A thread on politics- have some balls and post

[Davemonkey]

I visited Aleppo in 2000. I have wonderful memories of the place and the people, same with Hama and Damascus. I was so hopeful of change in the Arab Spring but Hassad had the blood and his father's example to try and use force to keep the lid on. Unfortunately for everyone it wasn't the same situation his father faced and with the disaster next door in Iraq the chaos only grew.

The best felafal wrap I ever had was in Aleppo. I almost lost my wife in the souk there (she wandered into the bridal section with a fellow traveller, she is also the non-navigator of the pair of us). Saddens me all the time.

 

[3KZ is Football]

On the surface the logic behind this piece seems reasonable:

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...nge-engaging-constructively-with-hansonism-is

But by changing a few names and dates it suddenly has a whole different feel. The issue with Pauline Hanson and her supporters is not that we need to "understand them," or engage with them, it is that we need to protect people and our body politic from them. This means that mainstream politicians and the media need to rebut, rebuke and shun her at every level. The fact that people elected her is immaterial. People also elected National Socialists to the German Reichstag and voted for Hitler and the world found out at great cost the consequences of attempting to give them an International Group Hug.

If you have the patience ... see what you think.


Comprehending Adolf is not the challenge engaging constructively with Fascism is.


At his first press conference in the week following that September afternoon where Neville Chamberlain stood before the voters ashen faced at the airfield, briefly contemplating his own political mortality, enraged at the very prospect of something so divergent from the life plan, Hitler was, reassuringly, the Hitler of old.

It was like we’d all peeled back the lid of the tin at the back of the cupboard marked 1923 and there he was, perfectly preserved in aspic. Those piercing eyes, blue. The brown hair. The quaver in the voice. The righteous jut of the jaw. The stupendous scale of the feelings. The manifest disdain for facts and evidence.

Hitler strode across the Alexanderplatz in Berlin, spotlight trained on him, rugged up in a grey winter coat against the chill Berlin spring, ready to be disdained by the working press, a familiar ritual which that only endears the National Socialist leader to his rusted-on supporters: plucky Adolf, giving those pricks of journos a good kicking. Go Adolf. You show them Mein Furher. The Bolsheviks and non Aryans deserve everything they get.

The Foreign Press journalists didn’t hesitate before getting stuck in, ripping his xenophobic, incoherent, noxious manifesto apart, question after question. Adolf just raised his jaw an inch or two higher and sailed on, a battleship of righteousness, with the flotsam holding on gamely, flapping against the hull. Listening to the show back at my desk in London, I had the clear view of the disconnected spectator. Here was Adolf, being pecked relentlessly by a mob of magpies. Like Franco in Spain, attacks –and that’s what that press conference would look like to a person only glancing up periodically to peruse the show – are likely to make him stronger.

Why is this? Understanding that requires referencing the various reasons why he’s back. Hitler’s and the National Socialist Party’s continuing success in 1938 is in part because the popular press outside Germany has done a superb job of keeping Hitler in the spotlight as a quasi-political celebrity, partly because he appealed to Germans other politicians spent zero time talking to – the people stuck in the old economy with zero prospects of finding themselves recruited by industry

I also think the strength of his International showing is also about registering a gesture. He is a totem of the disdain many voters feel for politics as usual. Adolf Hitler is a raised middle digit on the floor of the World Stage. If the political class in London, Paris and Washington rounds collectively on the stranger in its midst, deploys the blunt instruments of gotcha and when did you stop beating your dog, this will only confirm the worst fears of some deeply alienated Germans that the system is rigged permanently against the interests of the people, that politics is about elites protecting their own patches.

As Robert Menzies noted in early July, treating Hitler as a “scorned species” is a monumental mistake. It expresses disdain for his supporters, who have as much right as anyone else to have their interests represented and it ultimately plays into his studied depiction of himself as put-upon outsider, which is the dynamic on which he trades.

Understanding Hitler’s context is simple enough. But we face another challenge. The problem is not so much comprehending Adolf. His shtick is now reasonably familiar. The contemporary problem is how we engage constructively with Hitlerism, and by constructively I actually mean deconstructively, which is our core business as journalists: calling out the snake oil, attempting to protect people from being manipulated.

