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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun May 28, 2017 5:14 pm 
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Very few will be loyal to Trump in their heart. Most what he gets will be opportunists, who are good at pretending loyalty. So if enough of them believe he will go down, and there is an opportunity for a career without him, they will drop him and leave the sinking ship.

Maybe his family will stick with him, but who else has a motivation to stick with the gold-ass*, once it stops laying golden eggs.

* I'd consider the biological less correct metaphor to be overall better fitting here.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun May 28, 2017 9:35 pm 
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Trump chooses people who are underqualified for their positions so they are stuck being loyal to him because without him, they'd have nothing. He's done this for his entire career. That's why so many of his staff have no experience in government. Many of them would not survive a cabinet shake-up under a Pence administration.

But probably, most of them would be happy to go back to their careers in the business sector if they thought that was better for their reputations than staying on a sinking ship. We shall see.

And it appears that Trump really pissed off Angela Merkel on his little jaunt abroad. It's difficult to say how much Trump could really damage relations with Europe. The US and Europe are so intertwined militarily and economically that it would be quite difficult for even the most idiot president to do major damage to the alliance.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue May 30, 2017 11:52 am 
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Apparently he got out-manned during a handshake with a Frenchman... Well played Monsieur Macron, well played.

He also manhandled the Montenegran PM who downplayed it but his countrymen are less than amused.

Also, berating 23 NATO heads of state for their lack of defense spending... when they're standing right there in a show of unity... might not be taken so well by those heathen foreigners. And refusing to clarify his support for one of the most important clauses of the NATO treaties - you know, the one that says if somebody attacks you, we'll attack them? The whole reason NATO exists, you know?

By and large, though, the American public just goes *yawn* and says "yeah, he's a jackass but his jackassery might get us some stuff we want" not realizing that antagonizing Europeans might not be an effective way to get what you want.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Jun 01, 2017 8:45 pm 
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So, the Paris accord. Professional Republicans are paid by oil and coal men (like Tillerson and the Koch brothers) to hate it, moderates and liberals like it, Obama likes it, and, well, France. Got to go.

It's occurred to me that for all intents and purposes the Grand Old Party of Satan is being led by a servant of Lolth (even if he is nominally male). It's nice that Trump's driving them nuts; but the price the rest of us are going to pay for decades to come isn't going away, just going down.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Jun 01, 2017 9:52 pm 
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At least half of the GOP contenders would have done the same thing if they had gotten the nomination instead of Trump. A few of them might've been a bit more diplomatic and undermined the Paris agreement from the inside instead of rejecting it outright. But the law of averages says the US can be expected to do precisely jack about climate change at least half the time.

Thanks, America.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jun 05, 2017 12:41 pm 
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Remember Trump's NATO speech last month that really pissed Europe off because he didn't bother to mention US commitment to Article 5, the bit of NATO that says that NATO will defend any member of NATO that gets attacked, which is the entire point of NATO?

It turns out that Trump did that without telling his own national security advisers. H.R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson and James Mattis originally wrote Article 5 into Trump's speech, then he gets on a plane, and by the time he reaches that podium in Brussels, somebody, possibly Trump himself but more likely Steve Miller or Bannon, has deleted that part. To troll Europe. Or the national security advisers. The national security team only found out about it on television.

AAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jun 05, 2017 5:46 pm 
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Lets face it, a solid minority at minimum of the countries that signed the Paris accords will wait for whenever the deadlines are in the agreement and basically go "Oh, well, we didn't end up doing that stuff. So sue us."

I think most people expected a GOP majority to say exactly what Trump did, albeit in a more diplomatic and organized way. It's NIMBY writ large, which the American public never seems to hold anyone accountable for. It's just like the US freezing taking in Syrian refugees while dropping bombs in the very country they want people to stop running away from.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2017 2:10 am 
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I don't think it's that the other countries won't do anything- they will*- but you can't forget we are the world's worst polluter. So we have to do much more than the rest of the signatories, which is why this is so awful.

*Why would you agree to a non-binding resolution if you weren't going to abide by it anyway?

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2017 5:26 am 
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Technically, China surpassed the US as the world's biggest carbon emitter a couple years back, but they've got 4 times as many people. I think all the other countries are going to try to varying degrees, but they'll end up achieving less than they promised. That's how it always goes. The US might still reduce its emissions in spite of itself because fracking is still going to replace coal and renewables will keep getting cheaper. It just won't do it to as great a degree.

Anyway, this article says what I have suspected for a while. Democracy is not rational. Voters generally don't vote based on policy preferences. People's policy preferences will shift on a dime in order to align with their party's views. Republicans were for health care mandates before they were against them. They were against Russia before they were for Russia. Democrats stopped caring about drone strikes when Obama was in office. They claimed experience in government didn't matter when the relatively green Obama was on the ballot but later on said it was so very important when it was Clinton vs. Trump. Nor do they really vote based on their feelings about the incumbent's performance. That too is malleable to a certain extent. Business confidence has skyrocketed since Trump got elected in large part because business owners lean Republican. They vote based on identity. They choose the politician who feels most like "one of us" and they can easily be pushed into stronger tribalism if they feel their identity is threatened.

