[barmar]

Winstonm, on 2021-January-03, 14:11, said:

OK, you Trumpsters. How do you justify the felony crime (on tape) of solicitation of a felony? (WaPo and WaPo also has the tape)

The thing I found interesting about this phone call is that Trump actually seems to believe his own bullshit.

I've been assuming that Trump and his legal team know that there wasn't really widespread fraud, and they've been bloviating about it to rile up the base. But like when Woodward caught Trump admitting that he knew COVID-19 was serious, I expect there to be a difference in private conversations than public appearances.

But on this phone call, he repeated his claims that he actually won the election. You wouldn't expect that when talking to a co-conspirator, unless he's actually so deranged that he really thinks it's true.

[Winstonm]

barmar, on 2021-January-03, 18:16, said:

The thing I found interesting about this phone call is that Trump actually seems to believe his own bullshit.

I've been assuming that Trump and his legal team know that there wasn't really widespread fraud, and they've been bloviating about it to rile up the base. But like when Woodward caught Trump admitting that he knew COVID-19 was serious, I expect there to be a difference in private conversations than public appearances.

But on this phone call, he repeated his claims that he actually won the election. You wouldn't expect that when talking to a co-conspirator, unless he's actually so deranged that he really thinks it's true.

Mary Trump, Donald's niece and a trained psychologist, has stated that Donald is so psychologically ill that he cannot distinguish his lies from truth, and that what makes him such a successful liar is that he so needs to have the positive feedback of his lies that he actually believes they are true when he says them - which can be the next sentence and can completely reverse positions - but he will believe both when he says them.

From Mother Jones:

Quote

So could she answer for me a question that I’ve pondered for years: Does Donald Trump believe his own lies? After all, does Trump truly think he is the smartest guy of all time, that he knows more than the generals, that he’s been more right about the coronavirus pandemic than anyone else, that his polls are great, that he has achieved more than any other president, and blah, blah, blah? “Very often he is lying to himself,” Mary said. “It depends on the circumstances.” She continued: “The more stress he’s under, the more besieged he feels, the more likely it is that the distance between the telling the lie and believing it is the truth is decreasing. We’re getting to the point it’s instantaneous.”

I pressed her on this point. Does he lie (so much!) as a means to get what he wants and knows this is what he is doing—or is he delusional? “It’s a combination,” she said. “Is it just delusion or is it a tactic? I think it might start out as a tactic but it ends up being a delusion because his need to perpetuate a narrative about himself—a very specific narrative about himself as the winner, as always being right—is decades old. It’s a defense mechanism to protect him against the reality of who he really is…If he had any insight into that, I don’t know that he could bear it.”

[pilowsky]

barmar, on 2021-January-03, 18:16, said:

The thing I found interesting about this phone call is that Trump actually seems to believe his own bullshit.

I've been assuming that Trump and his legal team know that there wasn't really widespread fraud, and they've been bloviating about it to rile up the base. But like when Woodward caught Trump admitting that he knew COVID-19 was serious, I expect there to be a difference in private conversations than public appearances.

But on this phone call, he repeated his claims that he actually won the election. You wouldn't expect that when talking to a co-conspirator, unless he's actually so deranged that he really thinks it's true.

While listening to the call, the thing that came across to me was the lack of fluency in Trump's voice. It sounded to me as though his cronies were feeding him lines that he mangled into Trumpisms.
The tone on the other hand was that of a 14-year-old boy spurned by a girl who he had asked out on date.
Whining, pathetic and full of nonsense.

[kenberg]

As a 14 year old boy I won overwhelmingly. . Amy claim that a girl once turned me down is fake news. I have directed the secretary of state to find at least 14,000 girls who accepted my offer of a date. They all said I was the most terrific guy they had ever been out with. I am incredibly good looking.

[pilowsky]

kenberg, on 2021-January-03, 19:19, said:

As a 14 year old boy I won overwhelmingly. . Amy claim that a girl once turned me down is fake news. I have directed the secretary of state to find at least 14,000 girls who accepted my offer of a date. They all said I was the most terrific guy they had ever been out with. I am incredibly good looking.

Well, that may be true but what about all those discarded girls. My people tell me that they saw thousands of them being shuffled out the back door.
Fathers are very angry.

No doubt in my mind that these allegations constitute proof.
I demand a commission of inquiry before we certify Ken's amorous exploits.

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2021-January-03, 19:19, said:

As a 14 year old boy I won overwhelmingly. . Amy claim that a girl once turned me down is fake news. I have directed the secretary of state to find at least 14,000 girls who accepted my offer of a date. They all said I was the most terrific guy they had ever been out with. I am incredibly good looking.

