liveonearth

This is utterly brilliant. I wish I could take credit for writing it, but no.

British wit to help get you through the nightmare:

"Someone on Quora asked "Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?" Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote this magnificent response.
A few things spring to mind.
Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.
For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace - all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.
So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing - not once, ever.
I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility - for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.
But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is - his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.
And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults - he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.
Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.
Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.
And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.
Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.
He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.
He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.
That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.
There are unspoken rules to this stuff - the Queensberry rules of basic decency - and he breaks them all. He punches downwards - which a gentleman should, would, could never do - and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless - and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority - perhaps a third - of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think 'Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
* Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
* You don't need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.
After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.
God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.
He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.
In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws - he would make a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:
'My God… what… have… I… created?
If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.

liveonearth

...Glib, facile solutions stand at the very heart of the populist appeal.  Voters do not like to think that the world is complicared.  They certainly do not like to be told that there is no immediate answer to their problems.  Faced with politicians who seem to be less and less able to govern an increasingly complex world, many are increasingly willing to vote for anybody who promises a simple solution.  This is why populists from India's Narendra Modi to Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, from Hungary's Viktor Orban to Poland"s Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and from France's Marine Le Pen to Italy's Beppe Grillo sound surprisingly similar to each other despite their considerable ideological differences.
--Yasha Mounk, p38 of The People vs. Democracy

**first use of tag: populism

liveonearth

~~Hollow Horn (Lakota), 1929,
as recounted in Black Hills, White Justice:
The Sioux Nation versus the United States,
1775 to the Present (1991)

liveonearth

--The Dalai Lama

liveonearth

What's distinctive about Sanders is not (or not simply) that he's an ideological purist who refuses to think pragmatically but that he just doesn't know or care very much about the details of how the world works, how to affect concrete change, and what the possible unintended consequences of major changes is likely to be. He'd rather rally the troops and give a rousing speech.
--Damon Linker in the Week, here: http://theweek.com/articles/617065/bernie-sanders-hollow-aspirational-politics

I share this quote because I disagree.  I think that Bernie sees the writing on the wall, that this crash will either happen sooner and in an intentional way, or later in an even more devastating way.  Take apart the banks, or watch them take us apart.  Re-establish human decency or take care of just yourself.  This crossroads leads one way, the other way is inconceivable.  You just can't change directions when there is so much momentum.  Not without a crash.  Bernie knows that many people will die in the process, that poor people will loose the game, and that over generations rich people will be able to relocate to wherever they need to go to survive and propagate.  Idiocracy will come to pass if tRump is any indication of wealthy breeding.

I thought since the beginning that this polarity between tRump and Bernie is representative of the deepest cultural fissure in this nation.  It has been fascinating to watch it play out.

To assert that Bernie doesn't know how the world works is a pretty low blow.  He knows.  His heart broke a long time ago.  Now he's trying to do something to change it.  I appreciate his efforts and I wish that he'd team up with my old buddy Ron Paul (he's not too old) and connect the political circle.  If anybody knows what's going on, it's these old dudes.

liveonearth

When I look back on all these worries,

I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed

that he had had a lot of trouble in his life,

most of which had never happened.

– Winston Churchill

liveonearth

Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change.
When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken
depend on the ideas that are lying around.
That, I believe, is our basic function:
to develop alternatives to existing policies,
to keep them alive and available
until the politically impossible becomes
the politically inevitable.

--Milton Friedman

liveonearth

There is a great deal of difference
between loss, change, and transformation.
A loss is a step backward;
a change is an opportunity;
transformation is a step forward.
The common denominator in these three realities
is the fact that one must
give up something.
It is possible for both loss and change to lead to transformation,
but it is not possible for transformation to occur unless
something is lost and something is changed.
–Anthony Padovano