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Trump Adviser Steve Bannon is Leaving White House Post (nytimes.com)
President Donald Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon left his position on Friday (alternative source) as the newly minted chief of staff John Kelly sought to bring order to a White House riven by infighting and power struggles, more than a dozen news outlets report. Maggie Haberman, reporting for The New York Times: The president and senior White House officials were debating when and how to dismiss Mr. Bannon. The two administration officials cautioned that Mr. Trump is known to be averse to confrontation within his inner circle, and could decide to keep on Mr. Bannon for some time. As of Friday morning, the two men were still discussing Mr. Bannon's future, the officials said. A person close to Mr. Bannon insisted the parting of ways was his idea, and that he had submitted his resignation to the president on Aug. 7, to be announced at the start of this week, but the move was delayed after the racial unrest in Charlottesville, Va.
... as the newly minted chief of staff John Kelly sought to bring order to a White House riven by infighting and power struggles ...
As we saw on Tuesday - there's only so much discipline and order General Kelly can impose because the biggest problem in that regard is actually Trump being Trump.
#DeleteChrome
The CNBC article says both that Bannon resigned and that Trump fired him.
Looks like Time's puppet master attack worked.
Bannon represented Trump's base far better than any other person in his inner circle. Without Bannon Trump will have a far harder time keeping in sync with the people responsible for putting him in office. It wasn't the globalists like McMaster that got him elected, it was people like Bannon who helped him connect with people from the lay person to the disenfranchised (both Dem and Rep).
One Nazi gone, one to go.
With the term 'Nazi' being thrown around so casually these days I can only think of Inigo Montoya saying "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
In this case it's true, Bannon isn't a literal Nazi. He shares some of their philosophy and views, but Nazism is just a subset of the alt-right, which Bannon is one of the most important players in.
He's an awful human being, a racist and a bigot, but not an actual Nazi. Just a friend to Nazis, an admirer of them.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Ah yes, the "no true nazi" logical fallacy.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
The real question is, "Does he use Linux?"
By the end of his term it will be clear that Trump is the biggest mistake America has ever made.
Bigger than allowing slavery? Bigger than Vietnam? Bigger than leaded gasoline?
I think it is already clear that Trump is the worst President in my lifetime, and probably the worst President we've ever had. But I'm not convinced he is the worst mistake for the US has ever made. Of course, there is still time, so you may turn out to be right. I sincerely hope not.
Trump is just a symptom and so are all these protests - for whatever reason. People are looking for the one reason for their declining standard of living, healthcare costs going out of control, food prices increasing, housing costs, and just finding it harder to live better than their parents (the American dream) - let alone as well as them.
People are pissed but unfortunately, they are blaming the wrong people.
My meds are artificially high priced. Can I go and get them from another country? Nope - it's illegal. Why? For my own safety - because I may get counterfeit drugs from a foreign pharmacy. Amazing, I don't see many deaths from counterfeit drugs in Canada.
But why are our prices so high here in the USA? Because they can, that's why. And I know who is to blame and they are ALL members of the Republican party. Free markets my ass!
And when someone is making over $15 and hour - 40 hours a week - and STILL can't afford a place to live in some southeast sub-urban town, there is something really fucked up. We're not talking about the SF Bay area - but nowhere.
The wealth and income disparity is what is causing all this and it is because the system is rigged against us peons.
In a statement, Bannon said he wanted to spend more time with Anthony Saramucci's family.
The term 'Nazi' meant a member of the Nazi (National Socialist German Workers) Party. During the war the term Nazi was used to refer to pretty much all Germans. After the war the term was mostly used to describe members of Hitlers government and the Party paramilitary wings, the SA (brown shirts) and the SS. today I believe we can all agree that it has now a become a generic term for their core beliefs in racist nationalism although it is often used in daily speech to describe authoritarian figures.
You can be alt-right, but not a Nazi?
Yep. The alt-right is a diverse bunch - there are white supremacists who believe in ethnic superiority of anglo heritage, there are nationalists who believe in economic isolationism and are opposed to immigrants, there are religious authoritarians who want the government in our bedrooms, there are antisocial conspiracy theorists who are trying to hide out from government mind rays, and there are desperate suckers whose lives aren't going very well who will naively cling to any ideology, no matter how evil, that promises easy fixes. None of those things, on its own, makes you a Nazi. That said, if you are holding a swastika, or making excuses for someone that does, what should we conclude about you?
