Slashdot Mirror
After Losing Support, Trump's Business and Manufacturing Councils Are Shutting Down (theverge.com)
Over a dozen anonymous readers share a similar report: Two White House advisory councils that once included tech leaders like Elon Musk and Travis Kalanick have dissolved, after several members resigned over President Donald Trump's weak condemnation of white supremacists. A member of the Strategic and Policy Forum told CNBC that it wanted to make a "more significant impact" by disbanding the entire group: "It makes a central point that it's not going to go forward. It's done." Soon after, Trump took credit for shutting down both that group and a separate Manufacturing Council, "rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople." The councils' members came from a range of industries, including several major Silicon Valley companies. Besides Musk and Kalanick, executives from Intel, IBM, and Dell had joined. It's been controversial from the start -- Musk and Kalanick both left months ago -- but a major exodus started this week, after Trump issued a vague statement blaming "many sides" for violence at a white supremacist rally that left one woman dead. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich resigned on Monday, saying that politics had "sidelined the important mission of rebuilding America's manufacturing base." Axios has more details.
Fewer.
It has nothing to do with the Left. When dozens of CEO's of American companies representing billions of dollars of shareholder value are running away from the supposed "leader of the free world".... well, you have to ask yourself did America seriously fuck up in choosing a President? I think the answer is pretty obvious.
We aren't bashing Trump for being Trump but for being a POTUS that is dividing America in the worst possible way
I'm tired of winning.
Do you really think this is a left vs. right issue?
If you don't want to be called a Nazi, perhaps don't act like a fascist, and don't defend those who do by providing shade for them to hide in.
Half a year in and Trump has fucked up on every single endeavor.
Give me a break. This is a tech story. The president of the fucking United States has killed two boards, which consisted of several top CEOs, whose companies produces tech products and services that the vast majority of people in the fucking world use. If you think it's a left vs right issue, or a political issue, maybe you're not nerd enough to know the difference. Stop the whining. Open any news outlet's site and you will see a ton of Trump stories there. Look at Slashdot's front page, and in the last five hours, all they have run is a math article, a few Science-related stories, a story about Microsoft Office and another story about Google's services. That's a fucking fair balance.
Fuck them, and full all those that support this Orwellian oppression.
You mean like Trump and Sessions wanting the logs from an anti-Trump website? Or a bunch of African-American protestors who'd like the odds of "death by cop" to come down a few points?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
And you didn't quit, I FIRED you!
God that guy is pathetic.
You're seriously trying to sell it as a win?
Trump setup those councils when he took office. Everybody on the council left, and now he's disbanding them.
That's not a win. That's the loser kid sitting in a corner by himself because he smells like cat piss.
Plenty? How many? Provide a number, along with full citation and reference to the polls and/or studies used to derive the data. Go on, you've made a claim, now actually back it up.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There are violent BLM members. No denying it. But BLM itself doesn't stand for violence, nor is that its goal.
White supremacists, on the other hand, do stand for violence, do stand for racism. You can criticize BLM for perhaps showing some tolerance for hooliganism, but groups like Vanguard America are, to the every last one of them, violent extremists who, like their spiritual forebears, use political conservatism and the First Amendment as cover for their evil ideology.
So no, it ain't the same, and I wonder why you are trying so hard to defend the white nationalists, white supremacists and Neo=Nazis, and trying so hard to make BLM and Antifa into some sort left wing version of them? Is it a silly attempt at equanimity, or perhaps do you sympathize with people who hate blacks, Jews, and believe white people are the master race? Go on, explain yourself.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
s/dividing/divided .. USA has been divided for years and it's not something that started all of a sudden when Trump took office. America is undergoing the tyranny of SJW's and has been for years. Trump simply exposes it for the hysteria that it is. He's very clumsy in doing so, but at least he isn't walking away from the over-inflated snowflake issues and all that comes from it. He may be a big bad bully but that doesn't make him wrong on all accounts.
Oh, and for the record, I'm not a US citizen, I'm looking at this from the other side of the ocean, wondering WTF got into you people.
The fact that you believe this drivel is astounding.
