I hope not. As much as I think Trump as an idiot, the idea that a sitting President could be removed from office for what amounts to treason would tear the country apart. He's inoculated himself with his core base, so there's no kind of evidence that would prove his guilt in their eyes, and it split the Republicans in two.
That's why I suspect that even if McCain and Co. unearth something like that, they'd keep it quiet and use at as a means to blackmail Trump. To openly reveal and impeach him would be a catastrophe for the Republicans and for the country at large.
And how would that work? The Constitution doesn't have a mechanism for suspending elections, and each state runs most of the elections, so there's no real federal mechanism in place. Short of Trump outright trying to use military force to overthrow Congress and the states, he has no ability to suspend elections, and I have pretty strong doubts that a lot of military commanders would even follow such a blatantly unconstitutional order. I would rather think that Congress would vote for impeachment, and he end up in chains.
I can't imagine any set of circumstances under which the Republican-dominated Congress would impeach Trump. It would either take direct and irrefutable evidence that he was in cahoots with Putin or was/is taking instructions from Putin, or some extraordinary set of criminal acts while in office on the abuse of power level of things for the Republicans to slit their own man's throat. Trump may be a bastard, but as the old saying goes, he's the Republicans' bastard.
Well yes, if one chooses to be a nihilist, then nothing really matters. But I wonder if you're prepared to follow that particular world view all the way, or whether you just use it to justify apathy or a sort default contrarianism.
So you have no criticism of a man who insists, despite all the evidence, that his inauguration was the largest attended in history? It's all about the Democrats, eh?
To be fair to Trump, Hillary Clinton got nailed in a similar way when she claimed she was under fire during a visit to the Balkans in the 1990s. Of course, her response when called on what was a false claim wasn't to insist that she had been under fire, in complete defiance of the facts, but rather to admit that she had been mistaken. That eyewitnesses will often get even rather large details of an experience wrong is not in any way controversial. I took an introductory psychology course last year that had a very good section on how memories, even recent ones, can be faulty; prone to bother intentional and accidental alteration. Stress can often interfere with memory formation, and the way the brain stores memory is in an encoded format, so memories are in fact reconstructed, and not just simply video files, so even during the reconstruction phase, memories can be altered.
Now where Clinton and Trump differ is that when Clinton was called on the clearly false claim that she had come under weapons fire while landing in Bosnia, she apologized and admitted her memory of the event was wrong. Trump, on the other hand, lacks even a false sense of humility, and simply asserts, in defiance of the facts, that his experience was true.
Do you really think his base is 40%? I think the Republican base may be about that, but being a Republican and being a Trump supporter are not the same thing. There are a helluva lot of Republicans who are not thrilled that Trump is President. Obviously they're going to do all they can to support the Republican agenda, but that doesn't mean they're Trump supporters by any stretch. Unfortunately, in a two party system, there really are no alternatives.
What will be interesting is if Trump decides to run in 2020. I'm reasonably sure he won't, but if he continues being a complete idiot for the next three and a half years, one wonders if the Republican base may decide he doesn't deserve another term.
That's my view as well, and it's why I think while the Republicans will enjoy a brief period in which they can get their agenda pushed through, in the long term he's going to be an anchor around them. Congress is probably secure in 2018, largely because it's mainly Democratic incumbents, but if he continues in this vein, he's going to end up alienating a lot of the voters the GOP needs.
This seems to assert that the only verifiable and useful knowledge is that which you directly observe. In fact, human observation is in many cases rather faulty. Our cognitive machinery used to store and recall memories can be manipulated, either intentionally or unintionally, so I'm afraid observation alone is insufficient. How science works is by demanding that experiments can be repeated to produce a similar outcome, to overcome biases, cognitive problems and memory issues.
The fact is that Obama has a Hawaii birth certificate that is like other birth certificates from the state at that time. The preponderance of evidence is that Obama was born on American soil, and thus was constitutionally permitted to become President of the United States. Trying to claim that you can't tell is nothing more than a sort of "Birther lite" position.
