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[Silverthrone]

it has to be said tho that minor things have been blown out of proportion by the presses in one of the largest smear campaigns the free world ever witnessed, creating this situation where actual, major issues with Trump persona are drown in the noise.

Like have you seen the video proof of Trump crowd? there's a big jump if you look at the clock from before to after the inauguration. Trump couldn't had as many viewers as Obama, that's for sure*, but it doesn't help proving a point constantly trying to manipulate raw data into a narrative. And the more they do, the worse it'll get.

What I don't understand is that they don't need to do that, they have enough bad stuff as it is against him.


* being friday vs sunday, being in a leftist city, rioters scaring people, area being blocked off, Trump being unpopular, what have you, there's no chance Trump could have had more.

Well, yes. The major news and media networks have been particularly idiotic about this whole business, and one could never accuse them of handling this well. I suppose that is another side of the coin; responding to the TrumpLife^TM phenomenon by panicking and attemting to scuttle him through poor reporting. While "alternative facts" is a particularly unhealthy piece of nonsense that ought to be called out in no uncertain terms, the weird, boasting glee that his inauguration attendance was smaller than Obama's was simply unworthy.

Of course, there is no united, coordinated effort amongst the media networks to destroy Trump, by surgical manipulation and fictional reporting. If there was, I imagine it would have been far less incompetent. There is a general anti-Trump alignment, but it is terribly ineffective. They could have done far more damage to Trump's campaign by simply doing what they should as reporters, rather than scurrying for any opportunity to inflate an incident and manufacture a nice scandal.

[Sergarr]

it has to be said tho that minor things have been blown out of proportion by the presses in one of the largest smear campaigns the free world ever witnessed, creating this situation where actual, major issues with Trump persona are drown in the noise.

Like have you seen the video proof of Trump crowd? there's a big jump if you look at the clock from before to after the inauguration. Trump couldn't had as many viewers as Obama, that's for sure*, but it doesn't help proving a point constantly trying to manipulate raw data into a narrative. And the more they do, the worse it'll get.

What I don't understand is that they don't need to do that, they have enough bad stuff as it is against him.


* being friday vs sunday, being in a leftist city, rioters scaring people, area being blocked off, Trump being unpopular, what have you, there's no chance Trump could have had more.

Modern media runs almost entirely on sensationalism, especially since the advent of social media. Giving out flawed information, but fast, is rewarded much, much more than giving out accurate and precise one, fact-checking it thoroughly before publishing, but a day or two later. As a part of this sensationalism media craze and the reduced time to think things through, both for the media itself and for the consumers/readers, logic-based reasoning gives place to emotion-based reasoning, and emotion-based reasoning is extremely poor at discriminating between things that are actually important and things that are, frankly, not.

Also, I've watched the inauguration speech live on ABCNews's YouTube mirror, and the size of the crowds looked pretty similar to the photos that I've seen given as proof of media's claims about the size of the crowd. Not that anecdotal evidence counts for much...

[PTTG??]

The inaugural crowd thing is entirely on Trump. He and his administration started attacking estimates of the crowd size with completely fabricated statistics. I agree, however, that his initial attacks on reason and sanity were a feint quite possibly designed to obscure the absurdities that have been coming rapidly every day since.

[McTraveller]

Hey look, we've rediscovered the one major flaw in using popular elections for leaders: a person's popularity doesn't have anything to do with what kind of leader they are/will be but only about how popular they are!

[PTTG??]

Hey look, we've rediscovered the one major flaw in using popular elections for leaders: a person's popularity doesn't have anything to do with what kind of leader they are/will be but only about how popular they are!

Only a small fraction of the population voted for Trump. Most people didn't vote... a misguided but forgivable sin considering the offensive pungency of both candidates. If the parties had been healthy, democracy would have worked.

The problem with the parties, of course, is naked oligarchy and nepotism.

[Frumple]

They could have done far more damage to Trump's campaign by simply doing what they should as reporters, rather than scurrying for any opportunity to inflate an incident and manufacture a nice scandal.

Pretty damn doubtful, that. Over the course of the last year the fourth estate did, at one point or another, just about everything they should have as a reporter. It's one of the most screwed up parts of the last year or two's media cycle, that just about friggin' everything involved had the information needed to figure things out (truth, relevance, etc., etc.) just kinda' out there and barely anyone could seem to notice, particularly for more than a day or two.

Functionally no one gave a flying fuck about it. Folks didn't care about the criminal actions and legal history, about the business incompetence and malfeasance, about the ethical character outside of the couple of points of it that got attention, and so on and so forth. So the bastard news venues decided to give their viewers what they did care about, and every last bit of it was flooded with bullshit. FTFE, yes, but they only get part of that blame. A lot of what they did was just because they were responding to what the population was signaling they wanted.

Thinking that if somehow the news just put out proper investigative journalism, it'd make the difference, flies in the face of the last while's reality. When they do, it gets ignored or barely acknowledged, and half the time folks immediately flock to a blatantly fabricated bullshit rebuttal, about as much just because it's there as anything. It's another one of those points where it'd either take something draconian or a internal shift in their viewer base before it changes. People don't want news, they want a show, and until that stops -- or at least reigns its bloody self in -- they're going to get a show more than they get news and we're all going to get fucked by it.

[McTraveller]

Hey look, we've rediscovered the one major flaw in using popular elections for leaders: a person's popularity doesn't have anything to do with what kind of leader they are/will be but only about how popular they are!

Only a small fraction of the population voted for Trump. Most people didn't vote... a misguided but forgivable sin considering the offensive pungency of both candidates. If the parties had been healthy, democracy would have worked.

