War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Truth isn’t truth. - really?

[fromderinside]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/...-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

Paul Krugman makes a hammer of a weak Giuliani assertion. Isn't it a couple steps into woo woo land to say that Giuliani's Truth is not Truth, he said, she said, is the same as the theme of Orwell's 1984?

Sure it looks like Guiliana jumped in to deep shit when he headlined The Truth is not the Truth. But, when he supplied context and then supplied ways that Truth can be established by association with patterns or by accumulating evidence it kind of takes the steam out of the 1984 banner. Presidential Council has spent 30 hours reciting his impressions of Trump involvement in critical activities in the Russian involvement in US elections. I think Giuliani is right when one takes in to account his scrubbing of his initial oral fart.

You may think differently. Is Trump actually practicing disinformation, east is west, methods? Or is he just a half informed bloviator shouting at the top of his lungs to keep attention on his own damn self.

Are democrats speakers now embellishing a theme, an exaggeration, making incompetence look as if intentional just because the Russians really did stick us with a bunch of BS during the last election cycle. I'm not buying the connection. TRump and friends are way too stupid to pull that off. Sure they want money from Oligarchs so they talk up Brave shirtless Putin. Looks like a lot of in your face to me.

I think we elected a stiff and we are on our way to correcting it without impeachment. I'm pretty sure a strong majority got the message. I'm afraid the involvement of Russia in elections is going to be trampled under our political anger with those who managed to dupe us without any need for Russian polishing.

Is it really true that:

..... did this happen to the whole Republican Party? And it is effectively the whole party: There is no serious G.O.P. opposition to Trump or his vision. Why did the party’s belief in objective reality collapse so suddenly and completely?

Or is it more that the Republicans are scared shitless that they are about to lose power, have been taken over by a shyster, a reality player, and are marching down to almost certain defeat so they are just paralyzed by that fear.

 

[Underseer]

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Seems appropos

 

[ideologyhunter]

What is it about the right that they have this obstinate, sheeplike propensity to believe myths, conspiracies, deranged fantasies -- and that they absolutely cannot figure out when they are being lied to? Go ahead, tell me that there's a contingent on the left that equals this. That we've had our Vince Foster myth, our Whitewater, Benghazi, pedophile-ring-in-a-pizzeria moments? That we've had anything like Q-Anon or Birtherism or "alternate facts."

 

[Sarpedon]

The closest thing I can think of is vaccination panic, which affects both sides. No comparison on the volume or strangeness to the Right wing conspiracy machine.

 

[whollygoats]

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

It doesn't do us any favours when people twist or over exploit things that Trump and his cronies say, when there are plenty of things they say outright and that they do that are horrendous and fly under the radar due to a boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome.

It is clear what Rudy meant. He meant that the "truth" that comes out in court is never the actual Truth, nor is your memory of an event the actual Truth of what happened. Memories are not perfect and the "truth" that solidifies in a court room is created by lawyers, judges, and juries by piecing together what different witnesses way (often who conflict even without any dishonesty on anyone's part). Add to this that people misspeak or get words interpreted not how they meant (you can see a lot of that happening right here on this forum). Trump tells plenty of transparent lies, and those are what we should be using against him, if we want to play gotcha and make it stick.

Rudy obviously could have chosen better words than "truth is not truth", and if you watch the clip where he said it, you can see him realizing that he misspoke. That people focus on this sort of thing instead of on what really matters is alarming.

Another great example of this is as Noam Chomsky pointed out on Democracy Now about the Russia obsession with the Democrats. Politics supersedes reason and we all lose as a result.

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/27/noam_chomsky_on_mass_media_obsession

So, take, say, the huge issue of interference in our pristine elections. Did the Russians interfere in our elections? An issue of overwhelming concern in the media. I mean, in most of the world, that’s almost a joke. First of all, if you’re interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Israeli intervention in U.S. elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies—what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015. Did Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of Congress trying to—calling on them to reverse U.S. policy, without even informing the president? And that’s just a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence. So if you happen to be interested in influence of—foreign influence on elections, there are places to look. But even that is a joke.

