Final-Fan said:
I don't really see where I talked about ecology, but now that you mention it Trump has made extremely dangerous proposals on that topic. You may not like the EPA's regulations but you probably do not remember the huge problems we have had in the past on environmental issues. Abolishing the EPA would be tantamout to inviting those problems back.
If you don't think that the scams he's run on thousands of people over multiple projects, AND THE FUCKING BRIBES HE'S GIVEN, indicate a very, very, very strong likelihood to be corrupt in office as President, I really don't know what to say.
What I don't think you see is that "not doing the same thing" does not therefore constitute "having a little common sense". You're proposing trading a crook for a madman, a shadowy figure for a moustache-twirling villain.
Another couple of quotes from Sam Harris, whom I had never heard of a week ago but whom I like more and more by the day:
| When I hear Trump speak extemporaneously, I hear someone very often getting prompted by his own misstatements to complete a thought in a way that he clearly didn't intend to. Which is to say that the thing he's now saying doesn't reflect anything he believed or even thought about before. But he's saying it now because the last thing he spoke just launched him there. It's as though he's speaking in verse and he's forced again and again to complete the rhyme. It's like he says, "There was once a man from Nantucket," and he's got to finish the thought, so he says, "who always carried a bucket." But he didn't know he was going to say bucket. But now he's stuck with it. And now he'll go to the mat defending "bucket". But he's rhyming about policy and about world leaders like Putin, and it's the rhyme of ignorance and error and bombast. |
Those of you who are mystified that I could forgive Clinton her obvious lying and other indiscretions just don't understand what a dangerous imbecile I think Trump is. I really think he is a child in a man's body. He is a malignantly selfish, ignorant, and petty person, and a tyrant in the making, insofar as our system could accomodate a tyrant. As I said on that other podcast, if you're supporting the guy because he'll, quote, "shake things up", I think you're just playing a game of chicken with human history—and there's no one in the other car. It is absolutely astonishing to me that this guy is a candidate for the presidency. Now, obviously, those of you who support Trump must think I've been misled about him, but I don't think that's true. I I believe that I see through the media spin against him. I see that he's occasionally been treated unfairly. He's also been treated far too fairly, and graded on a curve for almost everything of substance. I mean, you saw Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, get destroyed in the press for not knowing what Aleppo was. Trump commits gaffes like that all the time, and people just move on. And his gaffes are much worse. His gaffes are policy prescriptions that he pretends to have thought through, and that would be disastrous if implemented.
Like, at the Presidential forum the other day with Matt Lauer where he was asked about the war in Iraq—I'm going to actually read some of this—he was asked about the war in Iraq, and he said, "I've always said we should have just taken the oil." When asked how he would do this, he says, and this is a quote, "Well, you, you just would leave a certain group behind, and you would take various sections where they have the oil. People don't know this about Iraq, but they have among the largest oil reserves in the world. You know, it used to be, 'to the victor go the spoils.' Now, there was no victor here, believe me, there was no victor. But I always said, 'take the oil.' One of the benefits we would have had if we took the oil is ISIS would not have been able to take the oil and use the oil to fuel themselves," end quote.
Now, it should be clear that this is much worse than just blanking on what Aleppo is. This is just insanity. Forget about the logistical problems of, quote, "just taking the oil." Forget about the ethical problems of taking the main resource from a country we were ostensibly trying to help and further impoverishing tens of millions of people that we have just submitted to punishing sanctions for a decade and who we just freed from a brutal dictatorship. What's he picturing happening in Iraq to the Iraqi people when we "just take their oil"? Mass starvation? Forget about that. Forget about the fact that ISIS's primary funding hasn't been oil. They were robbing banks and forcing people to just give them money. Forget about that. Just think about how the world, both Muslim and non-, would have responded to our invading Iraq and then just stealing their oil. Which is to say, confirming the craziest conspiracy theories about why we invaded the country in the first place. Trump is telling us that this is what he would have done had he inherited the ongoing problem of Iraq. This is so much worse than not understanding what the word Aleppo means in the context of a weirdly posed question, and yet Trump gets away with it. And, again, there have been probably hundreds of moments like this in the campaign. In any case, I've bracketed all of the charges against him that seem spurious, and I've acknowledged that his plain talk about radical Islam is preferable to the sanctimonious lies we get out of the Democrats. (And if you want to read about what Hillary could and should say about radical Islam, that article's on my blog.) But I can't overlook the fact that the man shows every sign, really every sign, of being motivated by pure selfishness and narcissism, to be compared with Hillary's partial selfishness and narcissism, and he strikes me as being completely rudderless intellectually. I mean, you want to understand how I see Trump? Blow up a balloon without tying off the end and hold it up high and then release it. Then watch it fly chaotically around the room. That’s Trump’s mind. In my view, that’s what we’d be doing with the country if we put him in charge: just hitching our country to a totally chaotic system. If that's your view of "shaking things up", you're a nihilist. |
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