George Orwell’s 1984 is currently the top selling book on Amazon | Hacker News Reader

George Orwell’s 1984 is currently the top selling book on Amazon

openculture.com

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While I love 1984, I think Fahrenheit 451 has become more true than Orwell's novel. People have willingly given into an information bonanza that is the internet, with headphones always in (seashells). We don't need the TV walls, as our cellphone has taken that role, altogether with the hyperactive delivery of such content.

A collectivist state has not become the dominating power, but wealthy individuals and corporations have, although with similar results--while that part wasn't really part of Montag's universe, the part that is is that we have given up to the "firemen" on our own freewill, because it fits our narrative or it's our safe space.

Nonetheless, I am very optimistic. I think for all the faults that the internet and mobiles and social networks and globalization has wrought us, the world today still is a better world it was say 20 or 30 years ago. When ontop of oscillations, they are never obvious from the vantage point of a single wiggle. I still feel that despite many of the shortcomings of the previous few decades and years and months, we can still arrive on net at a better place than we were yesterday.

I feel that if you honestly believe the world is unambiguously better now than it was 20-30 years ago this reflects either your youth or privilege more so than any objective truth. I'll just leave this here:

http://thebulletin.org/timeline

If you honestly don't believe the world is unambiguously better now than it was 20-30 years ago, you've been living under a continental plate the entire time. The world has gotten better in almost every way including the rapid fall in poverty rates, more reliable sources of food and medicine, and better access to technology for even the poorest folk. All the problems that seem so overwhelming now like the threat of nuclear war, growing confrontationalism between and within countries, or extreme nationalism were way worse before the 90s (unless, of course, you honestly believe that the United States is the only nation on the planet and you have a nostalgic predilection for the "good ol' days"). Not to mention that the majority of the world has finally recognized and united around solving the single greatest threat to our civilization, a threat that pretty much irreversibly changed our climate by the time we identified it and became completely unavoidable by the 1990s.

If all you're going to do is provide a link to an arbitrary countdown with scary words like "nuclear" and "catastrophe" as your evidence, might as well skip the sciency sounding fluff and just link one of Nostradamus's books. Until then, I'll fondly remember just how priveleged I was growing up in the Soviet Union and reconstruction-era Russia. /s

"and better access to technology for even the poorest folk"

I hear this one a lot, I don't think it matters or is relevant.

I've spent time in third world countries I met people sleeping, working and eating in rubish dumps, and they're not even considered the poorest! I didn't see them running around with technology, nor do I see how that would change there situation much.

> I hear this one a lot, do you have a source to prove this?

What kinds of source would be most convincing for such a broad question such as this? How about the fact that as many people have escaped extreme poverty since 1990 as there are human beings alive in Europe [1]? Average global purchasing power more than doubling [2]? Or maybe global agricultural output growing more than twice as fast as the world population since 2000 [3]? Life expectancy at birth increasing by more than 10% [4]? The massive decline in fatalities from armed conflicts [5]? Growths in industrial productivity that dwarfs even the industrial revolution [6]? How about access to technology that can instantly connect you to half of the world [7]? Price of renewable energy finally at parity with fossil fuels even in the face of the Republican party [8]? The number of people living under elected representatives instead of authoritarian regimes nearly doubling [9]?

Better yet, what evidence do you have that invalidates all of the above? Even if you're the world's ultimate nit-picker, the data is overwhelmingly positive.

> I've spent time in third world countries and not even the poorest people were working and eating in rubish dumps and guess there slept?

I didn't see them running around with technology.

The only region in the world where less than half the population has access to at least mobile broadband is Subsaharan Africa. Even now the wealthiest nations have citizens that fall through cracks in the system and live in destitution but the big picture is clear: the world is better off now than it ever has been.

[1] http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/report-2013/mdg-report...

[2] http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=xx&v=67

[3] http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.do...

[4] https://www.clio-infra.eu/datasets/search

[5] http://www.hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR2013/HSRP_Repor...

[6] http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/global-economic-monit...

[7] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.P2

[8] http://sunmetrix.com/sunmetrix-grid-parity-map-for-residenti...

[9] https://ourworldindata.org/democracy/

If you're starving and working in a toxic garbage dump, how does a smart phone or cell phone improve the situation? Honest question.

If the government is corrupt, and steal infact money from citizenss, is a cell phone going to put food on your table? It could actually be used against a population. Think mass surveillance, censorship or false news for example.

Also, the OP said the "poorest", from my own observations the "poorest" will not have money for cellphones, electricity or credit. You might be referring to less wealthy people than you, but the poorest?

Look at all the tech available in the US and 50 million still go hungry [1].

I believe amongst technologsits there is a false view that technology "just makes things better". The reality is technology is a tool and it has to be used for the right applications by those of us with good intentions. Modern technology offers potential, it's not always essential.

[1] http://indiafacts.org/americas-most-desperate-why-are-50-mil...

It does't matter how poor the poorest people are. They'll always be extremely poor. The important change is that their numbers are falling. If your job is to work with the poorest people, you won't see the ones who never became poor in the first place due to global improvements in quality of life.

> If you're starving and working in a toxic garbage dump, how does a smart phone or cell phone improve the situation?

It's worth remembering the incredulous responses to seeing photos of Syrian refugees with smartphones.

They rather missed the point: smartphones are a lifeline for many poor, desperate people. Internet access enables communications, enables research into fundamentals like "where can I find someone willing to save my life?"

I live in India and many poor people have cellphones or basic smartphones. They did not have that earlier.

I have also lived in a third world country among these people for years and saw a ton of evidence of the benefits of better access to tech. Even if they couldn't buy it. Easier communications, access to information etc. so... anecdotes right.

It is excellent to hear this has been your experience.

Perhaps these days people are less likely to be living and working in rubbish dumps.

What are your thoughts on these graphs?

https://twitter.com/Sheril_/status/821356927158484992?s=09

I think those graphs seem to present positive and hopeful metrics about the state of the world and the future; However, I also believe they're an over simplification of the extremely complex and interconnected world which live in, glossing over other important issues we face, climate change, mass-extinction events, pollution, inequality, and debt to name a few.

I'm not claiming graphs like that are bad, incorrect or utterly useless, what I am saying is it's important to see things for yourself and formulate opinions based on real, authentic experience. Which is why I enjoy travelling and interacting with people firsthand.

