Trump is only guilty of one thing

Trump is guilty of just one thing… ignorance. He is deeply ignorant about politics, the world, humanity, philosophy and real values, which means even about life itself. He basically caricatures everything and uses constant hyperbole as a cover for this deep ignorance. As far as I can see he has near-zero understanding at the philosophical level.

And yet this is precisely what makes him valuable to us.

The current system of neoliberal cronyism has transformed America, and to a smaller extent the EU also, into one of the worst versions of itself. The America that existed in and right after WWII has been entirely changed. Many things came together to achieve this change, but regardless it has happened. The US is essentially its own worst enemy, and many people around the world no longer see the US as a sign of freedom, hope, justice, rationality; they see it as a sign of warfare and death, hypocrisy, and shameless exploitative capitalism.

Hillary will continue the trend that we are on. She is a part of the neoliberal system and has nothing to gain by upending it, even if she could or wanted to, which she couldn’t and doesn’t. US influence is already under fire because of these contradictions and hypocrisies, which really rose to the fore under Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1 and 2, Clinton and Obama. Each of these presidents expanded the neoliberal contradiction that is eating away at the heart of American and the ideals it used to stand for (rationality, equality, tolerance, freedom, justice, and human genius and greatness). These are each philosophical values; America may only have stood for some of these implicitly and still with many faults and contradictions, but nonetheless it stood for them, or rather they were historically instantiated within it.

Now the much larger contradiction of modern-day America has essentially wiped out much of those past gains. The people and the values are still here, the ground level hasn’t really changed that much at all in America, but the overt level of values, power, structural forms has changed; the image that is presented to the world, the actions, the rhetoric, and the loss of will to truth, all of this is what the rest of humanity sees when it looks at America. Yes it is still visible to see the good, truth-reflecting parts too, but those are increasingly pushed to the side.

So, can Trump do something about this? I would think that is deep ignorance is his virtue here. He has some very simply ideas about how to fix things, and unfortunately he has been brainwashed for many years by extreme right-wing talk radio, but other than this I think he could really do some positive changes. For one thing he would seemingly not have the will to continue the imperialism, but new economic arrangements would be needed, and I think he is enough of an instinctual businessman to find them. He might not seek out the necessities that will force that instinctive potency to bear, but I think those necessities will become apparent on their own. He might also not want to continue colonialism and warfare in the Middle East, which will cause the ME to blow up even more initially but this is just an expression of latent contradictions inherent to the ME. The western world divided up the ME after WWII in such a way that these contradictions must be realized, either now or later.

But Trump is also a wild card, we cannot really know exactly what he will do. So it comes down to a question of betting on the wild card you can’t be sure of, or giving in and accepting the same problems and deterioration that have been ongoing for so many decades. But don’t get me wrong, I am not a cynic here, I think there has been a lot of progress made over those decades and America is not in some kind of seriously dire straights, and I would first make the argument that the GOP is the real enemy that threatens to bring down America (through their deeply ideological and false moralizing natures, paranoias, obstructionism in politics, mudding the waters, cronyism, disbelief in the positive value of governance, etc.); but that this point, I am starting to see things as from the perspective of a non-American looking at the US from outside. There are still many great things about the US, but I wonder what it must look like from the outside?

If there is, say, a 25% chance Trump is for real and could really bring some sanity and earth-groundedness back to America then I would take that over a 100% chance that Hillary will continue business as usual (the for-profit war machine).

We should see Trump as a tool of history. He may be a detestable person, deeply ignorant and incurably narcissistic but humanity at times needs people like this, these flaws can serve as strengths in certain situations. I’m not saying Trump would be a great president, but I don’t think we really need a “great president” right now so much as a fundamental shift in direction and a re-alignment back to the earth and the ground.

We can already see neoliberal lies and false narratives starting to dissolve as a consequence of the changes Trump has forced upon social/political discourse. We know one thing for sure now at the deep level of our instinct: that these power-systems of untruth, pathology and manufactured death are not absolute but only act absolute; they can be undermined as easily as letting a someone like Trump take the center stage for a while. Most people still retain their humanity deep down, even if the general course of things serves to cover this up.

Trump as ‘unconscious’ historical agent… a necessary “evil” perhaps, at least a necessary a-political eruption within the political. We should try to see what effects he will have on things, not so much who he is himself.

It is fully apparent to anyone now that the world is a deep contest of values and of valuing. Nietzsche is vindicated.

Values do not, or cannot, always assert themselves rationally. Nietzsche also wrote that even “evil” will end up serving humanity and the good in the end. Think of the ‘repressed truths’ that were materialized historically by the atrocities of Nazi Germany. But since the west won that war, the west now has its own repressed truths to deal with; that’s what is going on right now, that’s what Trump (unconsciously) reflects.