I just think he's an idiot who had damn good polling data and people who knew how to use it. I don't think he's the evilest man in the world, I just think he's emotionally and intellectually incapable of doing the job. Honestly, I think his presidency is going to be Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game; pay no attention to the people in the middle of the frame, pay attention to what's going on in the background. It's people like Pence and Tillerson who are the real administration.
It wasn't intended as some sort of Nostradamus-like work of prediction. Orwell was trying to demonstrate how an autocratic regime would use a combination of surveillance, propaganda (including wars, people and events that may or may not have existed), and linguistic compression (Newspeak is as much about its compression, blandness and one-dimensionality as it is about changing the meaning of words) to create what amounted to a perpetual tyranny. To some extent it was modeled in mid-20th century autocratic regimes like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, with the former being the larger inspiration, due in no small part to the pre-WWII Soviet regime being a big fan of extreme utilitarian art and expression (during WWII the Soviet regime began to talk a lot more about Mother Russia and the like, and also altering its suppression of the Russian Orthodox Church).
I don't think anyone contemplates that 1984 would ever happen in a literal sense, in that you would have a perpetual autocratic state. But elements of it certainly can be seen in the way regimes at times behave. 1984 probably best describes North Korea, but that's not to say that concepts like Newspeak wouldn't be tried by any government wanting to assert a certain amount of cognitive control over a populace.
I'm not sure I want to give Trump and his minions that much credit, however. I think the likes of Conway and Spicer have one job; and that is try to recast their boss's sometimes ridiculous or clearly false claims in a way that makes him look a little less like a hyperbolic thin-skinned primadona idiot. How are they supposed to explain clearly false claims about inauguration attendance figures? They can't say "You're right, the President was wrong", because they'd probably be fired in fairly short order. So they get handed these lemons and try to make lemonaid. And really, that's what spokespeople are for. If someone is actually taking them seriously, whether as a Trump supporter or as a Trump opponent, then I'd suggest they're shooting at the wrong target. I think the current popularity figures the pollsters are producing show that the American public aren't really buying Trump's line anyways, and his victory was more a repudiation of the political classes than any kind of belief that Trump was capable of doing the job.
The public hardly tolerated it. The problem was that for two elections there was no real opposition that anyone trusted enough to replace Harper. The Harper Tories' electoral success stemmed from the weakness of the Liberal Party; so long as it lacked unity and didn't have a leader capable of commanding the troops, the Tories walked up the middle. As soon as they had a leader whose qualities were such, or at least whose *perceived* qualities were such that the party could unite, well, look what happened, the Liberals went from third party in Parliament to a majority government, a political turnaround I'm not sure has been seen many times in any parliamentary democracy.
To some extent I think the same phenomenon is at play with the Democrats. Clinton was clearly a damaged candidate, and while I don't think she's the Palpatine-like figure that the Republicans cast her as, she was clearly the one candidate that Trump had a shot at. She also revealed some pretty significant divisions in the Democratic Party; between the more "classical liberal" wing that Clinton represented and the more liberal "social democratic" wing that adopted Sanders as their mascot. In the long term they're going to have to find a presidential candidate who can bridge that divide like Obama did. In the short term, they're going to have to survive the 2018 Senate races, where it is primarily Democratic incumbents in the crosshairs, and where there is little expectation of gaining a majority in the House, unless Trump and the Republicans completely fuck up the replacement of the ACA or some economic crisis occurs.
The problem stems from the fact that few if any politicians, at least in democracies, get elected by their base. The base is usually only a fraction of the number of voters needed to win, so politicians usually have to get a pretty significant percentage of non-aligned voters, fence sitters, and on occasion even a few of the voters that would normally vote for the opponent. That the Breitbarts and 4chan crowd will lap up and defend even the most moronic things that come out of the Administration's mouth is a given. But these people are not plentiful enough to guarantee victory.