As far as I'm concerned the quote “Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.” is still extremely valid.

> the world has finally recognized and united around solving the single greatest threat to our civilization

If it's CO2 you are talking about, Trump already said he doesn't give a shit.

EDIT: sorry for citing wrong ("world" instead of "majority of the world", wasn't intentional), but even then, you don't get a majority without the USA.

Well, technically you can easily get the majority of the world without the US, but I do agree with you that this does appear to be a step backwards.

A huge problem with climate change is that the CO2 we add to the atmosphere today doesn't have an immediate impact on the climate. It just adjust the balance between energy being added to the earth (mostly visible sunlight and UV) and the energy being radiated away (mostly heat). It takes time - decades potentially - to reach a new steady state. That's why you hear that even if we stopped ALL CO2 release today (which is obviously impossible), warming would continue for a period of time.

The end result is, even let alone the difficulty in perceiving global shifts in average temperature amidst the significant noise, we shouldn't even expect to see the majority of the shift immediately. But it appears that isn't fully understood, so many people take the lack of an obvious difference year to year as evidence against climate change.

> EDIT: sorry for citing wrong ("world" instead of "majority of the world", wasn't intentional), but even then, you don't get a majority without the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

The United States isn't even in the top five for CO2 production per capita and it's completely dwarfed in absolute terms by China which contributes 30% of the world's CO2 compared to the US's 15%. The United States is the last major holdout so yes, there is a very clear majority and American anti-intellectualism is the last major political obstacle.

Regardless, all of the worst polluters on that list are rapidly adopting renewable energy and even profit-at-all-costs capitalism can't stop demonstrably cheaper and more sustainable energy sources from taking over.

>...and even profit-at-all-costs capitalism can't stop demonstrably cheaper and more sustainable energy sources from taking over.

That makes no sense. Profit-at-all-costs capitalism is agnostic on power sources and will make no attempt to stop solar and wind when they become cheaper.

In my opinion, barring some serious nationalistic policies that I can't see at the moment... no matter what Trump says or does, technological progress on this issue will move onward regardless.

This even includes progress in the United States. Even now, it's hard to see one of the worst CO2-emitting sources of energy (coal) gaining that much traction with natural gas being quite a bit cheaper here. If solutions that emit less CO2 than natural gas get even cheaper, those start becoming no-brainers to implement.

I'm sure that some states will try to nudge more from a government level (see: California), but even in states that don't, if economics dictates that the CO2-less solution is better, it will most likely be implemented regardless of political bluster. For example, Oklahoma is long known for being a traditional oil and gas stalwart. Yet as of 2015, 18% of electricity in Oklahoma is generated by wind. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Oklahoma)

>The world has gotten better in almost every way including the rapid fall in poverty rates, more reliable sources of food and medicine, and better access to technology for even the poorest folk

Cool story. Have your own people seen equal (or equal-enough) growth in their respective living standards?

Better yet, has the brand of politician your particular subculture supports done enough to make sure that everyone in your Union has benefited enough to see your version (right or wrong) of the bigger picture? You know, where the solution to their job-loss problems isn't simply "abandon your own subculture, move to the city where there's work"? Where the solution to unemployment isn't simply "here's some unemployment benefits, now go try to find self-worth in a society that doesn't need you any more"?

Because the results of that failure are pretty clear. Something is happening where most places not in the Northeast or Southwest urban sprawl are getting hit hard economically- the absence of a similar pinch in those urban areas is striking, to say the least. Turns out that eliminating jobs that the people there used to be doing is only really good policy in places that can sustain themselves with another industry, which the service industry does quite handily but only in dense enough areas. Combine that with a lack of (misplaced?) social responsibility from industry leaders (and union management), and these cities that are still doing well start to accumulate political debt simply as a result of that inequality.

Remember, every time you need to pull the country in a given direction, you need to spend some political capital. Compromises must be made when a given problem affects one side more than it does the other (as you have to convince those who aren't in agreement for whatever reason- thinking that being objectively right has ever mattered is mistake #1, which is why "alternate fact" is even a valid turn of phrase).

And currently the side of Progress(tm) has no capital left- it was spent on creating the above inequality and frivolities like social justice. Even though climate change is really the priority the Left claims it is, the Left will first have to actually deal with the inequality in the country it claims to despise before the Right will even bother listening. This is going to be the real challenge.

And until that time, telling your jobless neighbor that his life has no more worth than someone in a third-world country might be technically true, but telling him that, or that third-world countries come first, is not doing your cause any favors.

>Better yet, has the brand of politician your particular subculture supports done enough to make sure that everyone in your Union has benefited enough to see your version (right or wrong) of the bigger picture? You know, where the solution to their job-loss problems isn't simply "abandon your own subculture, move to the city where there's work"? Where the solution to unemployment isn't simply "here's some unemployment benefits, now go try to find self-worth in a society that doesn't need you any more"?

Hypocritical nonsense, considering it's your political faction who've made a religious fetish of the Free Market Uber Alles. You can have a managed industrial policy aimed at full employment, or you can have unregulated capitalism. The former is a socialist policy, the latter a capitalist one.

Sorry this is blatant nonsense. Anything but stupid "smart" phones existed 20 years ago.

The important things (housing, health care, ...) have gotten more expensive.

Pensions are increasingly insecure.

Surveillance is at a far higher level than 20 years ago.

The ultra-right might get close to 40% in some European countries.

Western Europe was definitely a nicer place to live around 2000 than it is now.

The important things (housing, health care, ...) have gotten more expensive.

Housing cost per square foot hasn't changed significantly for most of the country overall [1]. What has changed is our demand for greater square footage. Home sizes have steadily and drastically risen.

And that relative consistency has held while the quality of the housing - better energy efficiency, safer construction, etc. - has steadily increased.

We get more quality for our money today, but we complain because our demand for greater quantity comes with a higher price tag.

[1] The situation in metro areas having extreme regulations interfering with new construction, e.g., San Francisco, differs because of the regulation that putatively protects the residents, but in fact sends costs through the roof.

First off you don't get to just handwave away the conclusions of a group with a 72 year track record of engaging some of the best minds in the world to reach their conclusions. I urge you to take a little bit more time and familiarize yourself with the organization, it's goals, and it's methodologies before making baseless assertions that their conclusions are equivalent to astrology.

