Showing posts with label sexism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sexism. Show all posts

Friday, November 04, 2016

Democracy Asks For Eternal Vigilance

Democracy is a wonderful thing, but it asks for eternal vigilance. Previous generations have gone to war to protect it. If this generation can't even be bothered to show up to vote to protect it, it does not deserve it.

It is like having to eat again and again. Having to sleep night after night. Physical exercise has to be regular. It is like that. You have to actively want it. Or it can be gone.

Trump is Lucifer himself lunging for the nuclear code. This guy will start a war his first year in office.

The Republic Is In Danger Of Collapse

an openly proto-fascist cult leader has emerged to forge a popular movement that has taken over one of the major political parties, eroded central norms of democratic life, undermined American democratic institutions, and now stands on the brink of seizing power in Washington

this republic is in serious danger.

his disturbed, unstable, and uncontrollable psyche.

He seems to have no close friends, because he can tolerate no equals. He never appears to laugh, because that would cede a recognition to another’s fleeting power over him. He treats his wives and his children as mere extensions of his power, and those who have resisted the patriarch have been exiled, humiliated, or bought off. 

His relationship to men — from his school days to the primary campaign — is rooted entirely in dominance and mastery, through bullying, intimidation, and, if necessary,humiliation. His relationship to women is entirely a function of his relationship to men: Women are solely a means to demonstrate his superiority in the alpha-male struggle. Women are to be pursued, captured, used, assaulted, or merely displayed to other men as an indication of his superiority. His response to any difficult relationship is to end it, usually by firing or humiliating or ruining someone. His core, motivating idea is the punishment or mockery of the weak and reverence for the strong. He cannot apologize or accept responsibility for failure. He has long treated the truth as entirely instrumental to his momentary personal interests. Setbacks of any kind can only be assuaged by vindictive, manic revenge.

He has no concept of a non-zero-sum engagement, in which a deal can be beneficial for both sides. A win-win scenario is intolerable to him, because mastery of others is the only moment when he is psychically at peace. (This is one reason why he cannot understand the entire idea of free trade or, indeed, NATO, or the separation of powers.) In any conflict, he cannot ever back down; he must continue to up the ante until the danger to everyone around him is so great as to demand their surrender. From his feckless business deals and billion-dollar debts to his utter indifference to the damage he has done to those institutions unfortunate enough to engage him, he has shown no concern for the interests of other human beings. Just ask the countless people he has casually fired, or the political party he has effectively destroyed. He has violated and eroded the core norms that make liberal democracy possible — because such norms were designed precisely to guard against the kind of tyrannical impulses and pathological narcissism he personifies.

He sees the judicial system as entirely subordinate to his political and personal interests, and impugned a federal judge for his ethnicity. He has accused the Justice Department and FBI of a criminal conspiracy to protect Hillary Clinton. He has refused to accept in advance the results of any election in which he loses. He has openly argued for government persecution of newspapers that oppose him — pledging to open up antitrust prosecution against the Washington Post, for example. He is the first candidate in American history to subject the press pool to mob hatred — “disgusting, disgusting people” — and anti-Semitic poison from his foulest supporters. He is the first candidate in American history to pledge to imprison his election opponent if he wins power. He has mused about using nuclear weapons in regional wars. He has celebrated police powers that openly deploy racial profiling. 

His favorite foreign leader is a man who murders journalists, commits war crimes, uses xenophobia and warfare to cement his political standing, and believes in the dismemberment of both NATO and the European Union. Nor has he rejected any of his most odious promises during the primary — from torturing prisoners “even if it doesn’t work” to murdering the innocent family members of terror suspects to rounding upseveral million noncitizens to declaring waron an entire religion, proposing to create a database to monitor its adherents and barmost from entering the country.

The Establishments of both right and left have had many opportunities to stop him and have failed by spectacular displays of cowardice, narrow self-interest, and bewilderment. The right has been spectacularly craven. Trump has no loyalty to the party apparatus that has elevated him to a possible victory next Tuesday — declaringwar on the Speaker of the House, attackingthe RNC whenever it fails to toady to him, denigrating every single rival Republican candidate, even treating his own vice-presidential nominee as someone he can openly and contemptuously contradict with impunity. And yet that party, like the conservative parties in Weimar Germany, has never seen fit to anathematize him, only seeking to exploit his followers in the vain and foolish delusion that they can control him in the future in ways they have not been able to in the past.