Of course, it's my feeling that Trump doesn't really care. I doubt very much he'll be running in 2020, so this is effectively his second term. Now there are lot of Republicans in Congress, many of which are facing the electorate in 2018, who probably do care, and probably wish very much that he'd stop using Twitter and would stop burning political capital on idiotic things like clearly delusional inauguration attendance and voter fraud claims.
Even if you imagine Benghazi claims by the Obama Administration were a lie, then at least it was a lie that would be very difficult to disprove. Indeed, even Congress has never really been able to solidly hold the Administration to account.
And Trump's claim on the Inauguration wasn't that lots of people saw it, his claim was that the Mall was filled with people and that pictures showing it pretty sparsely attended were faked, which was easily debunked.
So what we arrive at is that Trump is actually a terrible liar. Being a liar is practically a requirement of being a politician, being a terrible liar is the hallmark of a bad politician.
I don't really recall them asserting that lies could be recoined as "alternate facts". That politicians and their minions lie is a given, that they would so obstinately declare outright falsehoods and then try to recast the obvious falsehoods as some variant on "facts" is a new one to me, at least in the West. This is indeed more a trick of authoritarians.
And for what exactly? Because the Mall wasn't nearly as filled for Trump's inauguration as for Obama's 2008 inauguration? Why would that matter? Even further, to claim Hillary Clinton's popular vote win was made up of fraudulent votes? Why would that matter? What counts is the Electoral College, not popular votes? It strikes me as completely idiotic, a squandering of what little political capital Trump has actually entered the White House with on moronic side issues that have no bearing on governance whatsoever.
I had begun to believe the claim that Trump's bluster was some sort of clever ploy, a strategic type of hyperbole. Now I'm beginning the man really is a fucking moron. The first rule of lying is don't lie when you can get easily caught, and don't lie when there's no advantage conferred. What the hell was the point of inauguration attendance claim? What is the point of the three million vote fraud claim? These lies are not only stupid and easily debunked, they do nothing to aid Trump's administration.
And thank you Trumpites for the public education, as we see Conway and her fellow merry band of sociopaths try to create Newspeak before our very eyes.
I've given it a couple of chances. It's a substandard piece of software. It just doesn't work very well. There's a reason that despite all of MS's efforts to promote it, including fucking with people who use Chrome, it's still used by an incredibly small minority of Win10 users. That's because it's just fucking awful.
It says something about far Microsoft has fallen that not even leveraging their power over the operating system can get them any penetration with their built-in browser. I'd say they have not only lost the browser war, they're no longer in the same browser universe. Part of it has to do with the fact that Edge is truly a horrible piece of software, and part of it is that Google has basically colonized Windows with Chrome.
As much as I dislike systemd, it's hardly the same thing at all. IE and Edge are applications that should be no more or less embedded than any other application. Systemd is a system-level component/utility. The equivalent would be demanding that Microsoft take out, say, the event logging system.
The 4chan crowd believes they're superior because they can... well, honestly I'm not sure what the 4chan crowd can do. I'd say they could probably manage a circle jerk, but then I imagine some of them would think an erection required pliers, and it would all go horribly wrong.
And why would they do that? It strikes me that no sane company would go around intentionally trying to piss off the executive branch of any government they were thinking of making an investment in.
To be fair, OpenVPN isn't really designed to obfuscate the nature of the traffic any more than IPSec does. Both are about creating secure tunnels, with OpenVPN being very easy to configure and maintain as opposed to the pain that is IPSec. I use OpenVPN a lot, both for our road warriors, and to create the secure tunnels between our locations. In that role it really is an incredibly nice piece of software. But if I were looking at making something whose intent was to disguise that I was encrypting traffic at all, it's not the tool to use. Now as I understand it OpenVPN is pretty modular, so I would imagine if someone were to come up with some other encryption mechanism meant more to get around deep pack inspection, that would probably work, but as I said, such methods will inevitably make for a slower tunnel, and as OpenVPN is more of an infrastructure VPN, I'm not sure it's quite the right tool for that job.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope not. As much as I think Trump as an idiot, the idea that a sitting President could be removed from office for what amounts to treason would tear the country apart. He's inoculated himself with his core base, so there's no kind of evidence that would prove his guilt in their eyes, and it split the Republicans in two.