Your claims regarding the reliability of food and medicine sources are questionable. They are predicated on a fragile system of international logistics that if disrupted would result in mass starvation worldwide. Geopolitical instability raises the odds of just such a disruption.

Your assertion that existential threats like the threat of nuclear war were worse in the 90s is objectively false. All three of the world nuclear superpowers have active military operations with theater overlap. With these militaries operating in close proximity and occasionally bumping into each other the odds of an accidental escalation are greatly increased.

The fact that the majority of the world has identified global warming as an existential threat is heartening but as other commenters have pointed out the world industrial superpowers have to get on board and start pursuing aggressive policy changes for meaningful change to take place. Unless or until that happens what the rest of the world chooses is largely irrelevant.

TL;DR: I'm glad things are better for you now. It's not about you.

>If you honestly don't believe the world is unambiguously better now than it was 20-30 years ago, you've been living under a continental plate the entire time.

This is factually wrong.

You're looking at things worldwide, and while it may be true that on average, things are better than 20 years ago, in the US this is simply not the case for the majority. The 90s were an economic boom time in the US, and there was almost no military action going on at all, the Cold War was over with the Soviet Union collapsed, and people were making money hand over fist in the internet bubble (which didn't collapse until the early 2000s).

>Not to mention that the majority of the world has finally recognized and united around solving the single greatest threat to our civilization, a threat that pretty much irreversibly changed our climate by the time we identified it and became completely unavoidable by the 1990s.

This is factually wrong as well, if you accept that you're not going to get very far when the US completely disagrees with you, and this is important since the US is one of the biggest energy consumers and carbon polluters. In case you haven't noticed, the Trump administration, and the half of the nation that voted for him, does not believe in global warming, and wants to massively increase coal production and usage.

Indeed. In addition to your points, Orwell has to do with both an overreaching left (thought crime) and right (surveillance state). The government even associates itself with socialism.

That being said, it's not a stretch to imagine that it takes two successive and opposed politicians to set up and orwellian state. Trump would set up the surveillance state (as he threatens to do), and some future authoritative Democrat could outlaw freedom of speech.

Orwell has to do with both an overreaching left (thought crime) and right (surveillance state).

No, the surveillance state is certainly not a right-wing-specific thing, and in fact Orwell was probably inspired by the Stasi and other Soviet secret police agencies. Just to give you an idea:

  By 1995, some 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter
  (IMs) Stasi informants had been identified,
  almost 2.5% of East Germany's population between
  the ages of 18 and 60. 10,000 IMs were under 18
  years of age.

The last line is significant, since the book talks on children denouncing their own parents, who live afraid of them.

Thanks for the correction, I clearly interpreted it incorrectly.

> in fact Orwell was probably inspired by the Stasi

You know when 1984 was written?

Yes; a couple of years after the Stasi was created, though it was called Kommissariat 5 back then, before the GDR was officially established and could have official agencies.

So, you are claiming that he looked into the future to see what happens with the Stasi?

But even if you want to get technical: He started writing in 1946 and the final manuscript was presented in 1948. The "Volkskommissariat" may have been around, but you really can not compare their activity to the Stasi. If you were talking about them, then your quote makes no sense at all.

The Stasi were simply a recreation/extension of Soviet secret police tactics.

That's a bit oversimplified and a different story -- I might agree, however, that there is inspiration from the UdSSR -- but again, different story.

> So, you are claiming that he looked into the future to see what happens with the Stasi?

No, I'm claiming that from his position (particularly after his involvement in the Spanish Civil War), he was informed of the founding and early activities of the Stasi, and wrote the book based on the thought-experiment "what if a whole country was dominated by these principles?"

> The "Volkskommissariat" may have been around, but you really can not compare their activity to the Stasi.

That's not surprising, considering how "[i]n reality, K-5 was only nominally housed in the People's Police" (Dennis and Laporte, 2003).

For more about his experience in the Spanish Civil War and its influence on his writing, I suggest the In Our Time episode on Animal Farm: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wgkz4

> Trump would set up the surveillance state

I'm puzzled by this comment.

The US surveillance state was set up prior to Trump.

Is anyone still doubting the complete slurping of everything the TLAs (Three Letter Agencies) can get?

It wouldn't matter who the President was right now, this thing will march on.

Maybe it's convenient we get to lay some of the blame on DJ Trump. That's all.

More precisely, he aims to extend the powers of the TLAs to a very worrying degree.

> [1] “And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”

So it's not blame-laying, he's saying this stuff himself.

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/trump-and-his-advisors...

At least he's honest.

Any other potential president would have had their hand forced or led the charge too.

> At least he's honest.

While true, that is a non-sequitur.

>At least he's honest.

Saying something true by chance doesn't make the man honest when his words are randomly generated.

Yeah, it's like that thing about giving an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters and they'll eventually duplicate Shakespeare.

Now we get to conduct a similar experiment whereby we see first hand if having an actual clown in the oval office is any different to a real politician.

Trump reminds me of William S. Burrows Naked Lunch. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order, and Trump is about as obscene.

Yeah, I don't see how anyone could argue that the surveillance state would be Trump's creation. We know that it has existed for a long time and it has only gotten stronger under Obama [1].

[1] https://theintercept.com/2017/01/13/obama-opens-nsas-vast-tr...

>Trump would set up the surveillance state (as he threatens to do)

These kind of comments really underscore how little credibility the anti-Trump crowd has, given the context of the last 8 years.

Kind of a blanket statement. The anti-Trump crowd is rather large.

> When ontop of oscillations, they are never obvious from the vantage point of a single wiggle.

I am reminded of the Martin Luther King quote: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

That was probably a theological opinion, for what it's worth. People forget MLK was a pastor.

I disagree, he was paraphrasing early 19th century abolitionist Theodore Parker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Parker

Another theologian for sure, but pretty squarely in the context of black rights in the US.

Some of King's best work was putting civil rights in a theological context. That's basically what Letters From A Birmingham Jail was about.

Despite the passive voice, I still think God and Christ were on King's mind when coining that. I'm sure if he were still alive, he'd agree.

He was probably wrong about that. It's more like a pendulum that swings in both directions.