They are nihilist revolutionaries of the far right in search of a galvanizing revolutionary leader. And they have now found their man.

The staggering decision by FBI director James Comey to violate established protocol and throw the election into chaos to preserve his credibility with the far right

The Democrats, with the exception of Obama, have long been unable to marshal emotion as a political weapon, advancing a bloodless rationalism that has never been a match for the tribal national passions of the right. Clinton’s rallies have been pale copies of the bloodthirsty mobs Trump has marshaled and whipped into ever-higher states of frenzy. In every debate, she won on points, but I fear she failed to offer a compelling, simple, and positive reason for her candidacy. Only a party utterly divorced from half the country it seeks to represent could have made such a drastic error of hubris and complacency.

Over the last year, which forces in the GOP have been able to stand up to him? Even his closest aides have been unable to get him to concentrate before a debate. He set up a policy advisory apparatus and then completely ignored it until it was disbanded. His foreign-policy advisers can scarcely be found. He says he knows more than any general, any diplomat, and anyone with actual experience in government. He has declared his chief adviser to be himself. Even the criminal Richard Nixon was eventually restrained and dispatched by a Republican Establishment that still knew how to run the country and had a loyalty to broader American institutions. Such an Establishment no longer exists. 

What is so striking is that this requires no interpretation, no reading of the tea leaves. Trump has told Americans all of this — again and again — in plain English. His own temperamental instability has been displayed daily and in gory detail. From time to time, you can see his poll ratings plummet as revelations that would permanently sink any other candidate have dented his appeal. And then he resiliently and unstoppably moves back up. His bond with his supporters is absolute, total, and personal. It was months ago that he boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters would still be with him. And he was right. This is not a mark of a democratic leader; it is a mark of an authoritarian cult. 

If his policies lead to an economic downswing, he will find others to blame and conspiracies to flush out. If there is Republican resistance to his pledges to roll back free trade, he will call on his base to pressure the leadership to surrender. And if one of his first moves is to abandon the Iran nuclear deal, we will be hurtling rather quickly to a military confrontation, as Iran rushes to build a nuke before Trump can launch military attacks to thwart them. That rush to war would empower him still further.

There will doubtless be another incident between police and an unarmed black man under a Trump presidency. Rather than calm the nation, Trump will inflame it. There will be an Islamist terror attack of some kind — and possibly a wave of such attacks in response to his very election. Trump will exploit it with the subtlety of a Giuliani and the brutality of a Putin.

 A political hurricane has arrived, as globalization has eroded the economic power of the white working classes, as the cultural left has overplayed its hand on social and racial issues, and as a catastrophic war and a financial crisis has robbed the elites of their credibility. As always in history, you still needed the spark, the unique actor who could deploy demagogic talent to drag an advanced country into violence and barbarism. In Trump, America found one for the ages. 

we live in a republic, if we can keep it. And yet, more than two centuries later, we are openly contemplating throwing it up in the air and seeing where it might land.

Trump And Russia


Trump is not the project’s developer or even an investor; one of his partners, a Russian-born billionaire who got rich in Ukraine’s steel industry, controls the firm that’s in default. The Trump Toronto is still a posh hotel, and even though nearly two thirds of the tower’s condo units remain unsold, they’re still upscale residences. Still, the saga of the property’s glittering rise and rapid fall is classic Trump, featuring a tsunami of litigation and bitterness, money with a Russian accent, and a financial wreck that probably won’t hit its namesake particularly hard.

It is clear from affidavits in the fraud cases and the bankruptcy case that the buyers have taken a financial beating. A warehouse supervisor named Sarbjit Singh, who was earning about $55,000 a year, testified that he borrowed money from his father, a retired welder, for the deposit on his hotel unit; he never closed on the deal, but he says he still lost $248,000. Se Na Lee, a homemaker who was married to a mortgage underwriter, borrowed money for her deposit from her parents; she did close, and ended up losing $990,000 through December 2014, she says.

A judge later described Talon’s prospectus and other “deceptive documents” as “a trap to these unsurprisingly unwary purchasers,” and ruled that they could sue Trump as well as Talon.