That's why I suspect that even if McCain and Co. unearth something like that, they'd keep it quiet and use at as a means to blackmail Trump. To openly reveal and impeach him would be a catastrophe for the Republicans and for the country at large.
And how would that work? The Constitution doesn't have a mechanism for suspending elections, and each state runs most of the elections, so there's no real federal mechanism in place. Short of Trump outright trying to use military force to overthrow Congress and the states, he has no ability to suspend elections, and I have pretty strong doubts that a lot of military commanders would even follow such a blatantly unconstitutional order. I would rather think that Congress would vote for impeachment, and he end up in chains.
I can't imagine any set of circumstances under which the Republican-dominated Congress would impeach Trump. It would either take direct and irrefutable evidence that he was in cahoots with Putin or was/is taking instructions from Putin, or some extraordinary set of criminal acts while in office on the abuse of power level of things for the Republicans to slit their own man's throat. Trump may be a bastard, but as the old saying goes, he's the Republicans' bastard.
Well yes, if one chooses to be a nihilist, then nothing really matters. But I wonder if you're prepared to follow that particular world view all the way, or whether you just use it to justify apathy or a sort default contrarianism.
Go back to your 4chan circle jerk.
So you have no criticism of a man who insists, despite all the evidence, that his inauguration was the largest attended in history? It's all about the Democrats, eh?
To be fair to Trump, Hillary Clinton got nailed in a similar way when she claimed she was under fire during a visit to the Balkans in the 1990s. Of course, her response when called on what was a false claim wasn't to insist that she had been under fire, in complete defiance of the facts, but rather to admit that she had been mistaken. That eyewitnesses will often get even rather large details of an experience wrong is not in any way controversial. I took an introductory psychology course last year that had a very good section on how memories, even recent ones, can be faulty; prone to bother intentional and accidental alteration. Stress can often interfere with memory formation, and the way the brain stores memory is in an encoded format, so memories are in fact reconstructed, and not just simply video files, so even during the reconstruction phase, memories can be altered.
Now where Clinton and Trump differ is that when Clinton was called on the clearly false claim that she had come under weapons fire while landing in Bosnia, she apologized and admitted her memory of the event was wrong. Trump, on the other hand, lacks even a false sense of humility, and simply asserts, in defiance of the facts, that his experience was true.
Do you really think his base is 40%? I think the Republican base may be about that, but being a Republican and being a Trump supporter are not the same thing. There are a helluva lot of Republicans who are not thrilled that Trump is President. Obviously they're going to do all they can to support the Republican agenda, but that doesn't mean they're Trump supporters by any stretch. Unfortunately, in a two party system, there really are no alternatives.
What will be interesting is if Trump decides to run in 2020. I'm reasonably sure he won't, but if he continues being a complete idiot for the next three and a half years, one wonders if the Republican base may decide he doesn't deserve another term.
That's my view as well, and it's why I think while the Republicans will enjoy a brief period in which they can get their agenda pushed through, in the long term he's going to be an anchor around them. Congress is probably secure in 2018, largely because it's mainly Democratic incumbents, but if he continues in this vein, he's going to end up alienating a lot of the voters the GOP needs.
This seems to assert that the only verifiable and useful knowledge is that which you directly observe. In fact, human observation is in many cases rather faulty. Our cognitive machinery used to store and recall memories can be manipulated, either intentionally or unintionally, so I'm afraid observation alone is insufficient. How science works is by demanding that experiments can be repeated to produce a similar outcome, to overcome biases, cognitive problems and memory issues.
The fact is that Obama has a Hawaii birth certificate that is like other birth certificates from the state at that time. The preponderance of evidence is that Obama was born on American soil, and thus was constitutionally permitted to become President of the United States. Trying to claim that you can't tell is nothing more than a sort of "Birther lite" position.