> the world today still is a better world it was say 20 or 30 years ago

Are you sure? Can you tell me why you think this? Domestic crime has increased. We're bombing seven countries. Civil rights have been diminished. Human rights have been diminished. The last administration went to far greater lengths to go after whistle blowers and journalists than any in history. Income inequality is at all time highs. More than ever struggle to afford a home or to pay off debt (student loans).

The biggest improvements seem to have been isolated to those in technology.

Google variations on "graphs to make you feel better about the future".

http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-that-will-restore-your...

Thanks, that's somewhat uplifting.

You're welcome! There's also a good Ted Talk with an animated graph of life expectancy v wealth, with country blobs moving around from ~1700ish? to now.

Hint: Everything goes up and to the right, although in some pretty interesting ways.

Not all those things are actually getting worse!

Crime is falling in the long term, not rising, at least in the US. Much of the world now allows same-sex marriage, which I think is an important civil rights advancement.

I take your points on war, the crackdown on whistleblowers, income inequality. But on the upside, we have tremendous advances in medicine (is that "just" technology?)

It's a mixed picture, not a universally gloomy one.

> Crime is falling in the long term, not rising, at least in the US.

According to this[1] crime rates in the USA are higher than they were in 1960

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

I'm very happy to let the chart on that page speak for itself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Property_Crime_Rates_in...

That's sort of backwards. Over the past 30 years, poverty has fallen massively, democracy has spread to more people, child mortality has fallen, literacy and education have risen [1], and rate of war deaths has fallen [2]. Maybe the direct death-and-suffering problems have now mostly been solved and that causes us to look to more intangible problems like human rights, freedom of speech and inequality. It's a common misconception that the world is getting worse but it's actually getting better.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace/

Maybe the great lengths they went to against Manning and Snowden were because they released massively more data than anyone in history? People selling secrets to the soviets were dealt with just as harshly despite releasing far less information.

>over the past 30 years, poverty has fallen massively

This appears to be false[1], at least in the US.

Moreover, most statistics positing a reduction in poverty can be misleading because the massive growth in population is ignored by nature of percentages.

While there may be more people living above the poverty line than ever before, there are also more people living below it than ever before, about 3,000,000,000 people.

There are roughly as many people living in poverty today as the total world population in 1960.

[1]http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2015/may/07/jeb...

20 years ago in the US was an anomaly. Remember "The Matrix" when Agent Smith said that 1999 was our society's peak? He was right, the movie makers just didn't realize how right they were at the time. Many things have indeed gone downhill since then, thanks to Bush.

For the stuff about war, what you're forgetting is all the stuff that came before: Vietnam, Korea, WWII, various other police actions, Beirut, etc. The 60s and 70s were a particularly turbulent time in recent American history. Do you see the National Guard out, shooting American protesters today? Nope. But they did exactly that in the 60s.

You're factually wrong about many things here. Civil/human rights were much worse in the past; just look at how hard it was for black people before the Civil Rights Act of the late 60s. You think today's incidents of cops shooting unarmed black people in the back is bad? It was a lot worse in the past, people just didn't care and no one had cameras to record it all. Rodney King was the first big instance of this being recorded by a bystander. Someone else mentioned gay marriage; 30+ years ago gay people had to hide in "the closet", many of them marrying heterosexually just to hide themselves. Crime is lower today than in the past, despite what some alarmists would have you believe. Go look up the actual stats. Crime in America has been on a downward trend for decades.

Income inequality is not at an all-time high. It's a lot worse than it should be, I agree, but go back to the Gilded Age and compare. It was worse back then. They didn't even have simple worker protections like 40-hour work weeks and OSHA to keep from getting maimed or killed on the job.

Yes, in many ways (but not all), things are definitely worse for Americans than in 1997, but overall things are a lot better than there were in the past before that. The 90s were simply an exceptional time, especially if you were a white American: the economy was booming, we were in a big lull between military adventures, the Soviet Union had collapsed and the Cold War was over, the Internet was becoming a household item (much like electricity or the telephone or the automobile became commonplace decades before, radically changing society). It was a great time to make money, buy a house, not worry about nuclear annihilation, etc. About the only people who were having a really bad time were the people in former Yugoslavia.

> About the only people who were having a really bad time were the people in former Yugoslavia.

Or the people anywhere in the vicinity of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War (which conveniently didn't appear in the news much). Pretty sure they were having a much worse time than people in former Yugoslavia...

Yeah, that didn't get much exposure in the west. I've never even heard of it.

Also, this isn't to say that the rest of the world was doing great either; lots of other 3rd-world places were surely having a hard time too. But the question is, were they having an unusually hard time during the 90s, or was that normal for them? In former Yugoslavia, it was abnormal: before that they had stability behind the Iron Curtain, and after the war they had peace and stability too for the most part (though still some troubles with Kosovo). The war they went through in the 90s, and all that stuff with Milosevic, was an abnormal time for them.

I guess one big one I did forget to mention here is Rwanda in 1994.

Anyway, if you focus mainly on the western world, I think my point stands. For the West, the 90s were a great time, better than now overall IMO.

The death toll numbering in the millions was pretty abnormal for the region, yes.

Huh? According to Wikipedia, only roughly 140,000 people died during that 10-year period:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars

Still a horrific number, but one or two orders of magnitude fewer than "millions". There were millions displaced though.

Edit: I'll also add that that number (140k) is far less than the number of Rwandans killed during their 1994 genocide, and in Rwanda's case that happened in just a few days IIRC, not over a multi-year period.

Ever heard of a country called Rwanda?

Another classic anti-utopia becoming relevant today is 'Brave New World' by Huxley. See brilliant comparison with '1984' on comic [1] which summarizes Neil Postman's book 'Amusing Ourselves to Death'.

[1]: http://highexistence.com/amusing-ourselves-to-death-huxley-v...

This is an interesting comic, but I'd like to point out that becoming a society concerned with triviality is nothing new. Just look at the crap they were watching on TV in the 50s and 60s. And even if you go back in time to before TVs, there was plenty of crap that people occupied themselves with. It's just a lot easier now since so many of us no longer have to struggle just to survive every day.

Wishing for the entire population to be highly educated and interested in important matters is, I think, a fool's errand. You're never going to get that from people unless you start culling less-intelligent people, which obviously isn't a good idea for many reasons.

Which begs the question: Is modern's "occupied with crap" better, equal, or worse than the ancient "struggle to survive"?