I mean, one of the most elementary principles of a functioning democracy is that elected representatives should be responsive to those who elected them. There’s nothing more elementary than that. But we know very well that that is simply not the case in the United States. There’s ample literature in mainstream academic political science simply comparing voters’ attitudes with the policies pursued by their representatives, and it shows that for a large majority of the population, they’re basically disenfranchised. Their own representatives pay no attention to their voices. They listen to the voices of the famous 1 percent—the rich and the powerful, the corporate sector. The elections—Tom Ferguson’s stellar work has demonstrated, very conclusively, that for a long period, way back, U.S. elections have been pretty much bought. You can predict the outcome of a presidential or congressional election with remarkable precision by simply looking at campaign spending. That’s only one part of it. Lobbyists practically write legislation in congressional offices. In massive ways, the concentrated private capital, corporate sector, super wealth, intervene in our elections, massively, overwhelmingly, to the extent that the most elementary principles of democracy are undermined. Now, of course, all that is technically legal, but that tells you something about the way the society functions. So, if you’re concerned with our elections and how they operate and how they relate to what would happen in a democratic society, taking a look at Russian hacking is absolutely the wrong place to look. Well, you see occasionally some attention to these matters in the media, but very minor as compared with the extremely marginal question of Russian hacking.

And I think we find this on issue after issue, also on issues on which what Trump says, for whatever reason, is not unreasonable. So, he’s perfectly right when he says we should have better relations with Russia. Being dragged through the mud for that is outlandish, makes—Russia shouldn’t refuse to deal with the United States because the U.S. carried out the worst crime of the century in the invasion of Iraq, much worse than anything Russia has done. But they shouldn’t refuse to deal with us for that reason, and we shouldn’t refuse to deal with them for whatever infractions they may have carried out, which certainly exist. This is just absurd. We have to move towards better—right at the Russian border, there are very extreme tensions, that could blow up anytime and lead to what would in fact be a terminal nuclear war, terminal for the species and life on Earth. We’re very close to that. Now, we could ask why. First of all, we should do things to ameliorate it. Secondly, we should ask why. Well, it’s because NATO expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in violation of verbal promises to Mikhail Gorbachev, mostly under Clinton, partly under first Bush, then Clinton expanded right to the Russian border, expanded further under Obama. The U.S. has offered to bring Ukraine into NATO. That’s the kind of a heartland of Russian geostrategic concerns. So, yes, there’s tensions at the Russian border—and not, notice, at the Mexican border. Well, those are all issues that should be of primary concern. The fate of—the fate of organized human society, even of the survival of the species, depends on this. How much attention is given to these things as compared with, you know, whether Trump lied about something? I think those seem to me the fundamental criticisms of the media.

PS - I know its my own failing, but I can't stand to listen to this man's voice. But his actual words are excellent.

 

[laughing dog]

It doesn't do us any favours when people twist or over exploit things that Trump and his cronies say, when there are plenty of things they say outright and that they do that are horrendous and fly under the radar due to a boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome.

It is clear what Rudy meant. He meant that the "truth" that comes out in court is never the actual Truth, nor is your memory of an event the actual Truth of what happened. Memories are not perfect and the "truth" that solidifies in a court room is created by lawyers, judges, and juries by piecing together what different witnesses way (often who conflict even without any dishonesty on anyone's part). Add to this that people misspeak or get words interpreted not how they meant (you can see a lot of that happening right here on this forum). Trump tells plenty of transparent lies, and those are what we should be using against him, if we want to play gotcha and make it stick.

Rudy obviously could have chosen better words than "truth is not truth", and if you watch the clip where he said it, you can see him realizing that he misspoke. That people focus on this sort of thing instead of on what really matters is alarming.

What I find alarming is the lengths that people will go to spin what Trump or one of his spin doctors "actually meant".

 

[ZiprHead]

 

[Horatio Parker]

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Seems appropos

I like Marx's version: who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes? (Groucho)

 

[fromderinside]

PS - I know its my own failing, but I can't stand to listen to this man's voice. But his actual words are excellent.

Excellent words don't make them accurate words or even useful words. Better relations with Russia costs democratic political capital. Yeah even if the Ukraine is completely corrupt, is dominated by racists and tribalists, it is forging a path to reaproachmont with western Europe whereas Russia is all of that and a bad state actor as well. It wasn't Ukraine that invaded Russia. It wasn't Ukraine that annexed a region away on pretext of speaking language dominance.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

We should always be prepared so as never to err to believe that what I see as white is black, if the hierarchic Church defines it thus.
- Ignatius Loyoloa

Whatever Sean Insanity says is true.