Just as strategists have had to evolve their core methodologies as voters have evolved, journalists have to understand that the rules of our game are being rewritten as well. We have to understand that since Hitler coined the phrase the Big Lie in Mein Kampf journalists practise professionally in a post-truth environment, where increasingly, our audiences can increasingly choose to exist comfortably inside bubbles, selecting only the information and commentary that reinforces their views, rejecting other material.

The problem we have in facing up to the more toxic and corrosive elements of Hitlerism in 1938 (as opposed to the more orderly times in 1925) is that facts just don’t seem to matter as much as they once did. My innate respect for facts and reason and evidence remained largely intact until I watched the dynamic around Benito Mussolini play out during Italy’s gruelling political machinations in the 1920’s

I listened in horrified fascination from another country as the collective might of Italy’s greatest newspapers turned their guns on the nativist king, not with random take-downs, or savage hit jobs, but just with forensic journalism: countering Mussolini’s inflammatory nonsense with facts, and logic, and careful interrogation—all with no visible impact on Mussolini’s approval ratings.

I know enough of my own stagnant pond, the world of national affairs that intersects between includes news publications, rallies, posters and meetings, to know that political conversation increasingly feels like a giant exercise in confirmation bias. A great many people still consume their politics passively and genially, with a healthy dose of scepticism and a genuinely open and enquiring mind, but there is also an increasingly rancorous cohort of political followers who reject vehemently any information that does not reinforce their existing belief structure.

This cohort feels the whole press-political superstructure is lying to them and manipulating them, and countering this belief with exhaustive explanation sometimes only escalates the feelings of rage. More lies. More manipulations.

We can’t ignore these cultural trends, and we can’t ignore the gap between how we see ourselves and how some of our readers see us. The press see themselves as honest brokers, professional nit-pickers, pursuing the business of fact-checking and accountability, standing as an institutional check on executive overreach.

We work ferociously hard, harder than we have ever worked, and for leisure we go to films like Modern Times and feel good about ourselves and our understanding of the world. A great chunk of our audience still respects what we do, bless them. But another chunk sees us quite differently. They view the press as being the tame house pets of a busted political system; part of the jig, which that is now well and truly up.

William Percival Crozier, the Editor of the Guardian, captured these developments wonderfully well in a recent essay about how the wireless has disrupted the truth.

“Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the League of Nations as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of and other Fascist networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.”


What is common to these struggles—and what makes their resolution an urgent matter—is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth. This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as 1938 has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.”

Practising journalism in a post-fact environment is, in a way, more of an existential threat for journalism than technological change. Our whole function in a democracy does rest on an assumption that facts have broad-based currency, that there are shared principles around which societies can coalesce and public interest can be served. To discover that the power of agreed facts is on the wane is, professionally, like losing your moorings.

Intuiting the seeming inevitability of the post-fact, post-truth world, is a bit like enduring a head-on collision with the certainty of your own redundancy: what if, structurally, societally, journalism can no longer speak truth to power because no-one cares about us speaking truth to power anymore, because no-one trusts us either?

For the working journalist (as opposed to the working cypher for an undisclosed agenda, or working propagandist for their employer or their latest political paramour, or the non-working non-caring non-functioning hack), there really is no greater horror, because we know that journalism still matters. We know this, not as some statement of narcissism, as some abstract claim of entitlement, as some crotchety articulation of Paradise Lost, as some undignified foot stamp about our lost influence – we know it because the working journalist inhabits the same universe that powerful people inhabit.

We are not of that universe, but we enjoy privileged sightlines on it, enough to know that lies get told, sometimes monstrous ones, that corruption happens, that self-interest can often trump the greater good and the national interest. We know that the public does needs us to stand vigilant, sometimes as more threat than promise, as a structural check on bad behaviour, not because we deserve that honour, but because we have been conditioned our whole careers to serve the public, and most of us are intent on doing that for as long as someone will fund journalism.

I know, for example, that the following statement from Adolf Hitler’s manifesto is a statement unsupported by evidence: “Democracy has failed everywhere. It is negative and divisive, a weight that is drowning our once safe and cohesive society.” I know the proposed prescription for the problem is first, impossible and second, inflammatory, exhibiting the sort of sentiments that have in the grand sweep of history led great powers into destructive conflicts.