While in the measurable numbers game, the world certainly has become a better place (less child deaths, more literacy, longer life expectancy etc.), the actual question to ask oneself is if those numbers indeed are good proxies for a "better" world or life.

Is living longer, assisted by mechanical and pharmaceutical products plus surgical procedures, really that great? In general, we now are working more hours then ever before in history, and hence have less time for being creative, having hobbies, or simply to behold one of "Goethe's moments," because we always are in a hurry. Are we really happier, and even if we were, is that maybe only due to every second adult over 40 or 50 using anti-depressants?

Actually measuring if we are indeed living in a "better world" or a "better life" is very hard to do objectively with the parameters we have, and I honestly doubt it is possible. In the end, I believe the answer probably is: In many cases, it depends more on what you make of the time you were given than in which year you were born.

I really don't think there's any way to easily answer this. So much depends on the particular person (and who you're comparing them to) and their particular circumstances, plus your own perspective and your own values which are subjective.

I do think you have factual errors here though. We are not "working more hours than ever before in history". That is blatantly wrong. Go back 100 years and look at what lower-class people put up with: there was no such thing as a "weekend" or a 40-hour work week; those are relatively new inventions. Factory workers in America in the early 20th century had truly horrible lives and working conditions, including horribly long hours (not to mention child labor). We have more free time now than ever, in general (unless you're comparing to some privileged rich person in the past), though it's probably not changed that much over the last 50 years since we standardized on 40-hour work weeks. There's definitely pockets of society that aren't doing that great, working 2 jobs, etc., but that's not unusual; there's always been people on the fringe like that. I really think you're comparing modern life to some kind of rose-tinted and false romantic vision of the past as portrayed in fiction.

Are we happier? Who knows. I think that for much of the population, there wasn't much time to worry about that in the past 100+ years ago, nor did they live all that long due to disease and poor health. Now we have more freedom to contemplate these things.

This doesn't mean we couldn't use more free time, plus a way of freeing ourselves from financial strain which I do believe causes a lot of that antidepressant use. How much of our activities are shaped by financial pressure to "keep up with the Joneses" (or to stay in "nice" neighborhoods)?

Re. work hours; Right, the Industrial Revolution had quite many work hours, possibly even "peak" hours for some regions, particularly central Europe and the US. However, prior to that, research says "we" worked less than "we" do today [1]. But yes, 1880s were probably peak "worst-time", apart from some notorious companies today :-). And, work-hours should be compared and considered globally, not just the niceties that are found in some parts of Europe, maybe. I think many industrial (slave-) workers in Asian countries like China can be assumed to work far more than what they did when they were farmers or hunter-gatherers or whatever prior society they had, and probably work even more than the workers of the Industrial Revolution, too. So I really think you are comparing German and French minimalist work hours to the "Western-world" worst case, the Industrial Revolution ~150 years ago, without actually contemplating either a global view or considering other times.

Re. being happier; Again, if you try to look back more than 100-200 years ago, things seem to have been quite different otherwise. Just take the Greek philosophers, for examples. They would not have flourished without "time to think", one might argue. Also, is that modern slave-worker in a Chinese factory really happier than his great grandfather was 100 ago? Thinking globally, I think there is enough evidence we might be unhappier than ever - mostly, thanks to globalization...

[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

I can't recommend "Amusing Ourselves to Death" enough, especially in the light of the most recent election processes the world is witnessing. Neil Postman's thesis is both timely and - unfortunately - eerie.

That's the thing: 1984 is North Korea, while Brave New World is the entire Western world. The latter was always scarier to me because someone will eventually rebel against a dictatorship of fear (it'll happen in NK someday), but no-one will ever defeat a dictatorship of mindless pleasure.

I think the West is both Brave New World (consumer society) and [partially] 1984 (mass surveillance by three-letter agencies).

>A collectivist state has not become the dominating power, but wealthy individuals and corporations have, although with similar results...

Seriously? The current state of affairs is nothing compared to the socialist/communist nightmares of the twentieth century. It's not even close.

Exactly. People are looking at a ~2 decade window like its a large sample size.

At least communist states didn't destroy the world through overconsumption.

But they did engage in grand designs (like the Aral water diversion project, and more recently the three gorges dam project) and lax environmental concerns. So it's not clear to me that they were "better" however they were perhaps worse because ideology dictated what they did moreso than some other considerations.

No, but their environmental record hasn't been great, either. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea for one particularly spectacular example.

Only because they were too inefficient - they didn't do anything very well beyond controlling the people. And, come to think of it, not even that.

Two other good books that explain the geopolitical history/algorithms:

Propaganda - by Edward Bernays

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/bernprop.html

> THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

> We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Tragedy & Hope - by Carroll Quigley

> The powers of financial capitalism had [a] far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.

The Roger Water's album titled 'Amused to Death' is also a perfect predication of where we've ended up, particularly the title track on the album.

Was just planning on picking up the book. Didn't even know about this album.. listening now! Thanks for sharing.

While the album is based off the Postman novel I think Waters deserves a lot of credit for expanding on the theme and conveying the idea in a remarkable piece of work.

Whenever fellow Pink Floyd fans ask me what my favorite Pink Floyd album is I always tell them Amused to Death. I understand it's not technically Pink Floyd but it is Roger Waters at the height of his Jedi Powers and Jeff Beck's performance is amazing.

As a Pink Floyd fan who finds Roger Waters egotistical annexation of the band name obnoxious, I would be annoyed at this response. Roger Waters was not the heart and soul of Pink Floyd, despite his claims, and his solo work has a fundamentally different character (that I do not especially enjoy). By all means recommend his stuff if you enjoy it, but if someone asks you your favorite Floyd album - name a damn Floyd album. It's like naming a Paul McCartney album as your favorite Beatles work (only worse, since Paul never flew off the handle claiming to BE the Beatles) - you're gonna piss people off.

I must admit, I'm really confused by how impeachment works in the U.S.. Clinton was impeached for perjury and abuse of power because he took advantage of his position (and a political intern) and then lied about it.

Now we have a president who is not giving up his business interests while in office and who has already told some absolute whoppers, including the release of official press releases that were nothing but "alternative facts". Why tell such obvious falsehoods? We're all laughing (nervously) now because the lies seem to be harmless, self-serving vain ones. However, is Trump just a little insane, or is he actually finding out who is willing to say "We've always been at war with Eurasia" and who isn't?

