"POLY TICKS" all things political

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crfriend
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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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beachlion wrote:Nevertheless I have some universal advice when it comes to elect a person. I once heard it somewhere many years ago but I think it is still valid. I even send it as a letter to the editor of my local newspaper, the Morning Call.
Very nicely put, Wim. I hope more than a few folks read it, thought about it, and took it to heart.
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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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crfriend wrote: The above having being said, even if the unthinkable happened and the US got a president Hell-bent on restoring the Republic he would be thwarted at every turn in congress in a "bi-partisan showing" as the oligarchs' minions stop everything to overthrow them, and in lieu of that the Supreme Court.
I'm reading a powerful book now, JFK and the unspeakable: why he died and why it matters by James W. Douglass. It makes a strong argument that JFK was assassinated because he was turning against the war-based military-industrial establishment. It gives a sympathetic, but far from uncritical, look at Kennedy and what led up to what happened.

If the US got a President attempting to remove the power from the rich, I expect the same would happen.
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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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Image
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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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FranTastic444 wrote:Image
Ha! Ha! HA! :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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MAG(B)A.
Where do I get one?!

The main problem with that, however, is that coincident with Reagan, the UK got Margaret Thatcher. I'll let our friends in the UK comment on that one, but I suspect our countries were placed on similar paths at that point in time.
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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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Jim wrote:If the US got a President attempting to remove the power from the rich, I expect the same would happen.
That is entirely likely the only thing that keeps the current president in line.
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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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My favorite variation on that is "Make America Not Embarrassing Again."

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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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Interesting, and mostly fair considering the source, perspective on Trump and spoken language.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phsU1vVHOQI
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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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Is Donald Trump dyslexic?

I'm not asking this question to insult - many outstanding and successful people have worked through learning disabilities. I ask because I think we should all be concerned for the implications to his leadership ability. Too, I ask as simple human compassion for a fellow man. But it is a significant factor for any President. So please note the video link, and indulge my personal conjecture on the topic.

Trump is the product of an era when a learning disability earned a young person the stigma of "stupid." Now, I don't think Trump is "stupid," even if we could correctly assign the term to human behavior. No, far from it. I have known people who bluffed their way through college with precious little time spent in academic pursuit; they weren't stupid, just hamstrung by things not of their own making, but able to emulate "success," at least on record. I do, however, think he is ignorant. Ignorance, like limited reasoning ability, is foremost a product of environment, and not so much inherent.

I do wonder if Trump's self-defensive outbursts, his apparent inability to accept and tolerate criticism defensibly and confidently, are part of a coping mechanism, now imprinted in his thinking process, like the engraving upon a statue. I wonder if his sudden development of "bone spurs" to avoid military conscription, despite a collegiate career of active running sports, was really to dodge the possibility of being deployed to Viet Nam, his detractors claim, or whether he actually just feared the secret of his reading problems becoming documented information in a DOD file. Did he have to decide whether, if he was to be deemed "unfit for service," a physical deficiency was preferable to a deficiency in the skills he pretended to hold? I wonder if his oft-repeated assertions of having been "a very bright student who did very well" and "a stable genius," which he still apparently feels the need to make, despite his being a half-century beyond college, are remnants of that defensive need, and perhaps inextricable from his own self-image? Too, the (perhaps dubious) testimony of Michael Cohen to Congress suggests that one of Trump's worst fears was the revelation of his academic records.

We know Trump is the product of a power and wealth-driven father, and a cool, distant mother. Certainly his father's pressure - the relentless drive to make a name, to be a big man in real estate - was extremely difficult to escape. It may have been, at least partly, that same pressure that propelled his older brother, Fred Trump Jr., to an early death from alcohol. I suspect that old man Fred Trump really "did a number" on his sons, emotionally and mentally. I can only imagine how Donald may have had to hide his "failings" from the eyes of the world, lest he be labeled "weak" by the man he most sought to please. In addition to his thin-skinned character, that could explain a lot about his viciousness and vindictiveness today.