“National Socialism will abolish Democracy, allow Racial Discrimination and promote assimilation, nationalism, loyalty and pride in being a German.” This statement resonates with some people, particularly the losers of the Great Depression, but if you interrogate it it’s about as meaningful as placing a drive-through order at a restaurant: could I have Sauerkraut with a side of jingoism? Could I scapegoat someone else to feel better about myself and my prospects? Could we just send all the foreigners back home.

But in order to call out the falsehoods and dissembles and false comforts, we have to be trusted by our audiences, and we have to be self-aware enough to understand that at least some of our audiences now think that most of us are no better than the people we purport to keep honest: that we are all part of the same stinking, creaking, self-referential system that is increasingly cloaked in odium.

I’ve reported every German election since 1919. I’ve never lived through an election cycle where press commentary mattered less than in the 1938 campaign. Neither major-party leader felt any great pressure to subject themselves to rigorous interviews. The Guardian whipped itself into a frenzy about the evils of National Socialism day after day, loyally putting down Fascism in all its forms – and the result of all the histrionics and all the dire predictions of Armageddon from the Intelligentsia and their ilk was a positive swing to The National Socialists in the March of Brandenburg, Germany’s most populous state. Take that, Orwell, said the good voters of Berlin.

Part of the declining cultural relevance of the mainstream media is due to forces entirely beyond our control. It’s predominantly technological change, which has allowed consumers to access their own information on the wireless without the pesky middle-people – and again, technology, allowing public figures to communicate with voters directly without the press filter. But if we think that’s all it is we are deluding ourselves. We have to look in the mirror. Our intemperate excesses have also discounted our moral value. Our own behaviour has helped fuel a lack of trust, which leads inevitably to an erosion of our core mandate.

And when we have discounted our own currency, how then can we help ensure that voters aren’t manipulated by a new mob of charlatans: the nostalgia merchants and the new protectionists, and the xenophobes, and the reflexive nationalists, and the populists who proliferate and prosper in truthiness, and the people who lied to the voters in Germany to help generate the National Socialist vote, to faux everymen like such as Adolf Hitler, who thinks politics is not about service but about publicity and about ruling the world?

I don’t see an easy solution to the current impasse. But I suspect the way back is through understanding rather than glib judgment, and through resisting the temptation to style a genuine crisis of civic integrity as an abstract culture war between elites and people too foolish to understand their own interests – as if that binary, reductionist view of the problem was anything other than a cheap framing device to structure yet another hot take on a complex phenomenon in time for deadline.

From a journalist’s perspective it does involve understanding Adolf Hitler and the context sitting behind his dominance. That doesn’t mean white-washing his manifestly intolerable positions. It doesn’t mean excusing him, or launching apologias, or finding reasons why he’s terribly misunderstood: “some of my best friends are Nazis”.

It means looking him directly in the eye. It means comprehending him and the voters he represents. It means acknowledging that there are people who voted for Adolf Hitler because they are afraid of the future for entirely rational reasons, because governments have failed to give them hope for the future, and we need to acknowledge that perhaps part of the reason politicians have been insufficiently attentive to the losers is because journalists – under pressure, battling shrinking newsrooms, unable to get out into the field – haven’t done enough to tell their stories.

 

[3KZ is Football]

Another disturbing leak about the treatment of refugee asylum seekers held in Australia's Nauruan Concentration Camp.

https://www.theguardian.com/austral...rowing-accounts-of-sexual-abuse-and-self-harm

 

[brizrider]

Gee this Trump fella seems to be in a spot of bother.

 

[Hollow Knight]

Gee this Trump fella seems to be in a spot of bother.

Yeah, although his whole campaign has been a case study in "scandal hits... polls go up".

Pussygate seems a bridge too far, even for him though.

I'll give him one thing... he's rather brave (or incredibly naive) running for President with so many skeletons in his closet.

 

[acuguy]

I don't see this as too big an issue. American Presidents have a history of infidelity. I look forward to Hillary saying something tomorrow at the debate and Donald throwing something about her hubby getting fellatio off his secretary when Hillary was 1st lady.

 

[Hollow Knight]

I don't see this as too big an issue. American Presidents have a history of infidelity. I look forward to Hillary saying something tomorrow at the debate and Donald throwing something about her hubby getting fellatio off his secretary when Hillary was 1st lady.

I don't think it's the suggestion of infidelity that is the issue with this one, everyone knows he is a serial cheater. It's more about how it sheds light on his general objectification and demeaning approach to women and his seeming sense entitlement to them (regardless of consent). Not good when there are rape allegations surrounding him as well.