When you're a math star they let you do it. Grab 'em by the Pi.

[Zelandakh]

Winstonm, on 2021-January-03, 21:06, said:

When you're a math star they let you do it. Grab 'em by the Pi.

Poor Polly:

Once upon a time pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the edge of a singularly large matrix.

Now Polly was convergent and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never enter such an array without her brackets on. Poll however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored these conditions on the ground that they were unnecessary, and made her way amongst the complex elements.

Rows and columns enveloped her on both sides. Tangents approached her surface; she became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning point she tripped over a square root which was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she was differentiated once more she found herself alone, apparently in a non-Euclidian space.

She was being watched however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear co-ordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. Was she still convergent, he wondered. He decided to integrate at once.

Hearing a vulgar fraction behind her, Polly turned round and saw Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once by his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms that he was bent on no good.

"Eureka" she gasped.

"Ho Ho" he said, "what a symmetric little polynomial you are. I can see you're absolutely bubbling over with secs."

"Oh Sir", she protested, "keep away from me, I haven't got my brackets on."

"Calm yourself, my dear," said our suave operator, "your fears are purely imaginary."

"i,i," she thought. "Perhaps he's homogeneous then."

"What order are you," the brute demanded.

"Seventeen", replied Polly.

Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on yet", he said.

"Of course no," Polly exclaimed indignantly. "I'm absolutely convergent".

"Come, come," said Curly, "lets off to a decimal place I know and I'll take you to the limit".

"Never" gasped Polly.

"EXCHLF" he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He started at her significant places and began smoothing her points of inflection. Poor Polly, all was up. She felt his digit tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence was gone for ever.

There was no mercy, for Curly was a Heavyside operator. He integrated by partial fractions. The complex beast even went all the way round and did a contour integration. What an indignity. To be multiply connected at her first integration. Curly went on operating until he was absolutely and completely orthogonal.

When Polly got home that evening her mother noticed that she was truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly increased monotonically. Finally, she generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place until she was driven to distraction.

The moral of the story is this: If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom.

[awm]

There are a dozen Republican senators and over a hundred congresspeople trying to overturn the results of an election, without any evidence of fraud. Will there be any consequences (either legal or political) for their attempt to overthrow democracy (which some have equated to sedition)? How about for Trump's attempts to bully governors and state legislators into ignoring the voters of their state and declaring him the winner?

Given my experience of the Democratic party (and its unwillingness to "play hardball" and insistence on seeing the Republicans as a reasonable party that can be compromised with regardless of how many norms and even laws they violate) my guess would be no. This seems very bad (in the longer term) for American democracy.

I don't really think we can throw these people in jail, but some interrogation before seating them in Congress might've been a start ("Why should we seat you when you allege massive fraud in the election in your own state?") or at least calling this out loudly and publicly in the news media. But Democratic leaders are mostly silent on this topic, apparently just assuming it will blow over and Republicans will somehow magically "return to normal" when Biden is inaugurated.

[johnu]

kenberg, on 2021-January-03, 19:19, said:

As a 14 year old boy I won overwhelmingly. . Amy claim that a girl once turned me down is fake news. I have directed the secretary of state to find at least 14,000 girls who accepted my offer of a date. They all said I was the most terrific guy they had ever been out with. I am incredibly good looking.

And you had big hands and big feet.

[johnu]

awm, on 2021-January-04, 00:49, said:

There are a dozen Republican senators and over a hundred congresspeople trying to overturn the results of an election, without any evidence of fraud. Will there be any consequences (either legal or political) for their attempt to overthrow democracy (which some have equated to sedition)? How about for Trump's attempts to bully governors and state legislators into ignoring the voters of their state and declaring him the winner?

Given my experience of the Democratic party (and its unwillingness to "play hardball" and insistence on seeing the Republicans as a reasonable party that can be compromised with regardless of how many norms and even laws they violate) my guess would be no. This seems very bad (in the longer term) for American democracy.

I don't really think we can throw these people in jail, but some interrogation before seating them in Congress might've been a start ("Why should we seat you when you allege massive fraud in the election in your own state?") or at least calling this out loudly and publicly in the news media. But Democratic leaders are mostly silent on this topic, apparently just assuming it will blow over and Republicans will somehow magically "return to normal" when Biden is inaugurated.