There have been protests outside the building by union workers, women’s groups, and Muslim groups. The Trump brand is under siege, which has delayed the opening of a similar Trump-licensed hotel and condo project in Vancouver until after the election. The colorful mosaic celebrating multiculturalism at the entrance to Trump Toronto, titled A Small Part of Something Larger, now seems to clash with the nominee’s white-backlash message.

he can’t deny all responsibility for the failure of a Trump project, especially when the Trump Organization is running the Trump hotel. The project's partners, investors, and lenders all got a Trump Experience

Victory, But No Landslide


It looks like Hillary Clinton will win, perhaps also the Senate by a narrow margin, but the GOP will keep the House.

Thursday, November 03, 2016

FBI: Trumpland

The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”

The Cause Of The Hillary Slide

"I debated Donald Trump for four and a half hours and I am not going to respond to him any more."

Hillary Clinton

Obama: Feminist

Barack Obama Is America's Feminist-in-Chief

He’s offering a valuable new template for masculinity, not just in politics but in American culture more broadly.

Steve Jobs, Hillary Clinton And Doing Homework

Why ambitious men are celebrated and ambitious women are criticized

Rejecting her policy stances is one thing. Aversion based on a gut feeling, he suggests, might be sexism.

“The predictable swings of public opinion reveal Americans’ continued prejudice against women caught in the act of asking for power.”

Not comparing Hillary Clinton to Steve Jobs. But you have to note. Steve Jobs was praised to no end for his product launch presentations. Every word was endlessly rehearsed in advance.

But when Hillary Clinton does her homework, oh, she is not a natural, she is "rehearsed."

It is a sexist trap. If you don't prepare you are not qualified. If you prepare you are "wooden." Damned if you do damned if you don't.

Wednesday, November 02, 2016

Priyanka Chopra And American Racism

America is a fundamentally racist country. America is as much into mindless, unthinking racism as people generally were into mindless assaults 2,000 years ago.

Hollywood is the most racist place in America with the possible exception of the US Senate.

You get to see some of that when Priyanka Chopra gets interviewed on American TV.

So Ellen. She is gay and female and small. And so she is the make you feel good person. If you can tolerate Ellen then you have proven you are a really really tolerant person. Hillary picked Ellen as the first show after the debates. Because Ellen is gay and female and small.

But Ellen has to ask Priyanka Chopra, "Do they drink over there in India?"

Some of the most famous Bollywood songs are around drinks. There is an entire genre of songs - ghazals - that revolve entirely around drinks. Not saying that drinking is essential and wonderful and when you drink you have really arrived or anything like that. But do they drink anywhere in the world?

The point is, if you have to ask, do they drink in India, you are about to ask, do you ride elephants to school? I rode an elephant once, but not to school, and I did not even grow up in India, I grew up an Indian in Nepal: my kind are still waging a civil rights movement for basic rights for being Indian.

Do you ride elephants to school? That actually was a question Priyanka Chopra was asked when she attended high school for a few years in Flushing, Queens, of all places.

But Ellen is a candlelight compared to a dumb white guy who shall remain nameless because I really don't know his name. He goes ahead and calls Priyanka Chopra "Miss Piggy Chops, because you eat like a pig, all the time, and your last name is Chops." On live television. Prime time television.

I was dumbstruck. If Indians were into things like jihad they would call a jihad on that dumb white ass, if you have any idea how popular Priyanka Chopra is in India.

She is Bollywood royalty.

But then this is a country where 40% of the people have felt the urge to delegitimize the first black president and the Senate Majority Leader would rather burn the US constitution for good rather than let the president appoint a judge like that document says.

But it is also a country where the top paid actor right now is a black guy. Opposite whom Priyanka Chopra is starring in a movie.

She came, she saw, she conquered even as the dumb white guys of the world stayed busy asking their dumb questions, like, can I call you Miss Piggy Chops?

She has the Body Mass Index of someone who has not destroyed half her gut bacteria.

Racism is a lot of people's idea of an ice breaker. I am going to say something racist and you are going to act like you are okay with it, then I am going to be nice to you about other things. Because I need to get the big picture right first.

But if you don't put up with that first racist comment they are utterly lost, like you had suddenly dropped them in the jungles of Burma without so much as a map.

FBI Institutional Hatred Of Clintons: Why?

FBI releases docs from 2001 Marc Rich probe days before election - CNNPolitics.com

By now this has become bizarre. The top law enforcement institution in the country is expressing open hatred for a particular last name in a naked attempt to influence a presidential election and is succeeding at it. Hillary is getting hammered at the polls with this FBI antic. What explains this bizarre behavior?