 

[acuguy]

I don't think it's the suggestion of infidelity that is the issue with this one, everyone knows he is a serial cheater. It's more about how it sheds light on his general objectification and demeaning approach to women and his seeming sense entitlement to them (regardless of consent). Not good when there are rape allegations surrounding him as well.

I think Donald is timing this controversy at the right stage of the campaign, this will blow over by the 20th October and then Hillary will be able to have the final massive controversy right on the eve of the election. Great move from the Trump strategist. #circus

 

[dlanod]

Yeah, although his whole campaign has been a case study in "scandal hits... polls go up".

Pussygate seems a bridge too far, even for him though.

I'll give him one thing... he's rather brave (or incredibly naive) running for President with so many skeletons in his closet.

When your own side is coming out against you, it's probably a step too far. Enough casual Republicans should follow their lead to doom them, given a couple of percentage swing against him will basically end the election as a contest.

I honestly don't know that he expected to get this far. I think he joined the primaries as a promotional stunt, similar to Cain or other fringe candidates, but hit the zeitgeist.

 

[MacMum]

This is by far the worst election campaign I can remember.....the two of them are making America the laughing stock of the world.......and to think one of them will be the leader of the so called leading country of the free world.

The USA is in such a terrible state of affairs on so many levels, yet they tell others how to run their countries. They need to start sorting out their own backyard first.

 

[Caiphus]

This is by far the worst election campaign I can remember.....the two of them are making America the laughing stock of the world.......and to think one of them will be the leader of the so called leading country of the free world.

The USA is in such a terrible state of affairs on so many levels, yet they tell others how to run their countries. They need to start sorting out their own backyard first.

I don't know whether Hillary has really done much wrong. The "crooked Hillary" stuff has largely been debunked by independent sources now yet the allegations are sticking around like a bad smell largely due to sexism.

There are some perfectly valid criticisms of Hillary, mainly surrounding her neo-conservatism, but that is just something we have to deal with considering the whole political system having taken a hook turn to the right post the 80s.

 

[The Flying Belgian]

If Trump makes it from here, the USA will be entering peak idiocracy.

 

[acuguy]

Just watching the debate now, surely America can produce 2 better candidates. They are both terrible. Trump is a maniac and Clinton is geez I don't know what to say about her.

 

[Skoob]

Yeah, although his whole campaign has been a case study in "scandal hits... polls go up".

Pussygate seems a bridge too far, even for him though.

I'll give him one thing... he's rather brave (or incredibly naive) running for President with so many skeletons in his closet.

I'd run with arrogant to megalomaniacal.

 

[Hollow Knight]

Mike Baird.

"One last chance to reform themselves".

Horseshit... if anything, this backflip has just given the "industry" another reminder how much political power it wields.

Those poor animals.

 

[MacMum]

There will be legal action taken by some, I'm guessing. Apparently some have sold up property or sold their dogs, given to other trainers etc...a big stuff up all round.

The industry itself will need to really change their ways, they are on their one and only chance to keep the sport going. Their use of live baiting must stop. Has never been necessary imo anyway.

While rearing or being trained for racing, the dogs will be well looked after.....it's the after that is a major concern.

Hoping more and more people give consideration to giving a greyhound a home, they truely are a magnificent, gentle pet.....big babies

 

[Skoob]

How good is the internet?

 

[Schache It Off]

CMON TRUMP!

 

[Schache It Off]

OMG BREXIT & TRUMP. WHAT MORE CAN I WISH SANTA?

 

[luthor]

If Trump makes it from here, the USA will be entering peak idiocracy.

5.....4......3.....2.........1.................and Cue it!!!!

.....peak idiocracy just about achieved.

 

[Hollow Knight]

Yep, collective mass suicide of a nation.

Man did the pollsters universally read this election wrong or what.

 

[iBeng]

Yep, collective mass suicide of a nation.

Man did the pollsters universally read this election wrong or what.

Tickets to Mars going cheap in a few months time.

 

[iBeng]

Worth a watch, there is language though so be aware:

 

[Elixuh]

 

[Cooties]

One bonus of Trump winning is that I'll confidently be able to quit my job, go travel and see some of the world before it inevitably ends... mm, silver linings