I just think he's an idiot who had damn good polling data and people who knew how to use it. I don't think he's the evilest man in the world, I just think he's emotionally and intellectually incapable of doing the job. Honestly, I think his presidency is going to be Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game; pay no attention to the people in the middle of the frame, pay attention to what's going on in the background. It's people like Pence and Tillerson who are the real administration.
It wasn't intended as some sort of Nostradamus-like work of prediction. Orwell was trying to demonstrate how an autocratic regime would use a combination of surveillance, propaganda (including wars, people and events that may or may not have existed), and linguistic compression (Newspeak is as much about its compression, blandness and one-dimensionality as it is about changing the meaning of words) to create what amounted to a perpetual tyranny. To some extent it was modeled in mid-20th century autocratic regimes like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, with the former being the larger inspiration, due in no small part to the pre-WWII Soviet regime being a big fan of extreme utilitarian art and expression (during WWII the Soviet regime began to talk a lot more about Mother Russia and the like, and also altering its suppression of the Russian Orthodox Church).
I don't think anyone contemplates that 1984 would ever happen in a literal sense, in that you would have a perpetual autocratic state. But elements of it certainly can be seen in the way regimes at times behave. 1984 probably best describes North Korea, but that's not to say that concepts like Newspeak wouldn't be tried by any government wanting to assert a certain amount of cognitive control over a populace.
I'm not sure I want to give Trump and his minions that much credit, however. I think the likes of Conway and Spicer have one job; and that is try to recast their boss's sometimes ridiculous or clearly false claims in a way that makes him look a little less like a hyperbolic thin-skinned primadona idiot. How are they supposed to explain clearly false claims about inauguration attendance figures? They can't say "You're right, the President was wrong", because they'd probably be fired in fairly short order. So they get handed these lemons and try to make lemonaid. And really, that's what spokespeople are for. If someone is actually taking them seriously, whether as a Trump supporter or as a Trump opponent, then I'd suggest they're shooting at the wrong target. I think the current popularity figures the pollsters are producing show that the American public aren't really buying Trump's line anyways, and his victory was more a repudiation of the political classes than any kind of belief that Trump was capable of doing the job.
The public hardly tolerated it. The problem was that for two elections there was no real opposition that anyone trusted enough to replace Harper. The Harper Tories' electoral success stemmed from the weakness of the Liberal Party; so long as it lacked unity and didn't have a leader capable of commanding the troops, the Tories walked up the middle. As soon as they had a leader whose qualities were such, or at least whose *perceived* qualities were such that the party could unite, well, look what happened, the Liberals went from third party in Parliament to a majority government, a political turnaround I'm not sure has been seen many times in any parliamentary democracy.
To some extent I think the same phenomenon is at play with the Democrats. Clinton was clearly a damaged candidate, and while I don't think she's the Palpatine-like figure that the Republicans cast her as, she was clearly the one candidate that Trump had a shot at. She also revealed some pretty significant divisions in the Democratic Party; between the more "classical liberal" wing that Clinton represented and the more liberal "social democratic" wing that adopted Sanders as their mascot. In the long term they're going to have to find a presidential candidate who can bridge that divide like Obama did. In the short term, they're going to have to survive the 2018 Senate races, where it is primarily Democratic incumbents in the crosshairs, and where there is little expectation of gaining a majority in the House, unless Trump and the Republicans completely fuck up the replacement of the ACA or some economic crisis occurs.
The problem stems from the fact that few if any politicians, at least in democracies, get elected by their base. The base is usually only a fraction of the number of voters needed to win, so politicians usually have to get a pretty significant percentage of non-aligned voters, fence sitters, and on occasion even a few of the voters that would normally vote for the opponent. That the Breitbarts and 4chan crowd will lap up and defend even the most moronic things that come out of the Administration's mouth is a given. But these people are not plentiful enough to guarantee victory.
