President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I’m a floater. Keep ‘em guessing.

 

Notice the phrasing:

By MAGGIE HABERMAN and JONATHAN MARTIN
NOVEMBER 28, 2017

WASHINGTON — Shortly after his victory last year, Donald J. Trump began revisiting one of his deepest public humiliations: the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape of him making vulgar comments about women.

Despite his public acknowledgment of the recording’s authenticity in the final days of the presidential campaign — and his hasty videotaped apology under pressure from his advisers — Mr. Trump as president-elect began raising the prospect with allies that it may not have been him on the tape after all.

Most of Mr. Trump’s aides ignored his changing story. But in January, shortly before his inauguration, Mr. Trump told a Republican senator that he wanted to investigate the recording that had him boasting about grabbing women’s genitals.

 

I want to try to give you an intelligent reply here, but you'll have to forgive me if I don't express myself well. This is complicated. Sorry if it's long.

I will confess to a long history of absolutism—of black-and-white, us-and-them type thinking. I don't know why I see the world that way. All I can tell you is that it's my instinctive way of thinking. I don't think it's a good thing, however, and I am trying to evolve and become more nuanced in how I see the world. It's not easy, and it's a constant battle against my base self. It's like fighting against the tides.

That being said, I understand intellectually that you (one) can argue against a certain facet of a side and still be on that side. I don't think of you as a Nazi sympathizer, for instance. I don't expect you like Nazis very much. I know we disagree on the treatment of Nazis. I believe that once you start standing on street corners, advocating for the extermination of other people based on their race, you lose the right not to get your teeth punched out. My understanding is that you abhor violence in all its forms, or at least most of its forms, and see something animalistic in my approach. That's fine, and I get that. That doesn't make you a Nazi, and it might not make you less of a Nazi-hater than I am. (I think there is a debate to be had there.) It just means we are two different versions of the same side.

When it comes to climate change, yes, I understand that not everyone who believes in climate change believes in it the same way. But you know that there are deniers out there, and for the life of me I don't understand their position. The scientific and anecdotal evidence that climate change is real is overwhelming. So when someone argues against climate change, I don't think they are good. I think they are either dumb or disingenuous, and I don't have a lot of time for either of those things.

I see the abortion debate differently—and much more difficult to solve—because it isn't really a fact-based argument. I see climate change as almost mathematical, so that its deniers are now arguing that 2+2 doesn't equal 4. I see abortion as a subject where both sides can hold differing but honestly held and valid opinions. And I can also see how people who are pro-choice might want to draw lines in different places—so they are on the same side but in different places on the spectrum of choice.

I get that, I really do, and I see that in the arguments here, especially yours. I used to lump you in with the Dick/YF/QYFW quarter (I also initially thought you were someone else I didn't like very much who had made his return here), but then I realized that I learn things from your posts and they make me think, which I can't say is true for those I once thought were your brethren.

I still run into trouble when I can't see why someone is arguing on behalf of certain things that strike me as impossible positions for good people to hold. I am still not much for the devil's advocacy, which too often seems a form of intellectual wankery. Trump is there for me, as is any defense of him. I don't believe a person of any real decency or substantive conscience can support Trump and his presidency. He's just too awful—the evidence, as it is in climate change, is too overwhelming. So I approach any "debate" there with cold, dead eyes.

That doesn't mean I approach every debate that way, or even every side of every debate that way. You sometimes take stands or argue for things in which I have no belief, but I try to hear you out, because frankly, you've earned my attention. Others have not. I don't treat all posters equally, just as I don't treat all real-world opinions equally. I consider the source. You do this, too, I believe—like when you thought I was being somehow disingenuous in starting my "Greatest One Liners" thread, which I still don't see. But that's human nature.

As is, I would submit to you, different types of thinking. And trying to change those ways of thinking. What matters—I believe, and I hope—is that we all deal with each other with sincerity. The instant I feel someone is being insincere, I revert to the position I've held for as long as I can remember: There are two sides, and one is wrong, and one is right.

 

Flea or Anthony Keidis?

 

Frequently drunk.

 

Both of those phrases are accurate. So is "bragging about sexual assault."

It turns out English is infinitely malleable.

 

So I shouldn’t get my Ph.D in Mississippi?

 

I’m not going to relitigate it. I find the decisions interesting is all.

 

Michael-
Obama's wrong worldview showed he had little to no experience ever running a profitmaking business.

 

I would have to research it but I think the humanities might contradict that so-called law of gravity.

 

Plenty of delusion to go around.