I think this is the beginning of the end of the union. It's time to admit that letting the confederate states back into the union was a bigly mistake and it is in everybody's interests to let them secede and form a new confederacy (without slavery this time). But even in the reddest states there are usually blue counties, and red counties in the bluest states. So, let individual counties secede to join into a new country. Red America can careen wildly back to the 18th century (or maybe back to dark ages), while Blue America can get things in order to get ready for the 22nd century.

[Cyberyeti]

johnu, on 2021-January-04, 01:58, said:

And you had big hands and big feet.

You know what they say about men with big feet ............. they're clowns

[shyams]

johnu, on 2021-January-04, 02:06, said:

I think this is the beginning of the end of the union.

I really hope such a day never comes. The USA may, at this time, appear very divided but it won't take much to heal these superficial wounds. The one thing that will completely destroy the USA (and lead to the destruction of the "Western World" alliance) is any form of splintering of the UNITED States of America.

[y66]

Julia Azari at Mischiefs of Faction said:

Trump broke the presidency

I realize this probably seems a little stark compared to my usual overly complicated and ambivalent observations. But everything that has happened between the 2020 election and now really clarified my view on this. The essence of the American presidency is that its powers are in many ways unspecified, but their expansion and extension has nearly always been connected to the president’s duty to defend the Constitution, or to protect the security of the nation. Some of these expansions of power have been wrong-headed, some of have been outright bullshit. But someone in the White House has pretty consistently tried to make that linkage.

Trump has changed that. After the 2020 election, he transgressed the boundaries that keep the president out of the Electoral College process – a state process – and pressured state and local officials. He used his Twitter account to advocate for “overturning” the election. He spoke about a military coup. Under these conditions, the oath of office no longer has meaning. The take care clause no longer has meaning. This all came as a shock but not a surprise, nothing we have seen in 4 years has made us expect anything different, or demonstrated that Trump and those around him have any real understanding of the Constitution. Trump occupied the office, took up its powers and its symbolic influence. But he neglected its civically sacred obligation to direct those powers toward the Constitution and the nation, co-opting them instead for his personal and political ends.

Biden ran in part on restoring a more conventional approach to the office, and it seems likely that he will try to bring the powers of the office back into line with its Constitutional purpose. But we’ve seen once that these can be severed, and without complete rebuke. Both Trump and Biden, in very distinct ways, ran campaigns of preservation and restoration. And now Biden will inherit the altered political landscape that Trump will leave behind. The need to reconnect presidential power and national interest could go in a number of directions. It may provide opportunities for subsequent presidents to spell out civic purpose and Constitutional meaning. It may also be just the beginning, a dangerous precedent for a truly unhindered executive power.

As the year and the Trump presidency both come to a close, we’ve heard a lot of questions about whether American political institutions “held up.” But institutions are more complicated than that. Our institutions feel a bit like everything at the end of 2020 – fundamentally altered and yet also stalled. They have proven flexible in some ways, rigid and stagnant in others, and in other cases, highly susceptible to the will and ideas of those who hold power within them. Institutions that can’t adapt seem potentially more brittle than ever. The last four years – not just 2020 – have expanded the range of what we might see as politically possible. As we head into 2021 and a new administration, these possibilities stare us down, wonderful and terrifying all at once.

[kenberg]

I really ike the Julia Azari article,

Here is another portion:

Quote

As I've written before, parties are conservative, risk-averse institutions, and the Democratic Party has a complicated and fragmented electoral imperative. Over the summer, I predicted that the wave of protests against police violence and racial injustice, coupled with the pandemic and the struggling economy, would be a change election and that the Democratic Party would be the obvious, if somewhat ill-fitting, vehicle for that change.

The November election results carried a more ambiguous message. While Biden won a decisive victory, the Democrats lost House seats and failed to pick up Senate seats they had hoped to win. Turnout was up among Democrats, but also among Republicans. And fights over whether Democrats had tacked too far to the left – and whether slogans like "defund the police" had harmed the party despite not being part of the platform or the Biden policy program.

There are a lot of questions here – about messaging, about the electoral calculus of a party disadvantaged by political geography, compounded in some cases by redistricting efforts. But there are also questions about the tensions within the Democratic Party over increasing diversity, attending to economic inequality, and yet maintaining the status quo. It seems even clearer now than it did a year ago that this is Obama's party, and that this delicate balancing act is an important part of his legacy.

As the Dem leaders attempt to get back House seats and figure how to prevail in 2024, I really hope that they can resolve the dispute over whether the "Defund the police" slogan cost them votes. Then they can move on to less obvious questions.