The problem with the parties, of course, is naked oligarchy and nepotism.

I'm not sure how that is a failure of democracy.  That is - you can't say "democracy didn't work" - because it did exactly the only thing that democracy is capable of: choosing something based on the votes of the people - and note that 'abstain' is actually a vote.

Low voter turnout isn't a failure of democracy - it's a failure of the overall society to impart the fact that being involved actually matters and the character and quality of your leaders matters*.  It's not "the party's fault" that the party doesn't field a good leader - it's the people's fault (at least in an environment where the people have the say; in a system where violence or might chooses, then I suppose the people have a more valid complaint).

EDIT* It doesn't help that humans are odd creatures and can be convinced not to vote by abusive personalities, or through policies that make it difficult to vote, etc.  At least in the US, yes, it might be hard to vote, but it's never IMPOSSIBLE - and if things mattered enough, people would just take the time out of their day to vote, potential job loss be damned, because they really want a good leader.  But most people are unwilling to experience immediate pain for potential future reward - especially when they themselves may not even experience the potential reward.  And that is what it would take to fix things.

[PTTG??]

Hey look, we've rediscovered the one major flaw in using popular elections for leaders: a person's popularity doesn't have anything to do with what kind of leader they are/will be but only about how popular they are!

Only a small fraction of the population voted for Trump. Most people didn't vote... a misguided but forgivable sin considering the offensive pungency of both candidates. If the parties had been healthy, democracy would have worked.

The problem with the parties, of course, is naked oligarchy and nepotism.

I'm not sure how that is a failure of democracy.  That is - you can't say "democracy didn't work" - because it did exactly the only thing that democracy is capable of: choosing something based on the votes of the people - and note that 'abstain' is actually a vote.

Low voter turnout isn't a failure of democracy - it's a failure of the overall society to impart the fact that being involved actually matters and the character and quality of your leaders matters.  It's not "the party's fault" that the party doesn't field a good leader - it's the people's fault (at least in an environment where the people have the say; in a system where violence or might chooses, then I suppose the people have a more valid complaint).

That's my point. Democracy as a system is still strong. It's the un-democratic party operations that brought us where we are.

[misko27]

So for an article that isn't Donald Trump doing some new horrifying thing, and which is relevant to the "fiscal hawk" thing I saw mentioned, I present to you: Trump's guide to budgeting.

The short version is "he don't do it". Issue is Trump wants to cut taxes, ram up military spending, open up huge infrastructure projects, and of course build his Great Wall of Mexico. You'll note the existence of "cut taxes" and "ram up spending" in the same sentence. This is a problem because the word from the administration is they don't think paying for it is necessary. Paul Ryan disagrees, and he has numbers to prove it: Even assuming growth goes up to account for the tax cuts and such (which is, of course, a GOP favorite), it still leaves a big hole in the deficit. How big? $10 Trillion over 10 years, according to a conservative think-tank. Paul Ryan has proposed a number of ways to gain this revenue, but Trump has publicly dismissed some of his options. So what's to stop Trump from doing it anyway, like he does everything else?

The problem is while the Republicans can force a budget through using budget reconciliation on a simple majority vote (bear in mind Republicans currently have a 52-48 majority), they can't do it if it's not revenue neutral, which Trump's plan is short of by about one trillion. Which means it gets put to a regular vote (read: the filibusterable ones). Which means it get's easily blocked by democrats, who will oppose due to massive tax cuts to the rich.

So either they come up with a revenue neutral option, or they figure out how to win a significant number of democrat votes. Or they don't pass a budget again and Trump can't do whatever it is that he wants. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's my point. Democracy as a system is still strong. It's the un-democratic party operations that brought us where we are.

Well the party operations are as old as the republic, so I don't follow.

[Frumple]

Huh. Wasn't the campaign message basically forcing protection money out of all our allies, to make up any differences? Did that fall through or somethin'?

[martinuzz]

Hahaha, someone in the US already sent an official petition to the White House with the request to honour the request to put the Netherlands second, arguing "there's no one in the second place yet, and the Netherlands is the first to ask".
Only 100.000 signatures are needed for the White House to have to come with an official response.

Meanwhile, our disabled politician, state secretary Klijnsma of Welfare, Social Affairs and Silly Walks wasn't offended at all and called it "Great! Simply fantastic! Best video ever!". Ponypark Slagharen, which is closed for the winter, has seen as many visitors enter their website as they normally would in the height of summer season, getting reactions from all over the world from people who want to 'ride the best ponies in the world'.
http://www.volkskrant.nl/media/staatssecretaris-klijnsma-over-filmpje-lubach-best-video-ever~a4453364/

[Guardian G.I.]

Brace yourselves, the wall is coming.

[smjjames]

That's my point. Democracy as a system is still strong. It's the un-democratic party operations that brought us where we are.

Well the party operations are as old as the republic, so I don't follow.

It's more their actions within the past two decades or so. Also, polarization.

Huh. Wasn't the campaign message basically forcing protection money out of all our allies, to make up any differences? Did that fall through or somethin'?

Pretty much, though whether it fell through or not, I don't know. Though Mexico is a 'special case' in the sense that it's a different set of reasoning than the NATO stuff and other allies.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Forget that, he signed the sanctuary city defunding? Here we go.

[misko27]

Huh. Wasn't the campaign message basically forcing protection money out of all our allies, to make up any differences? Did that fall through or somethin'?

Presumably that's what the military spending increases are for. Gotta spend money to make money you know? They aren't going to cough up the dough until they see drones tailing them in the distance whenever they are late on a payment.

Brace yourselves, the wall is coming.

He has still gotta pay for it, and I do strongly doubt Mexico is actually paying for it.