As another non-US citizen, Trump is a complete dumpster fire in every way.
He isn't exposing things or confronting issues.. he's making issues worse with his horrible understanding and statements about them..
I find that entire argument pretty ridiculous. So, history is getting rewritten because statues are being removed? Do you teach from them?
There's a reason Germany doesn't have Hitler statues, you know, and it is not because they're willing to forget.
And I bet you really outraged when all those Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians toppled statues of Lenin! Truly a crime against humanity.
The fact that you can still have statues of the likes of Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis a century and a half after the Confederacy was beaten into the ground astonishes me. It's one thing to remember one's past, but to actually honor the leaders of the Confederacy with statues and memorials, no thanks, that's not remembering a bitter chapter from the past, that's celebrating it.
It all stems back to the fiction that the former Confederate states were allowed to propagate, that somehow the formation of the Confederacy wasn't about preservation of slavery, that somehow it was some great campaign for liberty. Well, that's bullshit. The Confederacy was entirely about slavery, and it stood and fell on that principle, so fuck Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and all the other men who sent hundreds of thousands off to stain hundreds of battlefields red for the cause of keeping men in shackles because of their skin color. We shouldn't topple their statues, we should fucking dynamite them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Do you really think this is a left vs. right issue?
Everything has to be portrayed as a left or right issue to keep people distracted and fighting among themselves instead of working together to solve the actual problems.
Based on the idiotic posts in this thread, that plan is working out really well.
This NY Times article, quotes Trump's tweet:
Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Aug. 16, 2017
But I'm more inclined to believe that Trump is disbanding the councils to avoid being embarrassed by the publicity of the people on those councils quitting. On the other hand, they don't seem to be really doing anything productive anyway:
Moreover, the panels have not been seen to be particularly effective. After a few high profile events for the groups early in the Mr. Trump’s presidency, there have been few meetings since, and none more are planned.
“So far they haven’t done much,” Ms. Admati said. “They had a few meetings with a bunch of fanfare, but it was more symbolic than anything else.”
Perhaps their intended purpose was simply to make Trump look good and the councils haven't achieved that. Certainly people quitting them en-mass doesn't help that effort either.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
By re-framing it through the morals of the day
Well yeah, because being against slavery is soo 2017...
They were a product of their time and to judge them against our morals is wrong.
Actually, if you look it up, quite a lot of these monuments got erected decades, even a century after the war. They were certainly a product of their time, just not the one you think.
You miss the lessons learned. You miss the motivations. You are ignoring history.
In order: The South got off easy. They wanted slaves. They lost. None of these monuments make any of that clear, so I fail to see what's being lost.
Robert E. Lee isn't the monster the left make him out to be.
This should be fun. Please explain to me how someone who owned slaves and decided to commit treason in order to be able to continue having slaves is not a monster.
All of the founders had slaves
Yeah, veneration of the founders has always baffled me too.
Are we to burn the constitution and abandon the ideals because they have because we judge them with today's standard?
What a bizarre argument considering the 15th amendment is sitting right there.
yet not realize that it was slave owners that wanted slaves to be counted equally!
ROFLMAO! Yes they did. Can you tell me why, though?
ISIS destroys antiquity because blasphemy. We do it because offense. I see no difference.
Well, one group thinks those statues desecrate their entire worldview. The other group thinks that celebrating treasonous slaveowners is not what modern democracies do. The fact that you can't see the difference says a lot more about you than either of those 2 groups.
By destroying them and moving them out of sight we forget our past.
Nah, I'm pretty sure the thousands of books, movies, history classes and artifacts from the era will manage to take up the slack.
We lose a part of us that help us become better.
Please explain to me how one statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, let alone several, accomplishes this goal.
At least with moving it is still there but out of sight out of mind does not challenge you to understand it.
And I've yet to meet a leftist that has a problem with this solution.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
You do realize that Robert E. Lee was against secession, right? He was more loyal to Virginia and at the time people were more loyal to their state than to the federal government. Even Abraham Lincoln asked him to lead the Union Army.
Read a history book.