This is probably a good time for people to be reading 1984.

> I'm really confused by how impeachment works in the U.S.

Impeachment requires a crime.

Lying isn't usually a crime, and as best I can tell hasn't been one any of the times Trump has done it (.. yet?). It also hasn't been a crime any of the times Obama has done it.

Failure to give up business interests is breaking precedent and confounding ethicists, but also doesn't seem to be illegal.

When we come up with something criminal (and especially if it rises to the level of "high crimes") we can hope Trump gets impeached. As yet, I don't see it, and certainly not in your examples.

Failure to give up his business interests is an impeachable offense. He literally does not meet the requirements set forth in the Constitution.

He isn't being impeached because his party controls both houses.

> He literally does not meet the requirements set forth in the Constitution.

You need to be more specific. If you mean the emoluments clause, I think it's more accurate to say that it's hard to verify whether he meets "the requirements set forth in the Constitution." If you know of an instance of his business accepting a gift from a "king, prince or foreign state" since he's assumed office, then he's actually in violation.

> He isn't being impeached because his party controls both houses.

There is also that. Although I think a not insignificant fraction of that party would much prefer Pence, and if they were going to oust him doing it as far from the next election as possible would seem preferable.

Does it say "gifts" or "payments"?

"accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever"

Payments in exchange for regular business which would have been engaged in anyway would seem not to apply, although there's disturbing room for corruption there.

U.S. Const. art. I, § 9, cl. 8. states:

"No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state." [1]

Add to that:

- The lack of case law or Congressional guidance;

- George Washington receiving and accepting "two gifts from officials of the French government" without asking for nor receiving any Congressional consent [2]; and

- Almost every Founding Father from the South operating their plantations while in public service.

I think it's safe to say (at least as a non-Constitutional scholar) that this clause is far from definitive on anything. Please note that I am not defending Trump's behavior nor saying this clause cannot be interpreted to apply. I'm saying we cannot comment on this with any reasonable degree of certainty.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_of_Nobility_Clause

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/11/17/would-trumps...

It's certainly untested. One scenario that might be trouble for Trump would be, for example, an easement, tax credit, extraordinary incentive, or other streamlining of a Trump project in a foreign state.

What nation, looking to create a favorable deal of some kind with the US, would allow a Trump project to languish in frustrating red tape -- or allow a Trump project to lose out to a competitor in cases where the government is the decision-maker? What would the informal Trumpian chatter be like around that international negotiating table?

I'm not a native speaker but shouldn't this be "of any kind whatsoever"?

In current English, yes, but usage was different in the late 18th century. There's quite a lot of archaic language in the Constitution, which is one cause of the endless arguments about its exact interpretation. (Some of the language was very ambiguous even at the time.)

"Whatsoever" is the stronger form, but either is correct.

"Emolument" is exactly the word that's supposed to cover that. Unless he's operating not for profit.

Whether it does or not is ultimately something that'll have to be decided in court.

While they would prefer Pence, their base is still enamored with Trump. The legislators are scared, and don't want to endanger their reelection until he is no longer popular.

Na, he just won in a near landslide. Sure Pence could have won too, but he's nowhere as capable as Trump taking on the established false left-right MSM.

What landslide

he barely slid in a electoral vote disaster, despite the electoral vote being meant to be used against men like Trump

227 vs 306 is not close. I said near-landslide because a landlside (I think) is usually something >=370. No worries, it might still happen.

I'll also point out that Trump lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes (2%), which makes it really stretch the imagination to even call it a "near-landslide".

Sure, except popular vote does not matter, nor should it. If it did, CA and NY's echo boxes would run the US, and there would be no US in short order. Don't forged why the Unites States exists; taxation without representation.

He could have lost FL _or_ OH and still won.

I don't understand this idea that just because somebody lives in a particular state their vote should count less than somebody in a different state. That seems evidently unfair.

The fairness is intended at the state level. How your state decides on electors is their law. It doesn't even have to poll each individual, historically state legislatures even did it themselves.

It exists because some states are very sparsely populated while others actively suppress the votes of a large portion of its population, first by slavery, then by other methods. It's fair to increase representation of underpopulated states because their interests would be underrepresented if not (and it's a good thing because it allows large areas to be dedicated to nature).

Unfortunately, there is no mechanism in place that actively punishes voter suppression. Voters per inhabitant ratio and election turnout could be used to penalize states with low engagement to ensure voter suppression does not occur.

I still don't get it. Why would sparsely populated states' interests be underrepresented if every individual vote were equal? That only makes sense if you think land area or population density is a primary unit of relevance regarding political influence, which to me seems completely arbitrary.

One sq mile, one vote!

People who live in underpopulated states have a valid argument in that, if their votes are not weighted to compensate for the low density, their voices may end up not being heard. This weighting creates a minimum limit for representation.

It, however, removes the penalty for suppressing votes because the remaining votes continue to have a fixed weight.

Popular vote doesn't matter for who becomes president, but neither does the presence or lack of a "landslide." But both can certainly be relevant when analyzing an election.

Also, the "CA and NY would run the US" is an extremely weak argument. It's logically equivalent to saying that Texas and Oklahoma are currently running the US, since their electoral votes are sufficient to swap the winner from Trump to Clinton.

>Also, the "CA and NY would run the US" is an extremely weak argument. It's logically equivalent to saying that Texas and Oklahoma are currently running the US, since their electoral votes are sufficient to swap the winner from Trump to Clinton.

Actually, I don't think it's equivalent, since basically no Congressional majority or Presidency has been won without the South for the past 50 or so years. You can actually estimate which party will be dominant in an American party system by looking at who consistently holds the South, irrespective of how other regions vote.

So California and the Northeast can consistently vote one way, and it basically just doesn't matter if the South happens to disagree.

I don't understand. It sounds like you're saying that the South "runs the country" in the wording of the original claim.

That is what I'm saying. The South runs the country, and the rest of us are forced along for the ride, whether we want it or not.

We all know that the Electoral College and these complaints about California and New York are disingenuous. They're devices to make sure the South controls the country.