This is a naked attempt to give the election to Trump. This is a naked attempt to hijack an election.

Is the idea of the first female president so abhorrent?

Comey seems to think it is a sure shot. Either Hillary loses or she wins and is illegitimate from day one.

Lucifer himself is working extra time on this.

This is not just sexism. The idea of nakedly playing foul. This is also racism. The black woman boss will not be obeyed. This is also classism. Bill Clinton never had class to be president. Before him even Democratic presidents came from dynasties.

It is amazing how desperately America wants to be a Third World country.

Hillary’s Male Tormentors

Obama Criticizes F.B.I. Director: ‘We Don’t Operate on Leaks’

Tuesday, November 01, 2016

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel’s Fantasy Trump

Burr Reveals

the GOP nominee "aligns perfectly with where the Republican Party is" on the issues. 

Comey's Trumpism

James Comey, the formerly respected FBI director whose maladroit handling of a fresh email “discovery” threatens to change American history. A few weeks ago, I wrote that the rise of Trump is a sign that the Constitution is “gravely, perhaps terminally, ill.” I underestimated how far the rot has spread and how hard it will be to cure.  A constitution is not simply a collection of words, or even a set of rules; it is a complex focus of text, history, values, and institutions. And as the nation forsakes the values and devalues the history, the institutions—for all their marble majesty—are hollowing out. The Comey episode is but the latest symptom of a seriously ailing civic culture.

He defied Department of Justice tradition and policy, and the advice of Department of Justice staff, to boldly tell the nation . . . essentially nothing except, “Everybody freak out!” In so doing, he has left not only his own reputation but the organization he heads sadly diminished for some time to come.

The email announcement—now denounced by, among others, Democratic and Republican attorneys general, the ethics counsel for the Bush White House, and Fox News’s Judge Jeanine—seems not to have been a partisan maneuver so much as an extraordinary lapse in judgment 

a chilling reminder of how many such pillars of the republic have been buckling lately.

Consider that Donald J. Trump, a man incapable of a coherent English sentence, now has a lease (with option to buy) on the Republican Party. The United States Congress—where the Northwest Ordinance, the Homestead Act, The Fourteenth Amendment, the Social Security Act of 1935, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were drafted—now spends its time happily threatening to default on the national debt and refusing to confirm judges.

The Supreme Court—once vaunted as the branch that worked, is now literally hollowed out, its one missing justice having robbed it of not only its ability to decide cases but its very confidence in itself. A new step downward is now being pledged, as Senators like John McCain and Ted Cruz begin to suggest that Court vacancies should never be filled. (“[L]et the Supreme Court die out,” one conservative commentator suggested last week.)

State governments—once the supposed “laboratories of democracy”—are hollowing out too, degenerating into semi-democratic one-party satrapies (look at Kansas, North Carolina, and Wisconsin).

even the elected state courts are increasingly under the sway of unregulated money.

The institutional media is now a shadow of itself. In the rise of Trump, cable news was an eager collaborator. 

The FBI’s Halloween trick was not intended light-heartedly, and it may be a harbinger of the same.

Monday, October 31, 2016

The Comey Sexism

Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere.

FBI Chief James Comey has shown himself to be another bully of the same kind. He has repeatedly talked down to Clinton, admonishing her as a bad parent would a 5-year-old. He has accused her of “poor judgment” and called her use of a private email server “extremely careless.” 

Sunday, October 30, 2016

The Comey Attack

What drives people? When your professional obligation is to uphold the laws and the constitution but you helplessly undermine your chain of command and your department guidelines and your heart says to not obey because your boss is a black woman (that don't look right) and you are moved by the ideologies of racism and sexism as certainly as the electrons are moved by electric forces and you are okay with Huma Abedin being a Hillary Clinton surrogate but a Pakistani Indian American is getting too close to the president for your comfort, what do you do? You make one last ditch effort. You would rather a madman near the nuclear code than a Pakistani Indian American near the President Of The United States.

The FBI did it to John Liu, who is born in New York City. He looked too Chinese to possibly occupy the second most powerful office in the country.

This is how you know racism in America's criminal justice system is a very real issue.

On Clinton Emails, Did the F.B.I. Director Abuse His Power?

Friday, October 28, 2016

GOP Civil War Round The Corner?

Now the party of Ronald Reagan is being led by a man with no discernible ideological leanings, save for an affinity with some of history’s ugliest. 