For better or worse he's going to be President of the United States for the next three years and a couple months.
Maybe, maybe not. He's rapidly losing the support of Republicans in the House and Senate, and he really, really needs that support. The House has the power to impeach and the Senate has the power to remove him from office after the House impeaches. You know the Democrats would love to do both of those things (even knowing that Mike Pence is ready to step in), so Trump really needs to keep the Republicans on his side.
And then there's Mueller's investigation. Were a smoking gun proving Trump intentionally colluded to throw the election to have been found a few months ago, Trump might have survived it simply because the Senate would have refused to give him the boot. That is no longer true. He's become enough of an embarrassment to the GOP that if Mueller finds something even moderately bad, the Reps will kick him to the curb. And as time goes on, the Republicans are getting more and more fed up with him. A few more months of the current trends and they're going to be right there with the Democrats, looking for a reason to boot him, or worse.
At this point, I give Trump even odds of completing his first term, but that's only if he gets rid of Bannon, and starts accepting advice in the fairly near future. If he doesn't, the odds tilt heavily toward not making it four years.
I don't think he'll actually get the boot, mind you, he'll resign first. He never actually intended to be president and the job is nothing like what he thought it would be, so he might not even wait to be impeached, but instead resign in a fit of rage, blaming the media, Congress, disloyal staff and everyon else for his failure to accomplish anything of note. He may do it in the hopes that it will stop the Mueller investigation, but I strongly doubt that it would. I have no idea if Pence would pardon him if anything criminal came to light. Wouldn't shock me if Trump doesn't have any idea what Pence would do, either.
Bottom line, Trump had better figure out how to act like a president if he wants to be president for another three years and five months. And he'd really better step up his game if he wants another term. Either that or attempt to pull a Nicolas Maduro, but I don't think that would succeed in the US.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I agree. I find it really disappointing how many people here seem to be looking for ways to excuse Nazis. They go through a lot of trouble to make it seem "fair" and "objective" by drawing false equivalences, and trying to distract from real issues.
Because first, as you point out, BLM is not in itself a violent extremist hate group. Its fundamental message is, "It's not ok for police to kill black people." To all the people saying, "white lives matter," yes, of course that's true. That goes without saying, literally, which is the point. The reason they aren't saying "white lives matter" is that we all know white lives matter without even saying it, but some of us don't seem to realize that black lives matter too, equally as much.
But I digress. The point is, though there may be some violent people associated with BLM, they're not equivalent to Nazis. Any group can have some violent members, but you have to look at the group as a whole, and it's just not fundamentally a violent group.
But aside from all of that, it doesn't matter. Even if BLM were a violent extremist group, it's irrelevant. It doesn't serve to justify Nazi groups, not even a little. We should condemn the Nazis, full stop. No justification or equivocation. Other people's bad acts are for another conversation.
Because when you say, "Sure the Nazis are bad, but BLM is bad too!", it doesn't count as a condemnation of the Nazis. What you're actually doing is taking a combative rhetorical stance, assuming that your opponent is on the side of BLM, and you're taking the side of the Nazis. Sure, you're literally saying that the Nazis are bad, but then you're defending them by comparing them to a group you assume your opponent will want to defend.
You also see this approach where Trump supporters will say, "Maybe Trump has done some unethical and illegal things, but Clinton is a crook!" Even if we were to assume that Clinton was a criminal, that's not a valid argument that we should ignore Trump's misdemeanors (and possibly high crimes).
It all stems back to the fiction that the former Confederate states were allowed to propagate, that somehow the formation of the Confederacy wasn't about preservation of slavery, that somehow it was some great campaign for liberty.
That's the cover story.
In reality, all of those statues were put up during the Jim Crow era, and were part of a deliberate effort to make sure that blacks never forgot who the boss was. Other elements of the effort included segregation, regular lynchings, and use of the criminal justice system to recreate the system of black slavery, only at lower cost and with less regard for black lives, because they were now an operational expense not a self-replicating capital investment.
I recommend Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon, to learn about this incredibly nasty and hypocritical part of American history that has been effectively excised (not accidentally!) from American education.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.