But I digress. The issue is whether Donald trump's apparent reading skill level poses a risk for the country. We can pretend that he doesn't need to read, that he is surrounded by people who can do the reading for him. But we innately know that analogy is just a shallow apology. There is a famous quote "A leader is a reader," often attributed to the evangelical minister/author John Maxwell, although I first heard the quote used by Bill Britt years before Maxwell's 'fifteen minutes' began. So I suspect it was already well-known before Britt adopted it as a mantra. To me, this means, in the case of Trump, that by his advanced age, his leadership skills were either developed appropriately already, or they would never be developed.

Some claim his business success points to leadership ability. But we know his success was largely based on his experience in business with his father, i.e. learned as a family value, and a product of "hucksterism", the use of personality to promote his ventures. That made him moderately successful in NYC real estate, an environment with which he was familiar, and in Reality TV, a phenomenon where his personality could rule the day. Being a successful POTUS, however, has an entirely different set of requirements.

Too, we know that his illusion of success was self-promoted with many falsehoods, like his ever being a billionaire. He apparently hoodwinked Forbes Magazine into declaring him one. And even his "humble beginnings" story of receiving a "small, million-dollar loan" from his father (as if all families in the US could easily loan their kids a million bucks), which was partly true, except for the lie of omission, because a few years later he essentially took the real estate business from his aged father, which, after family settlement, was estimated to have been worth somewhere between three and four hundred million dollars - and then "successfully" parlayed that sum into multiple bankruptcies. At any juncture Trump attempted to diversify his enterprises, i.e. left his comfort zone of NYC real estate, he quickly became "out of his league," and sans the reading ability necessary to learn, build, and manage a new business, he failed. The fact that Trump could finagle and cajole bankers into continuing issuing credit is not hard to understand. No banker, having been schmoozed into making unsound loans, wants to appear to have made a faulty deal, so they simply try to run out the clock by extending additional credit with the feeble hope that somehow the borrower will make good. They essentially become parties to the scam, but reserve plausible deniability. I have seen this many times among very big farm operations - the borrower becomes "too big to be allowed to fail" because the fate of a local bank is tied to his success.

I don't believe a treatable LD has to be an impediment to anyone's career or to even high-level public service, but a man's denial, concealment, and/or the total lack of self-awareness, coupled with the apparent inability to acknowledge one's significant limitations, is clearly a danger to the country. We may be able to understand and live with a President with an overcome (-able) impairment, as long as the citizens, and his most important staff, and the members of Congress, were allowed to adjust expectations and reactions based on honesty and transparency. But to hide the fact what we have is a state of concealment, perhaps denial - IMPO, pathological denial - and that is a serious threat to the country and the planet. Trump's unproductive and self-serving "play to the base" political strategy suggests that protecting his own twisted self-image is more important to him than leadership, accomplishment, or even his own historical legacy as a President.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd79UsXSLWg
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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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Just when you thought "The Pirates of Penzance" couldn't be modernized...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-LTRwZb35A
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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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Brilliant! :-)
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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... 8oq79VWSYw

If this doesn't trouble Trump supporters enough to make them see the wanton corruption they elected, nothing ever will.
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Re: "POLY TICKS" all things political

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OK, the astute have already noticed that this particular thread got locked, and I was the one who drew the short straw to explain it.

All three of the moderation staff have now chimed in, and we're in fairly strong agreement that locking the thing was the right thing to do since the topic at hand is so inflammatory that nobody can keep control. We gave it a good shot, but sooner or later these sorts of things eventually spiral out of control and need to get shut down before the level of toxicity pollutes the useful things.

Perhaps in a few years, things might calm down enough to try another experiment like this one, but now is not the time to continue an experiment that has quite clearly failed. It's a sorry comment, but that's the way it looks from here. The Brexit thread may be next unless plenty of restraint is showed. These 50/50 fights look to be entirely intractable, which is a sorry commentary on human nature in the 21st Century so far.
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