So, did Trump win by a lot when you take out California and New York? Yes. He also lost by a lot when you take out the South. Population is the only fair metric for weighting regions against each other. The South is not entitled to control everyone else's lives, especially since they're the damned region that demanded extra Representatives for their slaves.

Funny that you think CA and NY are so entitled. I don't have a map handy, are MI and PA in the south too now?

The problem with calling it close based on the popular vote, is that you have to retroactively change the rules. The MSM made the game of winning the popular vote much different than winning the electoral college, by being so biased against Trump, and he campaigned hard in the swing states. Only those people really heard what he had to say. The rest of the US was hearing information filtered by the MSM.

Since state electoral votes are mostly awarded all-or-nothing, the electoral count can't tell you anything about how close an election was or wasn't.

Looking at a number of swing states with significant numbers of electoral votes can, though. The margin of victory was just over 1% in Florida (29EV). It's less 1% in Pennsylvania (20EV) and Wisconsin (10EV). Michigan (16EV) was less than .25%.

That's 75EV won by that thin a margin. Half that could have swung the election.

(And yes, you can play this game the other way, but the only state Clinton won that was that closely contested was... New Hampshire, 4EV)

The election was quite close. Trump's electoral victory was very thin.

That's the state of affairs to be expected when the EC winner loses the popular vote.

> he barely slid in a electoral vote disaster, despite the electoral vote being meant to be used against men like Trump

Did you not pay attention to the election at all?

About 3 million votes LESS, winning only because of which particular states he got majority in?

How's that a landslide victory?

I think they are just taking their sweet time with it because he is well enough aligned with their agenda. The second a big enough scandal comes up, away we go.

I think you have it backwards. The second he is no longer aligned with their agenda, they will clutch their pearls, blow up one of the existing scandals, and away we go.

That too, but I think a big enough scandal will be used regardless of alignment. Pence isn't unpredictable.

Trump won the Presidency, and his impeachment by Paul Ryan et al would tear the Republican Party asunder. Impeachment has to be an option of last resort for them. There's absolutely no guarantee that they'll be able to maintain their majority in the House after that. There's indirect evidence of this in how Republicans treated Trump in the run-up to November.

There's also no indication that they'd be able to get enough Democratic support for it.

I would hope so, because frankly Trump is such a loon that I would rather Mike "electrocute the gay away" Pence, but...

Sigh.

> Failure to give up his business interests is an impeachable offense...[as] set forth in the Constitution

U.S. Const. art. I, § 9, cl. 8. states:

U.S. Const. art. II, § 1 cl., 7 states:

"The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them." [2]

There isn't a lot of case law surrounding these clauses [3] nor guidance from Congress. It could be an impeachable offense, though frankly that's true of anything. Impeachment is a political, not judicial, process.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_of_Nobility_Clause

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/what-is-the-emolumen...

"Failure to give up his business interests is an impeachable offense."

Nope. They've had lawyers on this for a while, and I think he's ok on it.

FYI - do you know how many Republican secretly wished that Trump were 'gone'? Probably most of them. He's a) a loose cannon and b) not actually a conservative on many issues.

I think he's legally in the clear on his ownership issues.

They wish he were gone for sure, but they're also too scared of his voters. If they impeach him? They're going to be facing a new pro-Trump Tea Party-like wave in the primaries, and many of them will get kicked out pronto. They need a really, really good excuse to kick him out... to the point where they could say "we really didn't want to, but we had no choice" to their constituents.

The Republicans don't want him gone at all. With him in the office, they can aggressively push the conservative agenda and have him be the fall guy if things don't work out.

We've probably all seen the emoluments clause raised as one way he may be breaking the law. I'm not a legal expert but I would assume, if it's true, that breaking the Constitution would be illegal?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_of_Nobility_Clause

"The Title of Nobility Clause is a provision in Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, that ... restricts members of the government from receiving gifts, emoluments, offices or titles from foreign states without the consent of the United States Congress."

I suspect we will hear a lot more about the "consent of Congress" in the next 6 months if this has any merit.

Except Congress already consented decades ago:

> The financial conflict statute prohibits federal employees from participating in matters where they could enrich themselves. It applies to everyone in the executive branch, from the lowliest file clerk up to the White House chief of staff – except for the president and vice president.

Ref: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/12/07/can-congress...

You could try to convince Congress to re-apply the rules, but that's a different discussion.

Sure, but the courts enforce the constitution, not congress.

The issue isn't who enforces the constitution; it's what the constitution says. Congress has the power to decide which emoluments are okay. Assuming parent comment's interpretation of the law is correct (which it may not be), Congress has given blanket permission, in the same way that it has historically signed away large parts of its Constitutional war-making powers to the executive.

Congress hasn't given blanket permission. The law says that it's illegal for certain government officials to accept gifts etc. It doesn't say anything about whether it's legal for the president to accept them; it merely says that the president is not within the scope of that particular law.

You don't have to have a law for something to be legal. All actions are legal unless stated otherwise.

Yes, and the constitution states otherwise.

In the absence of any law, yes, it would be legal.

Constitution has a clause that prohibits it for any public official including the president (assuming for the moment that it is the meaning of the emoluments clause), unless Congress specifically authorizes it.

Congress additionally passed a law - 18 U.S. Code § 202 and § 208 - that regulates conflicts of interest among government officials. Its domain intersects with the Emoluments Clause somewhat, but it is not an implementation of the Emoluments Clause. It says that certain actions by people other than the president are illegal. Insofar as it intersects with Emoluments Clause, it is at best redundant (although even then it defines clear penalties, so not really).

But there's nothing in it authorizing the president to receive emoluments. § 202 does contain language excluding certain people from the categories of "government officer" and "government employee", which are the target of § 208; but this simply means that § 208, and prohibitions in it specifically, do not apply to those people. In other words, the law doesn't say anything about them. It most certainly doesn't contain any language explicitly authorizing emoluments. Here, see for yourself:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/208 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/202

If we look at other past cases where the Emoluments Clause had to be dealt with, Congress specifically authorized such things, with clear verbiage to that effect. For example, here's the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7342

Note the language: "The Congress consents to ..."

There's nothing even remotely similar in the law we are discussing.

The only real question for the courts here is whether receiving payment for goods and services from a foreign government qualifies as emolument or not. The originalist interpretation is in favor of that - this is one of those clauses in the Constitution where the Founders wrote a great deal about why it was there, and it's clear that their concerns were broad rather than narrow (preventing "foreign corruption" of all kinds).