Quote:
During the worst of Northern Ireland “Troubles,” when tensions between Catholics and Protestants were at their height, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney told of a visitor to the region who was asked whether he was Protestant or Catholic. The man replied that he was an atheist.

“Yes, yes, we understand,” his hosts said. “But are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?”

Donald Trump might have been, in political if not religious terms, an atheist, but he was clearly a Republican atheist. He knew which side he was on, even if he didn’t believe what they believed. And that was enough. That was more than enough. Tribes exist to fight common enemies.

Every stupid, false, ignorant Trump tweet serves to tell his supporters that he loathes the same people they loathe. He pisses off people who value things like "facts" and "logic" and thereby exposes them as "snooty coastal elites who we love to hate". Hillary Clinton lost because her tribe didn't show up in the right places. She wasn't inspiring enough to them.

Quote:
There are a few findings that rocked my understanding of politics, and one of them came from political scientist Corwin Smidt. Looking at decades of election data, he found that self-described independent voters today are more loyal to a single party than voters who described themselves as “strong partisans” were in the 1970s. This bears repeating: The people who say they’re free from either party today are more partisan in their voting habits than the people who said they were strong loyalists of a single party in the ’70s.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2017 11:35 am 
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Dodger77 wrote:
*Why would you agree to a non-binding resolution if you weren't going to abide by it anyway?


Lots of possible reasons. If you know that the only teeth to this agreement was "shaming" the offender, why not sign it then do whatever you wanted anyways? You get to stand in front of the cameras and look all "environmental" for the proles and then turn around and do the bidding of your corporate masters anyways. Win-Win!

Also, the people in power in many of these countries will change over the course of the agreement, leading to a "WE didn't sign that, the other party we hate did!" resistance to abiding by the terms of the deal. Which is pretty much what's going on here between Obama and Trump.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2017 1:21 am 
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...you know, in some countries, different political parties all at least claim to be trying to do what's best for the country, even if they differ on their approach to the problem. Not just reflexively doing the opposite of what the other party does just because.

And it's not easy to find a justification for just dropping the Paris accords.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2017 9:58 am 
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Let me tell you a little story... one that probably almost nobody outside of Canada even knows about...

In the 80s, the Canadian Navy started to look for a replacement for their CH-124 Sea King helicopters. They still had quite a few hours left on the airframes, but they realized they needed a bigger aircraft, with better anti-submarine warfare capabilities. In 1986 they asked for bids, and two of the helicopters probably fit the bill - the Sikorsky SH-60 (that's what the US navy, who uses a metric ton of these, call them) and the EH-101 Merlin.

The Conservative government at the time decided to buy these helicopters and allotted money to the project a few years later. It was a lot of money - C$ 4.4 billion - (that's a lot of our Monopoly colored money!) and was slightly controversial. In the meantime, the Sea Kings got older, and more out of date, and required more and more dollars to keep in the air. They also started crashing with unfortunate regularity. The crew death toll began to rise.

In 1993, a new government came into power. Seeing an opportunity to embarrass the Conservatives during the election, the Liberal party had made the Merlins a political football - a "Cadillac" purchase which they promised to cancel if elected. They were elected, they did kill the program dead. $500M down the drain in cancellation fees.

Fast forward... 10 years. Sea Kings falling from the sky. Sea Kings unable to fly at all due to critical parts shortages and requiring ludicrous amounts of repairs to get into the air at all. Pilots and crews being put at risk because of a political sideshow. The Liberal government, after a leadership change, finally get around to putting out bids for the new helicopters. In the view of many, myself included, they deliberately wrote the bid requirements to exclude the EH101, which by now has seen widespread use throughout the navies of NATO powers in the exact role Canada wanted to use them in. Because it would probably be embarrassing to them to have the military ask for the same helo again...

So the government decides in 2004 that the aircraft for them is the S-92 Superhawk. Never mind that NOBODY else at the time used the military version of this helicopter, and a bunch of the R&D costs were therefore to be borne by the Canadian government. Add some delays as Sikorsky tries to iron out wrinkles in their military version... so the helicopters are due for delivery... sometime in 2018... probably...

And the Sea Kings are still in active service. More than 30 years after their replacement process started. And more than 20 years after the US Navy started removing their Sea Kings from service. Welcome to political football, Canadian style.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2017 10:12 am 
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So, I sort of missed putting in the point to that... Yes, even in relatively "polite, civilized" countries, this Us vs Them nonsense is all to often the norm.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2017 11:13 am 
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What you were getting at was pretty clear.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2017 12:18 pm 
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Anecdotal, but Obamacare enrollees in Kentucky are disappointed with the Republican health care bill but not enough to make them stop voting Republican. They rationalize it. They think their Congresscritter must have voted for the repeal for a good reason. Perhaps he did it to save jobs or reduce the deficit. Oh well. They'll still vote Republican next time. Even if they lose their own insurance. Because we're Republicans so we need to trust them. It's all a turn-out game at this point. Perhaps they'll get so disappointed they won't be motivated to vote.

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