Give alternative facts instead.
He made a hard right out of the White House.
Have a look at his original staff and check who is left: http://time.com/4658499/donald... Of those who sometimes communicated their own opinions rather than simply defending Trump, there is only Kushner (family) and Pence (elected VP). Those that left include Bannon, Priebus, Flynn, McFarland, Walsh, Dubke, Spicer, Scaramucci, and more. https://www.bustle.com/p/all-t... We are looking at 3.5 more years of a delusional President who chooses divisive people for his staff and then fires anyone who gets under his thin skin. I can't see how competent people would agree to work there given what we know thus far.
Um, no. If you want to see what Nazi currently means, check the clips of the Charlottesville march with people chanting "Blood and Soil" and waving, you know, fucking Nazi flags.
Motherfucker, we had people goose-stepping through Charlottesville, waving Nazi flags, wearing swastika armbands, chanting "Heil Hitler, Heil Trump", beating people with billy clubs and listening to a speech about how we need to kill all the Jews, Muslims, Blacks and Communists. There is no better word to describe them than "Nazis".
And they counted Bannon as a thought leader - someone who would make sure Trump followed through on what they perceived as promises.
In this case it's true, Bannon isn't a literal Nazi. He shares some of their philosophy and views, but Nazism is just a subset of the alt-right, which Bannon is one of the most important players in.
He's an awful human being, a racist and a bigot, but not an actual Nazi. Just a friend to Nazis, an admirer of them.
Strangely enough, the major difference between a Nazi and a regular, garden variety, classical (Italian) fascist is that the Nazi ideology has a serious racist bend to it.
Both a Nazi and Fascist believe in nationalism, enforced ideologies, control over media, totalitarianism, but a Fascist stops short of thinking, "well that black fellow, he must be subhuman and we white men are the superior race". Sure some fascists are racist by accident, but Nazism has racism baked into its very foundations.
This is why white supremacists are often (and correctly) labelled as Nazis. There are enough similarities between the two ideologies and if the jackboot fits...
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Honestly I am not so sure about Bannon being a bigot. Trump, however, eliminated any room for doubt on that issue in his most infamous press conference on Tuesday.
Here is what I am certain about regarding Bannon: Bannon is straight out of the oldest school of political manipulators which has ever existed, the sophists. Plato founded his academy in Athens in reaction to and in opposition to the rampant sophistry, which was destroying Athenian Democracy. The sophists were the then current intellectual hired-guns of Athenian politicians. These hired-guns mastered the rhetorical art of equivocation, showing, in part at least, the originary fundamental relationship between Democracy and Demagoguery. Athenian politicians hired these men to craft their speeches, speeches designed to inflame the passions of their supporters, for short term political gain, regardless of whatever consequences followed, which ultimately led to the downfall of Democracy in Athens. Philosophy, from it's inception in the academy, correctly understood, sought to discredit sophistry in general and equivocation in particular. Remember that, for close to 2,000 years, rhetoric was held to be the highest form of intellectual art, and one wasn't considered to be educated if one wasn't trained in the rhetorical Arts.
Why do I doubt whether Bannon himself is a racist or biggot, given his work in unleashing Breitbart on the world? Simple really. Bannon never concerned himself with who his fellow travellers were. He simply designed and delivered the rhetorical argumentation which Trump, and many others, used to whip their followers into a frenzy. If modern Americans had even the remotest clue as to the origin and history of the art of rhetorics there would be no need to argue with people about "slippery-slopes", because the "slippery-slope" argument in every single on of it's incarnations is nothing other than plain-ole equivocation, sophistry for those with a somewhat larger vocabulary. So who was speaking when Trump spoke about "many, many sides" or "what's next after the statues of Robert E. Lee, are you gonna take down the statues of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, they were both slave owners....", or the "fine people" amongst the torch bearing, swastika waiving, sieg-heiling brown shirts marching through Chralottesville who had exactly one and only one objective planned with their march- to terrorize the good people of Charlottesville and Americans in general of every color and persuasion?.
