Even now if Alaska weren't in the way Putin would probably be ****ing with islands and coastal waters off of the NW corner of Canada.

Still, I don't mind too much if they tell us we're being dicks and they aren't going to help invade Yemen or Iran.

Maybe a little dramatic, but it's pretty f-ing important. The things about Trump that offend me the most are his assaults on the institutions and processes (open press, tolerance for dissent, independent courts, free elections, etc.) that are essential to decency and fairness in a free democratic society.

I haven't. Coincidentally I'm going to Simi today. Maybe I'll stop by.

Can't imagine anybody in Trump's cabinet having the balls or the confidence in their own competence and knowledge to go against him the way C. Everett Koop went against Reagan and the rest of his cabinet on the AIDS issue in the 1980s

I don't mind doxxing him, **** him, but there's definitely something real weird about the reporter inserting himself into the story as essentially a blackmailer, keeping the threat of doxxing out there and making him write apologies and ****.

That's ****ed up, that's not the role of a journalist.

Markksman arguably could make the same criticism of Europe. There definitely have been times when Europe has been happy enough for the U.S. to be the lightning rod on military issues because it was easier for them politically to play both sides.

But microbet is also correct. That Canada shares a border with the U.S. doesn't preclude Canada or Canadians from offering legitimate criticisms of U.S. foreign policy.

No one gives a shot about impolitic tweets. FFS, did the media learn nothing from 2016? Focus on healthcare.

It's really worth a visit, if only to tour the decommissioned Air Force One.

Apparently that's not what CNN is saying they did, though the wording in their article is pretty explicit.

Greenwald's article on it pretty well covers it from the various angles and I co-sign everything he says:

https://theintercept.com/2017/07/05/...f-reddit-user/

Erosion of democracy and institutions is 2900x more important than a wrestling tweet, but that's not the issue. How do you get people to take it seriously? I've had some insane conversations with lots of Democrats who never gave a **** no matter how many times I told them about serious serious vows Trump has been breaking.

But these same people come up to me out of the blue to talk about scoops of ice cream and wrestling memes.

This is all reasonable and correct. I was wrong, I just hate the idea that online there is a huge community running a loosely coordinated campaign of harassment against women, Jews, and people of color and not only is there absolutely no recourse, when the individuals get found out there's little that cam be done that doesn't make them look like the victim.

Imagine someone went into a coma in say 2015 and woke up today.

And you had to explain that the media story du jour today was that a cable network has ham-handedly threatened a Reddit user, Han*******Solo, due to the President of the United States posting a .gif that Han*******Solo created of Donald Trump (now the President) beating up Vince McMahon with a CNN logo over his face. And how ostensibly this is worrisome because it has made the media fearful of violence targeted against them. And presumably CNN was able to threaten Han*******Solo into apologizing because he might be doxxxed and embarrassed due to his frequent anti-Semitic posts littered around Reddit.

Life comes at you fast, is what I'm saying. 2017 man. What a country we have here.

They did. Stupid Trump tweets & statements = ratings.

I got a link to some of that guys awful posts on reddit. Gives you a full picture of who CNN was going after. Obv really awful stuff NSFW, its all text posts though. Not sure about 2+2 rules for this kinda thing so lemme know if I should remove links.

http://i.imgur com/w3Z7Yac.jpg
https://i.imgur com/XpNyS3v.png

One of the things that we should be concerned about the very valid (imo) view of commentators and academics is that democracy and transparency are backsliding in many places. There's obvious examples like Russia, like Turkey, like the US. But even in Western Europe and South Korea, far-right populist parties have been ascendant or made some gains (like Brexit). And authoritarianism and illiberal tactics like repression of the press Trump is symbolic of processes happening everywhere. Including the US, even pre-Trump, it's not like the press was thriving and vibrant. Like, we're not even 15 years removed from the US pre-emptively invading a country based on lies, destroying the region, installing a torture regime. Much of which the press abetted. It's not like transparency was ascendant and universally respected as a norm. We paid lip service to it, but critics have pointed out how the US has been backsliding in those areas for some time. The same with elections; lots of events have been percolating and undermining fairness and voter participation that have been long in gestation and pre-date Trump.

As contemporaries living through it, it's likely we miss the bigger picture sometimes. I suspect historians long from now may see this period as an unwinding of the norms we cherish -- but dating back quite far from today. Perhaps decades. Which isn't to say we can't rally and restore them. But it's way more than Trump. For me, personally, right now -- I think Trump is a manifestation of stuff I long-recognized -- namely that huge amounts of people really actually despise the norms we cherish, or at the very least place no value on -- but assumed we had control of. Assumed there was a deeper consensus. That's what Trump is to me: he broke the false consensus we enjoyed.

In the end, as you say, Trump expresses many of the worst attributes of a potential future in worrying ways. But I maintain he is still symbolic of changes long-brewing, of changes we see happening elsewhere in the world. Changes we've seen developing here in the US for a long time if we employ even light scrutiny. That speaks to how illiberal tendencies have emerged, what's behind them, and how to solve it: Trump is a follower, not a leader. He's seizing on collective bad impulses, on groundwork being laid for a long time. Trump is just a very crude implementation of long-simmering tendencies and trends.

Is this dude legit? Anyone know?

Yeah, he nailed it.

Pretty sure this guy is a clown.

i think basically all of the attacks on CNN from trump and his band of followers are completely baseless and absurd, but greenwald's critique here about the colossally terrible way they handled this whole hansolo thing is 100% spot on

Perhaps 10 years from now when you visit the Trump Presidential Library located in Trump Park (formerly Central Park) in Manhattan, you can tell us about how much you underestimated Trump's capabilities too.

All true. The proper level of alarm depends in part on whether you view these trends as inherently cyclical. They may be, at least in part. But it seems quite reckless to rely on the invisible hand of cyclicality to tamp down authoritarianism and restore the topsoil to democracy.

To be clear, people should be alarmed. I suspect this is not cyclical at all. Hard to say. I personally do not count on time to sort this out. I just think the alarm should be only somewhat at Trump specifically.

Granted, there's much to fear when an unhinged idiot wields so many nuclear weapons. But, I think most of the worry should be more systemic in scope. Those illiberal tendencies is the cancer; Trump is merely a tumor. The things that we don't like about Trump (the assaults on the institutions and processes) are coming from many directions for far longer than Trump has been present on the political scene. Trump hitched himself to a bandwagon chugging along in a parade.

Trump won't be nearly as good as Putin when it comes to consolidating power like he'd need to do for this fantasy to happen.

lmao @ posting Claude Taylor bull****

i'm sure those sealed indictments are coming down any day now

He and Mensch are pretty much Kresskin and Daughter of Kresskin at this point. My favorite thing about both of them is how news breaks and then they scramble to find some vague tweet of theirs from two months ago and then claim that today's news confirms their reporting from back then.

CNN Reporter: Boss, we just broke the biggest story in the history of news reporting. Ever. In the entire world.

Managing Editor: Great job, sport! That'll knock Ol' Bob Woodward down a peg.

Reporter: Thanks boss! I've got most of it written up already, and I'll have a draft of the story ready for editing within the hour!

ME: Hold your horses there champ!

R: What do you mean?

ME: We're not going to run this story, not yet.

R: What?

ME: What we're going to do instead is leak the key bits, out of context, to a random on twitter. That way it might, as we say in the business, "go viral."

R: But it's the biggest story in the history of news. Literally everyone will spend the next year obsessing about it. Why do we care about a random on twitter?

ME: You may be a great reporter tiger, but you've got an awful lot to learn about the news business. An awful lot to learn.

/scene