Friday, November 18, 2016

You Are Still Crying Wolf

Half my sidebar is posting this essay from Scott Alexander of Star Slate Codex, and I can't take the peer pressure, so I'm posting it too.

9 comments:

DOuglas2 said...

"Please don’t interpret anything in this article to mean that Trump is not super terrible"

I stopped having conversations about the election months ago -- my wife and friends "know so much that isn't so" about Trump, and any effort to disabuse them of the falsehoods that they had imbibed was percieved by them as my supporting Trump.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I've had the same thing. No election has given better evidence of my belief in tribalism as this one.

RichardJohnson said...

The anti-Trump "coalition" in Venezuela has some very strange bedfellows. Apparently the only thing that can unite the Venezuelan government and its opposition is dislike of Trump. Call them the anti-Trumpistas. It is to be expected that Chavistas would be against Trump. After all, Maduro expressed support for Bernie Sanders. Not surprisingly, we find: Chavistas against Trump?
The Venezuelan in question is Jesús Rodríguez-Espinoza, Counsel General for the Venezuelan consulate in Chicago, who recently spoke at the Chicago branch of Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER),

While the rest of the speakers accused Trump of the normal litany of grievances — that he’s a racist, homophobe, misogynist and charlatan — Rodriguez said his diplomatic position forbade him from weighing in on Trump.

“Because of my diplomatic position, I’m going to be very careful about what I’m going to say tonight,” Rodriguez-Espinoza said.


The origins of International A.N.S.W.E.R. would give further reason not to be surprised that a Venezuelan diplomat would show up at an anti-Trump meeting.

What's interesting is that many in the Venezuelan oppo [Venezuelans who oppose the current Chavista regime] also dislike Trump. Francisco Toro, Executive Editor of the oppo blog Caracas Chronicles, had a recent article in the WaPo:Donald Trump is no Hugo Chávez. He’s more like Nicolás Maduro.

Francisco Toro previously wrote from his Caracas Chronicles blog: Trump = Chávez – Impulse Control.
Is Trump like Maduro or is Trump like Chávez? Given the justified dislike that the Venezuelan oppo has for those two, it is fair to conclude that this oppo blogger has a very low opinion of Trump.

But it isn't just blogging policy wonks who comprise anti-Trumpistas in the oppo.'Good luck, America,' Venezuela opposition leader says after Trump win.
Venezuela's main opposition spokesman on Wednesday wished the United States "all the luck in the world" after Donald Trump won the presidency, and suggested America could find itself facing problems that currently beset the South American nation.

Trump's campaign style of picking fights and lobbing insults has drawn comparisons to late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, who won repeated elections but faced criticism for stifling dissent and creating a state-led economy now mired in crisis.

"We come from this disaster - the fantasy of politics driven by a single leader, these hegemonic and totalitarian projects," Jesus Torrealba, spokesman for the opposition's Democratic Unity coalition, said in a statement.

"(Now) others appear to be heading toward that cliff," he said, adding that U.S. institutions "will be put to the test."


Chavistas and many in the oppo are saying "We hate each other but we also hate Trump." Apparently dislike of Trump is the only thing that can unite Venezuelans. My conclusion: the oppo is useless- a conclusion supported by the results of the recent "dialogue" that the Vatican sponsored.

Unknown said...

The author was trying to keep his article short so that it would be read widely. He did not include the monetary pressures on media. I wonder how much insight Trump had, if it was his strategy to manipulate the weaknesses of the media, was he aware that they sabotaged their own credibility, or if he was prepared to just roll through all the flak?
And lest we forget, this works both ways. There is a lot of contrived kr@p written about Clinton as well. One that comes to mind is that the senior paper she wrote on Alinsky was adoring. I read it, it wasn't.

Sam L. said...

Many of us learned years ago the media was in the tank for the left/progressives/liberals/Democrats. If we read or watch them, we engage our "Decode Pravda/Tass/Izvestia" brain mode first thing.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

@ Richard Johnson - fascinating stuff.

@ Edith Hook - Her commencement speech at Wellesley was more vacuous than radical, also. And while Hillary could legitimately be accused of obstructing justice, along with Webb Hubbell, the accusation that she'd had Vince Foster killed never had more than a few circumstantial threads behind it. Good pickup.

Unknown said...

It's funny. So many people believe that Hillary's senior paper was concealed from Republicans. I think it's possible to make the case for just the opposite; it was concealed from Dems.
It's been a long time since I read it, so don't hold me to this. I recollect that Saul Alinsky was pretty down on the "virtue industry" calling them puffed up little generals more concerned with feathering their own nests. Understandable, if you know that the federal funds passed through Mayor Daley's city hall.

RichardJohnson said...

For those who want to peruse it: Hillary's senior thesis on Alinsky.

I haven't read it yet. Some summaries I have read state that one way that Hillary differed from Alinsky was that she had greater faith than Alinsky in government to bring about change, by law, executive action, or the like.

Unknown said...

Good luck to you, I am forth generation Chicago and have an interest in the history of the city. This doesn't look like what I read, which was double spaced on an electric typewriter, so it must have been reformatted to make it readable. Full disclosure; I read 60 pages of the original and the conclusion. I just could not go on.