Most of 20th century American politics, and that which still dominates us today, would have been completely impossible had the majority of our citizens been trained to recognized and see through simple rhethoric, and how easily we are manipulated by those who have mastered these arts. How many people had to die in east/southeast asia by virtue of one of the, literally, oldest tricks in the book, 'slippery-slope' rhetoric? Lather, rinse, repeat, Iraq, Libya, Syria, TEH Terruhrism. Even the expression 'Alt-right' is straight up sophism, except that the semantic confusion spread by it has rendered even those who consider themselves to be Alt-Right unable to distinguish themselves from their fellow travellers the fuckin NeoNazis and the KKK. Wake up folks we are being played, and Bannon was damned good at what he did. Fuckin snake.
Right, because if there's one thing that defines a secretary of state's job, it's micromanaging security.
She rightfully took responsibility for the decisions made for people who worked for her regarding security for the compound. The buck always stops with the boss. But the scale of the witch hunt embarked on over that incident was just ridiculous.
Snopes.
Oh yes, that reminds me, my fellow cucks and I need to get after him, our checks are late this month!
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
"Nazi" may be an abbreviation for "National Socialism", but as for what it means... well, remember it was the Nazis themselves who made that term up. You shouldn't take anything they said about themselves at face value because they were history's greatest bullshitters.
Naziism isn't really an ideology -- not like socialism, communism, or capitalism for that matter. It is too profoundly anti-intellectual to be one. Not that this prevented from intellectuals from joining. Goebbels was both an intelligent and educated man; he was in charge of manufacturing bullshit for the masses, but like an addict/drug cooker he was a user of his own junk.
Insofar as Nazis embrace ideology, it is never to the exclusion of any contradictory ideas. If caught in an inconsistency, a Communist will elaborate, a Nazi will simply ignore. That's why Communism as an ideology is so rococo. Nazi ideology is a slovenly, slapdash thing, constructed for the moment and then freely ignored once used.
They were obsessed with joy. And here at least they were honest, because joy differs from ordinary happiness in that it involves letting go of the past and future, of your very self. And that's what they offered their followers: torchlit rallies in which you could lose yourself and in which what happened yesterday and what was going to happen tomorrow might as well not exist -- not coincidentally an extremely useful attitude for a ruthless politician to encourage in his followers.
Naziism promises immediate gratification, regardless of obligations (except to the leader) or consequences (which were entrusted to the leader). Nazis are obsessed with virility and vitality, but what they really mean is the momentary freedom weakness of character can grant.
Now Bannon's followers fit the mold, but as for Bannon himself... well he actually sees himself more in Lenin's mold, he's said so himself. So he fancies himself as an intellectual, and sees the rabble as useful idiots -- a term Lenin actually coined. But Nazi leaders often saw their followers the same way. The question is whether he's a user as well as a dealer.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Supposedly Trump actually doesn't deal well with confrontation or conflict. That's not to say that he never gets into conflict, but that he can't effectively deal with conflict.
If you think about it that way, it fits with his public persona. Trump seems to put everyone into one of two classes:
(1) People that he likes and who like everything about him
(2) People who he hates and who hate everything about him.
There doesn't seem to be anything in between. As long as everything is good and you're praising him, he'll like you and praise you. If he doesn't like something you're doing or you criticize anything he has done, then you're his enemy. It's a bit paradoxical, but labelling someone as an enemy can be a way of avoiding conflict. You don't need to sort the conflict out or come to a resolution. Their opinions and views no longer hold weight. If they don't approve of you, that's not a bad thing because they're "bad people" anyway.
It's a totally different thing to actually deal with conflict. If you have a conflict with someone that you don't want to be your enemy (or you can't afford to have them be your enemy), then you actually have to deal with the conflict. You have to confront and resolve the issue somehow.
Apparently, that is the thing that Trump isn't really able to do. If he has some sort of disagreement with someone who he can't afford to berate on Twitter, he just goes silent and stops dealing with them. If they try to confront him, he begs off. He doesn't have to courage to admit that he's wrong or speak truth to power. If he likes you, he'll tell you want you want to hear, and if he doesn't like you, he insults you, but those are the only two types of interactions he can handle.
like "Only when an arrogant woman with 20 years of bad press and only one real skill (keeping her rivals at bay for 8 years) is the opponent.".
Seriously, they were both running against the only person they could lose to.
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