[barmar]

awm, on 2021-January-04, 00:49, said:

I don't really think we can throw these people in jail, but some interrogation before seating them in Congress might've been a start ("Why should we seat you when you allege massive fraud in the election in your own state?") or at least calling this out loudly and publicly in the news media. But Democratic leaders are mostly silent on this topic, apparently just assuming it will blow over and Republicans will somehow magically "return to normal" when Biden is inaugurated.

The Dems are in a Catch-22. They can't invoke "massive fraud" as a reason not to seat the new Congress members if they also dispute the fraud in the first place.

The Republicans just don't care about the inconsistency, because their constituents don't care. They're happy to claim that their elections were legitimate while disputing the presidential results.

They also can't use planned sedition as a reason not to seat the members. If they actually carry it out, it might be a legitimate reason to oust them.

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2021-January-04, 11:02, said:

I really ike the Julia Azari article,

Here is another portion:
[/font][/font][/color]

As the Dem leaders attempt to get back House seats and figure how to prevail in 2024, I really hope that they can resolve the dispute over whether the "Defund the police" slogan cost them votes. Then they can move on to less obvious questions.

I din't think there is any doubt that "Defund the Police" cost votes as voters tend to not be nuanced when it comes to sloganeering. In many, maybe even most minds, Defund the Police is still considered an anti-police slogan rather than a pro-minority suggestion. What the Democratic party needs to adopt is a universal pledge that when it comes to slogans, if you have to explain it, don't use it.

[Winstonm]

The most important lesson from the Trump presidency is that character matters - more than anything else when it comes to leaders. The Trump campaign should have flopped and died the instant he mocked a disabled reporter. That it didn't shows the deplorable characterization was (and is) accurate.


WaPo

Quote

The great virtue of President Trump’s smoking subversion tape is that it clarifies the goals of all concerned.

The president’s stated objective is not to expose abuses in the electoral system. It is to pressure the Georgia secretary of state into manipulating the electoral system to squeeze out 11,780 additional votes — Trump specifies the exact number — in his favor. His cynical, delusional justifications are beside the point. He would say anything — invent any lie, allege any conspiracy, defame any opponent, spread any discredited rumor — to perpetuate his power.

This, in turn, illuminates the motives of his congressional enablers. In light of Trump’s clarifying call, the term “enablers” now seems too weak. When Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and their GOP colleagues try to disrupt and overturn a free and fair election, they are no longer just allies of a subversive; they become instruments of subversion. They not only help a liar; they become liars. They not only empower conspiracy theories; they join a conspiracy against American democracy. They not only excuse institutional arson; they set fire to the Constitution and dance around the flame.

This post has been edited by Winstonm: 2021-January-04, 13:48

[kenberg]

Winstonm, on 2021-January-04, 13:21, said:

I din't think there is any doubt that "Defund the Police" cost votes as voters tend to not be nuanced when it comes to sloganeering. In many, maybe even most minds, Defund the Police is still considered an anti-police slogan rather than a pro-minority suggestion. What the Democratic party needs to adopt is a universal pledge that when it comes to slogans, if you have to explain it, don't use it.

According to the article, there is still an argument within the party over whether it, the defunding slogan, and similar matters, did or did not cost votes.
"And fights over whether Democrats had tacked too far to the left – and whether slogans like "defund the police" had harmed the party despite not being part of the platform or the Biden policy program"
What's it called when someone cannot see what is in front of their face, their opinion being driven by what they wish were true?

There are several things that need to be addressed if the Ds actually wish to win some congressional elections. I hope that they do it.

[Zelandakh]

I think it is completely ridiculous, Ken. In fact, when I heard the slogan I assumed it was one the Republicans had thought up to misrepresent the policy and could not believe it when I heard actual Dems using it. How hard is it to use a slogan like "Support the police for all" or something along those lines, where you emphasise that you want to provide the police with additional features - social workers for domestic calls, retraining for identifying potential unintended racism, etc - to make sure that they are an effective force that everyone can feel proud of. Same policies but think how differently that will come over to conservatives and moderates (and police officers themselves) than a slogan that sounds like supporting anarchy. If Dem leadership figures do not understand this then I really feel sad (and worried) for American democracy give the apparent nature of the alternative in the last years.

[Cyberyeti]

The problem with "Defund the police" is it's a slogan that is wilfully misinterpreted by political opponents (much the same as bits of the right insisting BLM means you don't value white lives). As it was explained to me by a proponent in the UK, it was to remove a lot of things the police currently do from them and give them back to more appropriate services (mental health etc).