“The likelihood of the Republican Party surviving this, of there being another Republican president in the future, is small,” said one movement conservative who served in the Bush White House. “I don’t think the party survives.”

Far from the halls of the Hoover Institution and big Washington policy shops is a force they cannot control: the Trump campaign, a small collection of social-media gurus, Breitbart alumni, and Trump family members who have managed to capture the majority of Republican voters in the U.S., and who may use their new power to launch a media network, or take over as the new axis of the GOP, or both. And as the old establishment looks on in horror, the civil war in its ranks has already begun.

“I’ve never seen so many really smart people at a loss for what to do,” says the head of one prominent conservative think tank. “They’re pulling their hair out, to the extent they have any hair left.” 

We’ve known the cause of death while the patient was still alive on the table.”

There is pretty universal agreement in conservative circles that the immediate cause of death was blunt force trauma with a loud, orange object.

there is wide disagreement as to whether this was a sudden, unpredictable trauma—a piano falling on you as you walk down the street—or the result of deep-seated, sclerotic disease. 

“The ugliness of those forces is real. The number of people who supported Trump is alarming. 

Some among them just think it’s time to start over. “If you can’t resurrect the Republican brand with less than half a billion dollars and spending four to eight years to get it done,” Glover, who is on the board of Roy’s new think tank, said, it might be time to think about starting something new. 

The party she envisions is one with “a Jeb Bush platform but with a 21st-century bolt on acknowledging climate change, gay marriage and campaign finance reform that’s First Amendment-compliant.”

Trump could only have happened to a party that was already paralyzed by an identity crisis—one that still has to be dealt with in addition to the secondary identity crisis wrought by Trump.

three disparate factions that find themselves squabbling under the Republican tent—the Trump fans, the stand-pat establishment, and the conservative Jesuits—

What the orange dragon chooses to do after the drubbing Republicans are sure he’s going to get might be the difference between the final nail in the GOP coffin, and a revival. And again, few really believe in the latter, not even the stalwarts. “I have a feeling no one’s going to learn a lot from this campaign because of the unique nature of Trump,” says the think tank head. “I’m one of the people who is feeling a lot of angst.” If he starts a media company, says Ayres, “It will be far harder to heal the wounds that he opened up, and far harder to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

“It’s in Trump’s nature to continue to want to be relevant, to have people come to Trump Tower to lick his boots for years to come,”

As for the people who hope Trump will simply melt away on November 9 and remove the threat of collapse from the Republican Party? “I appreciate but do not share their optimism,” says Soltis Anderson. “I feel like we are in for a pretty long civil war.”

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Texas Blues

Texas Republicans are slowly coming to grips with the unthinkable: Hillary Clinton has a shot at winning the nation’s most iconic red state.

Texas is the beating heart of the modern Republican Party, and the cornerstone of any GOP nominee’s electoral strategy. It’s also home to the most recent Republican president, George W. Bush, and to two serious recent GOP contenders for the White House, Sen. Ted Cruz and former Gov. Rick Perry.

And Texas is where the party’s most prominent donor base is clustered.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Pigs Can't Fly

But they can run for President Of The United States, apparently! Oh, only in America! Here's looking at you Donald Trump.

Trump Monster

Bilal Elcharfa was pouring cereal for his children before school this month when his 7-year-old daughter, Maaria, walked into the kitchen, calling for him.

“Baba, I had a scary dream,” she said, hugging him tight. “About Donald Trump.”

Mr. Elcharfa, a taxi driver, had dealt with his own share of anti-Muslim sentiment, like the time a passenger refused to pay his fare because he said Muslims needed to pay for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Maaria said that if Mr. Trump became president, “I’m going to stay in my room forever.”



Trump Is Pus Coming Out

Mass injustice doesn't result from a "few bad apples," but from the mass of people willfully supporting injustice.

I remain desperate to protect you from a society that quietly but habitually tells you that as a girl, you're not equal to boys -- that you're more valued for your body than your brains, that you don't deserve the same opportunities let alone the same basic respect. And the truth is, black men and women are still treated vastly differently under our laws and in our communities. 

After all, you're only eight years old. But I know you understand the difference between right from wrong. And I know that you know the things Donald Trump has said about Mexicans and veterans and Muslims and women are wrong.

You've said that if Donald Trump wins, you want to move to India.