David Duke who got half a billion from his father and a billion in tax breaks. And that adds up to less than his net worth. No, he has not been creating wealth in the private sector.
But he is a more rabid sexist more than anything else. He is peddling the thought that only men can look presidential. He is talking about "wide shoulders."
Mussolini has come to America.
Saturday, March 05, 2016
नीतिश का एक Blind Spot: FDI
लेकिन मधेसी मीडिया को पढ़ो तो मालुम पड़ता है कि नीतिश जितना बिहार समझते हैं उतना ही मधेस और नेपाल समझते हैं। सबसे जो सटिक प्रश्न है वो उन्होंने किया। कि जो काँग्रेस और कम्निष्ट पार्टी में मधेसी हैं उन्होंने इस संविधान पर हस्ताक्षर क्यों किया? जाहिर है उन सांसदों के मतदाता इस संविधान से तीव्र असंतुष्ट हैं।
नीतिश के दो Blind Spots
लोकतंत्र में वैसा नहीं होता है। सांसद और उसके मतदाता के बीच इतनी दुरी लोकतंत्र में संभव नहीं। ये दुरी उस बात की प्रमाण है कि नेपाल में वास्तव में लोकतंत्र है ही नहीं। चुनाव में भारी धाँधली हुवी। उसके बाद भी विजेता पार्टी ने अपना मैनिफेस्टो ही फेंक दिया। संविधान सभा में व्हिप जारी नहीं किया जा सकता। वो एक विश्वव्यापी मान्यता है। नेपाल में व्हिप जारी की गयी। जभी जयशंकर आए उस समय में संविधान सभा के पास कमसेकम ६ महिना समय बाँकी था अगर प्रक्रिया को पुरा किया जाता तो। तो उसको शार्ट सर्किट कर दिया गया। अभी भी ये लोग कह रहे हैं चलो चुनाव की ओर। यानि की फिर से जम के धाँधली करने की काबिलियत रखते हैं। इतना सब कुछ हो जाने के बाद भी। ये लोकतंत्र नहीं फासिज्म है।