Of course, it's my feeling that Trump doesn't really care. I doubt very much he'll be running in 2020, so this is effectively his second term. Now there are lot of Republicans in Congress, many of which are facing the electorate in 2018, who probably do care, and probably wish very much that he'd stop using Twitter and would stop burning political capital on idiotic things like clearly delusional inauguration attendance and voter fraud claims.
Even if you imagine Benghazi claims by the Obama Administration were a lie, then at least it was a lie that would be very difficult to disprove. Indeed, even Congress has never really been able to solidly hold the Administration to account.
And Trump's claim on the Inauguration wasn't that lots of people saw it, his claim was that the Mall was filled with people and that pictures showing it pretty sparsely attended were faked, which was easily debunked.
So what we arrive at is that Trump is actually a terrible liar. Being a liar is practically a requirement of being a politician, being a terrible liar is the hallmark of a bad politician.
I don't really recall them asserting that lies could be recoined as "alternate facts". That politicians and their minions lie is a given, that they would so obstinately declare outright falsehoods and then try to recast the obvious falsehoods as some variant on "facts" is a new one to me, at least in the West. This is indeed more a trick of authoritarians.
And for what exactly? Because the Mall wasn't nearly as filled for Trump's inauguration as for Obama's 2008 inauguration? Why would that matter? Even further, to claim Hillary Clinton's popular vote win was made up of fraudulent votes? Why would that matter? What counts is the Electoral College, not popular votes? It strikes me as completely idiotic, a squandering of what little political capital Trump has actually entered the White House with on moronic side issues that have no bearing on governance whatsoever.
I had begun to believe the claim that Trump's bluster was some sort of clever ploy, a strategic type of hyperbole. Now I'm beginning the man really is a fucking moron. The first rule of lying is don't lie when you can get easily caught, and don't lie when there's no advantage conferred. What the hell was the point of inauguration attendance claim? What is the point of the three million vote fraud claim? These lies are not only stupid and easily debunked, they do nothing to aid Trump's administration.
And thank you Trumpites for the public education, as we see Conway and her fellow merry band of sociopaths try to create Newspeak before our very eyes.
No, not everything is, but not everything that doesn't rate as a planet killing catastrophe is good either.
Well, that and Edge just plain sucks.
I've given it a couple of chances. It's a substandard piece of software. It just doesn't work very well. There's a reason that despite all of MS's efforts to promote it, including fucking with people who use Chrome, it's still used by an incredibly small minority of Win10 users. That's because it's just fucking awful.
It says something about far Microsoft has fallen that not even leveraging their power over the operating system can get them any penetration with their built-in browser. I'd say they have not only lost the browser war, they're no longer in the same browser universe. Part of it has to do with the fact that Edge is truly a horrible piece of software, and part of it is that Google has basically colonized Windows with Chrome.
As much as I dislike systemd, it's hardly the same thing at all. IE and Edge are applications that should be no more or less embedded than any other application. Systemd is a system-level component/utility. The equivalent would be demanding that Microsoft take out, say, the event logging system.
The 4chan crowd believes they're superior because they can... well, honestly I'm not sure what the 4chan crowd can do. I'd say they could probably manage a circle jerk, but then I imagine some of them would think an erection required pliers, and it would all go horribly wrong.
And why would they do that? It strikes me that no sane company would go around intentionally trying to piss off the executive branch of any government they were thinking of making an investment in.
To be fair, OpenVPN isn't really designed to obfuscate the nature of the traffic any more than IPSec does. Both are about creating secure tunnels, with OpenVPN being very easy to configure and maintain as opposed to the pain that is IPSec. I use OpenVPN a lot, both for our road warriors, and to create the secure tunnels between our locations. In that role it really is an incredibly nice piece of software. But if I were looking at making something whose intent was to disguise that I was encrypting traffic at all, it's not the tool to use. Now as I understand it OpenVPN is pretty modular, so I would imagine if someone were to come up with some other encryption mechanism meant more to get around deep pack inspection, that would probably work, but as I said, such methods will inevitably make for a slower tunnel, and as OpenVPN is more of an infrastructure VPN, I'm not sure it's quite the right tool for that job.