Hillary is seemingly quite intelligent, just as is Obama, much more intelligent than Trump seems to be. But this intelligence is not entirely paired with sane, rational values. So right now we might need a short stint of less rationality to increase open spaces for new kinds of valuing… later on, say in 4 years when whoever is president is up for re-election, we can return to more sane rationality after the values-cycles have shifted a bit. This will also help cure the problems with the values-cycling (such problems as increasing acceptance of racist, fascist speech and policies that we are seeing in US and EU politics right now-- these are essentially problems of cynicism and ignorance). Nietzsche also knew that when you release the good in yourself there is also the danger of releasing the “wolves of our natures” as well. I don’t even agree with Nietzsche that this is all a game of will to power; I think it’s even more fundamntal than that. This is about truth itself.

The problem with a Trumpf is that all they
can do is destroy…
They cannot build and that is what civilization
is, centuries after centuries, generations after
generations of building and one fool with the
modern tools of technology can take
it all down and in Trumpfs case, in one afternoon…
NO, he is so much of a risk of taking down
civilization that he cannot be allowed in office.
Look at Isis which has destroyed priceless artifacts
in the middle east because the artifacts “violated” their
tenets… Now we have dozens of sites that have been
completely destroy to the horror of historians and
archeologist everywhere… We have lost a major part
of our history because of misguided fanaticism from a
small group of idiots…Clinton for all her flaws, won’t
destroy what has been built over the centuries and whatever
she does in these terms, can be easily repaired in a few years.
Trumpf is the harbinger of the destroyer and he would set
civilization back at least a generation and possibly more…
that risk is one we cannot take and must not take…

Kropotkin

Trump said he would build a wall to Mexico. Trump is the kind of mind who builds civilizations from the ground up.

Didn’t that happen when that democratic president Obama was in power? And wasn’t Hillary Clinton a member of that government in some small capacity?

I forget … What did they do about it?

That is another perspective, yes.

As I noted this is a war of values and of valuing. One could also argue that what Clinton represents is largely responsible for the problems in the ME including the formation of Isis. The west has been meddling there since WWII to very poor results, it’s called neocolonialism. People are sick of it.

For all Trump’s flaws he does recognize this fact, although he is too fucking stupid to articulate it very well. Clinton on the other hand would never dare admit to this fact.

The west cannot keep trying to micromanage puppet regimes in the ME. No matter the justification for doing so, even if the rationale is good (which it almost never is, again this is about neocolonialism and war profiteering) it’s not tenable. The rise of the aggressive ideology of radicalist terrorism has put a firm end to western expansion plans in the ME because of the logic of the double pincer between west (US+EU) and ME: there is just no way to stop the flow of people, materials and ideas between these two regions, which means that “terrorism” will only stop once the west drops its aggressive posture of manipulation toward ME nations and people.

What needs to happen is what is going to happen anyway: some ME nation-states are going to break up and need to be remade along more rational religious-cultural (tribal ethnic) lines. This isn’t about creating democracies, maybe the people in the ME don’t want democracies, maybe they really just want nation-states that actually reflect the realities of their cultures, histories and religious beliefs. Much conflict will be needed to settle how that all shakes out. But the western role has been one of only meddling and making it worse.

Trump may be an international businessman who has conflicted interests around free trade policies, but he is not a neocolonialist.

To be clear Kropotkin, I also worry about the destruction of civilization as you described. The largest worry is open warfare with the use of nuclear missiles. This is a risk whether Clinton or Trump is president. Trump’s statements about proliferating nuclear weapons and scaling back mutual defense in Europe and Asia are troubling because they signal a weakness that creates space for new aggressions by those such as Russia and China. The more open aggressions going on the more risk they it will snowball into open war, and if that happens the ultimate result could be nuclear war.

But you also need to realize that single state US hegemony coupled with neocolonialism is a failed paradigm, it just can’t continue like this. If it continues like this then that state of risking open wars is only going to get more and more likely… So the real question is how to scale it back without doing so too fast and creating power vacuums into which Russia, China and others insert themselves thus provoking new open hostilities even further than they are provoked right now.

I don’t think Trump or Clinton are either very well qualified or skilled to do this kind of necessary unwinding of the tensions. It’s hard to assess who would be worse at this, but at least we know that Clinton will likely keep going with the present paradigm, which does very little to ease those tensions. Maybe she will try to ease them slightly and Trump will try to ease them too quickly, that is another possibility. It’s a risk and an unknown in either case.

