Wednesday, February 07, 2018

More on Jordan Peterson



The Guardian asks how dangerous he is, and appears to answer: "very."

For more on professor Peterson and his ideas, I recommend the fruits of my female labor on this blog.* 

First, the post in which I explain why Peterson's facts didn't win the famous (seen six million plus times on YouTube) Channel 4 interview, even though he did win it, because the interviewer was unprepared.

This matters, as the right wing folks keep telling us that Peterson's arguments in that debate were the truth.

Second, do read my long review of his book. (The links are in order of the three posts in the series.)

I spent a lot of energy on it, and it's a pretty good response to all sorts of essentialist Damore-type arguments about why women suck in STEM and also why women doing so well in college in general also sucks!

I wanted to put many of the references in one place, and they are in the end notes to the three posts.  You can ignore those if you wish, but you might want to bookmark the posts and put that in your debate arsenal.

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and (added later) this article.

Tuesday, February 06, 2018

Trump Wants A Military Parade


Yes, he does.  And he just may get one.

Let's give him some models he might want to use for it.  Here's Berlin 1933:




And here's North Korea in 2017



Russia in 2016




Turkey in 2014



My thoughts on this? 

First, Trump has a mental age of about five years.  He wants what he wants and it doesn't really matter if what he wants is good for the country. 

Second, there is no particular reason for a military parade.  No special anniversary of the country, for instance.  This parade is just for Donald Trump, I guess.   And that smells of a dictatorship, even of totalitarianism.

Third, it might be difficult to criticize the parade without that being used (in the fake news bubble) as a criticism of the US military, whether it is intended for that, too, or not.  This could be part of Trump's plan (and part of the greater plan to truly tear the country apart).

And fourth, boasting about its military might is below par for a country with the largest, most humongous military budget on the globe.  It comes across as menacing, threatening and bullying.  It certainly doesn't signal great self-confidence in the fundamental values of the United States.

Four Thoughts On The Current Stage Of The Trump Reich



1.  It's un-American and even treasonous not to applaud when Our Supreme Leader gives good labor market news.  So says Our Supreme Leader, and therefore this must be true.  Well, it would be true if the United States already were a dictatorship.

2.  The Trump administration approach to preventing and controlling pandemics could serve as a metaphor of many of the changes it has created.  The changes all share the view that nothing bad will ever happen, and that, say,  all firms only think of the best of their customers, so it's unnecessary to have safety regulations at work or at home, or rules which protect the environment or even an office intended to protect the interest of consumers. 

Besides, by the time the next catastrophe happens, Trump might already be gone, and his friends, too.  With the money bags, filled from the government coffers?

Whatever the case about that might be, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are going to cut their pandemic prevention efforts by eighty percent.  This is because of lack of funds:

Most of the funding comes from a one-time, five-year emergency package that Congress approved to respond to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. About $600 million was awarded to the CDC to help countries prevent infectious-disease threats from becoming epidemics. That money is slated to run out by September 2019. Despite statements from President Trump and senior administration officials affirming the importance of controlling outbreaks, officials and global infectious-disease experts are not anticipating that the administration will budget additional resources.
A pandemic is unlikely to stay out of the United States, even if it begins in some other country, and the odds of another pandemic happening in the next few years are fairly high, if the past can be used to predict the future. 

But the Trump administration doesn't seem to care, perhaps because it is an administration staffed by people who adore Trump, rather than by people who have the skills and experience necessary for the job?  Or because it is an administration not for the American people, but only for Trump's real base (the Koch brothers, the Mercer family and others in the one percent)?  Or both?

3.  Something related is taking place inside the State Department which is slowly turning into a ghost town, largely, because Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wants it that way.

But the deeper concern I have about those changes is this (from last December):

Elizabeth Shackelford, who most recently served as a political officer based in Nairobi for the U.S. mission to Somalia, wrote to Tillerson that she reluctantly had decided to quit because the administration had abandoned human rights as a priority and shown disdain for the State Department’s diplomatic work, according to her letter, obtained by Foreign Policy.
...
The State Department’s role in internal government debates also had “diminished,” she wrote, with the White House handing over authority to the Pentagon to shape the country’s foreign policy. Meanwhile, unfilled vacancies and proposed budget and staffing cuts had left the department adrift, with weakened influence inside the administration and on the ground, she wrote.

Bolds are mine.  If the Pentagon is to shape the foreign policy of the United States, what kind of policies should we expect?  And if the US abandons human rights as a priority, while showing disdain for diplomatic work, what kind of a world will then come about? 

My guess is that it will be one in which human rights, including women's rights, matter not at all, while warfare matters very much indeed, though probably not in the sense of trying to prevent the slaughter wars cause.

Am I quite incorrect if all this sounds very much like the choice not to care about other people, the choice never to use "soft" options and the choice to always blow the war horns?  What is the role the Trumpites see for this country?  Something like Turkey or Russia?  Well, I guess Angela Merkel is now the leader of the liberal West.

4.  Last but not least, the recent stock market plunge.  Our Supreme Leader told us often that the credit for the bullish stock market was his.  So what about yesterday's deep and dramatic nosedive in that market?

The result is that a president who tossed aside traditional presidential caution in cheerleading the stock market now stands poised to take the blame for any correction.
“This is a risk that the president clearly set himself up for,” said Charles Gabriel of Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington research firm. “Until now, Trump’s had kind of a free ride in this market and taken so much credit for it, even though so much of it was due to easy-money policies from Janet Yellen and the Fed. Now she’s out the door and volatility is back.”
 So.  But at least he got rid of that woman in the Fed.