We need a true statesman and very skilled diplomat, someone with massive respect and moral authority as well as tons of knowledge, who also knows the ins and outs of the system and geopolitical games, can bridge differences and play all sides to the same positive outcome of, as I put it, unwinding the tensions in such a way that doesn’t trigger whole new hostilities.

Unfortunate no one matching that description seems to exist. Certainly Trump and Clinton aren’t it.

Wyld, let us agree that we have a failed ME policy and just
about any policy about the ME will fail as has been shown by
history over the last two centuries…
The solution certainly isn’t packing up and getting out of dodge.
That ship has sailed and we are stuck… Now what?

We are in a world wide economy today.
that is a fact and we must accept the fact
that in this world wide economy, every part of
the world plays a role in this new world economy…
Now I agree with those who want to downplay the economic
aspect of this new regime but the facts are pretty clear,
unless there is a collapse of the type of the medieval from the
Roman, we are stuck with the current fiasco…
Unlike Phyllo who fails to see that what we see is the result of not just
a few years of history and actions, but decades and
even centuries of history playing out today.
How do you put a cork into centuries of history?

You can’t but you can shape it, guide it.
Like a raging river, you can’t stop the river from
flowing but you can guide it with changes to how
the river flows and with such things as dam’s and
the like… We aren’t going to stop history from flowing
but we can contain it a bit and maybe that is all we need
to do…

Kropotkin

If you could put the blame on the Republicans and the GOP then you would jump on it right away. But since you can’t avoid implicating Democrats, you take a ‘broader view’ of history.

K: decades and even centuries…
note those words which implicates not only
GOP and Dem’s but the English and French
and Russians and the Turkish and the Chinese!
As I however mentioned in another post about Herr Trumpf,
it takes a civilization centuries and million’s of people
to build, but it takes one idiot with an foolish idea
to torch it, the way Hitler and Stalin set Europe and Russia back
decades with their foolishness. The GOP set the middle east back
decades with their foolishness and we are paying the price right now.
Al Quida and Isis wasn’t built in a day, but over decades and generations
of history… and each step of bumbling in the ME by a whole lot of people
over the years, have lead us to today and Al quida and Isis…
improvement takes years even centuries but destruction takes
about 5 minutes and a stick of TNT… We are looking at the long
years of history here and in that, everyone is guilty…including
you and me…I don’t really believe in a single person being guilty,
but I do believe collectively we are guilty of crimes against
humanity and the planet… We are all guilty (not in the biblical sense
of inherited guilt from birth, but from inaction or in this case, actions
toward a people or a region)
the long view of history won’t be kind to us and nor should it be…
We have fucked up and badly… Now the only question is,
are we ready to try to fix it or do we punt and let our children deal with
it…

Kropotkin

You manage to stick it again to Trump and the GOP. But you still can’t say …

Democrats are guilty …

Obama is guilty …

Hillary is guilty …

K: I have already said that the Dem’s deserve their share of the blame
which goes back decades beyond Kennedy to FDR… Yes, in part
Obama is guilty as is Clinton, both Hillary and bill. I have already conceded
this, but the guilt goes to following the game plan of
protecting Corporate profits over doing the right thing …
and that has been the doing of both GOP and the Dem’s…
We have failed because we have put corporate profits over
everything else and this has gone on for decades and even
centuries… And we can lay the failure there… Allowing
corporate affairs to dictate public policy… and everyone
is guilty of that…You think you have won some
sort of points, but you have failed to see the long game
and thus, you have failed at something bigger than just
winning points on the internet…You have failed at
understanding and that is a shame…so let
me repeat at the cost of being redundant…

both parties have failed, both parties have failed,
both parties have failed, the question is, now what?
instead of searching for blame, let us try something new!
Search for solutions.

Kropotkin

You look forward to when the GOP is decimated. You don’t want a vibrant political system. You want the Democratic party to rule over all - president, senate, congress.

Your solution is overwhelming support for Hillary.

What is she going to do that is different? How is she any sort of solution? Four more years of the same?

The lesser of two evils? Is that all?

Your blind partisanship is what really ticks me off about your posts.

Either will cause hell and havoc. But, it is time for it.

You want hell and havoc?

I think that maybe Joker got access to Kriswest’s account.

=D>

As a politician, Trump is not guilty of anything until he’s elected and caught.

Damn fools can’t see that civilization is slowly eroding being destroyed from within and very soon that process will gain momentum in speeding up. I personally look forward to civilization being destroyed as nothing will change until it is.

You guys just can’t see the forest for the trees.

Have fun with your childish political ideals as they never amount to much ever.