Well then. My assumption of parent comment's correctness was wrong :-)

There is an argument that the spelling out of cases in which it would be illegal implies that they're okay with it in other cases. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule...

Courts interpret the constitution. I'm no lawyer, but "without the consent of the United States Congress" seems very clear-cut to me. It's up to congress, as per the constitution.

The courts have historically been unlikely to see a Constitutionally-required affirmative permission in the fact that an additional restriction is not applied by Congress.

The fact that Congress has specifically granted permission under the Emoluments Clause to Presidents, at the latter's request, while the conflict statute was in effect wouldbsuggest stronglynthat neither past Presidents, nor, more importantly, the Congress has viewed the non-application of the conflict statute to the President as a grant of permission under the Emoluments Clause that makes more specific grants unnecessary.

OTOH, absent coverage under the conflict statute or some other statute establishing judicial remedies, there may an argument that there is no such remedy for a Presidential violation of the clause, and that the only remedy is via impeachment. That's probably the biggest weakness in an Emoluments Clause lawsuit.

On the gripping hand, a court ruling to the effect that the only remedy is by impeachment may create additional political pressure on Congress, which would probably have value to those bringing the claim, perhaps moreso than a judicial remedy that, e.g., forced Trump to give up past gains and avoid future gains through divestment.

This is a different issue. Trump is correct that the conflict of interest laws don't apply to him. However the emoluments clause is something else, and most constitutional scholars say that it clearly does apply. This doesn't prohibit conflicts of interest; it prohibits federal employees and office holders from receiving gifts, titles or emoluments from foreign governments. Profits from business with foreign governments would certainly be covered by this, as would beneficial terms on loans and, arguably, things such as building permits. You'd struggle to find a single non-partisan expert who would say that he isn't violating this right now, and even plenty of Republican lawyers agree.

The trouble is that impeachment is the responsibility Congress, and it would be a brave Republican congressman who would vote to impeach a Republican president right now.

So, wasn't Hillary Clinton breaking the Constitution when she was accepting donations from Saudi Arabia at the Clinton Foundation while secretary of state?

So does Hillary get to spend the foundation money on herself?

Didn't the leaks reveal that Chelsea's wedding was paid for by the foundation?

No, they didn't.

No, those were fake news headlines run by Fox and Russian news agencies.

Here is the email in question so you all can judge for yourselves:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/52046

For context, Doug Band is a very close Clinton associate and he's discussing an initiative apparently launched by Chelsea Clinton to investigate money within the Clinton Foundation (which is also mentioned in some of the other Podesta emails).

That's the one. Thanks for digging it up.

I would guess Hillary's situation would depend on the structure of the foundation. Likely she was not the one "accepting" it, and the ownership structure, such as it is, might not even include the Clintons. It might just have their name on it. This is all just speculation though.

Why is anyone still talking about Hillary Clinton?

Donald Trump is the man in office. Hillary Clinton has nothing to do with anything.

However Clinton may or may not violated the Constitution is absolutely irrelevant to the question of whether Trump is violating it now.

> Why is anyone still talking about Hillary Clinton?

Because we're trying to ascertain if the complainers are genuinely principled or partisan hacks. I've a feeling most of them would be turning a blind eye if it wasn't trump.

Complainers can't prosecute and convict. Courts can. That's a difference I'd recommend coming to terms with as it's the crux of this discussion at a level that's intensely germane.

In this case particular, actually, it's the legislature that can prosecute and convict. Still not random people on HN, though :-P

Why does it matter? The complaints are either right, or they're wrong. The complainers' motives for making their complains have no bearing on that.

Maybe, but for those of us who aren't experts on constitutional law, it's difficult to ascertain exactly who is in the right, we have to decide which self-proclaimed experts to believe.

For this reason it's helpful to understand the motives of those putting forth a particular argument.

I have a rule, and I think it's a good one. When I hear some political rhetoric I ask myself "if the parties were reversed would this person still be saying the same thing?" If the answer is no, I ignore that person. This cuts out about 97% of all political discussion and saves a lot of time.

Right. I didn't like either of them, I'm not a Republican or a Democrat.

I just think it's odd to say that Trump should be impeached for something his opponent did while in office.

I don't think that rule can apply for anonymous Internet commenters listing objective claims. You probably don't have enough information to determine the partisanship of the commenter, and even if you did, their claims are either true or false, and debating that is almost certainly a better use of time.

I've noticed this a lot in Reddit too. There I feel it is A distraction tactic. Posters seek to make a comment about very in every Trump thread and it is always some distracting sound bytes about the emails or something. Totally irrelevant to the thread at hand.

Seems to work like a charm to derail conversation about the real topic at hand.

Because it show the duplicitous nature of people like you. Clearly this wasn't an issue Hillary, so it's obvious that is all political nonsense.

I am willing to put money that this is being brought up so no one can set up another clinton foundation again. trumps press conference a while back he spent a considerable amount of time talking about his company and the legalities. he knew what he was talking about and they had spent some time working on it.(then he called cnn fake news). Now all this talk about nobility... This gets ruled on and he is totally inside the rules... but the real message is don't set up "Clinton Global Inititave" as it wound be outside the rules.

I did a spot of research on the emoluments clause and found three instances where specific events were evaluated for breaching this clause:

1 - Theodore Roosevelt. Nobel Peace Prize. He accept both the cash award and the medal.

2 - Barack Obama. Nobel Peace Prize. He accepted only the medal.

... and most interestingly ...

3 - Ronald Reagan. Receipt of pension payments from the state of California as a former Governor and California pension plan participant.

https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/opinions/198...

The way I read the analysis of Ronald Reagan's situation, any benefit from a domestic state, city, or county could potentially fall afoul of the emoluments clause. Think here of any local property tax rebate from a city to entice a Trump business to build a hotel or set up shop. Maybe even a tax rebate / waiver from prior business development agreement could fall afoul. Who knows how deep this particular rabbit hole could go.

I also was puzzling over Hobby Lobby the other day and I realized that Trump's situation vis-a-vie the emoluments clause could be parallel to Hobby Lobby versus the ACA. Hobby Lobby wanted out of the mandate for birth control and the Supreme Court sided with them because Hobby Lobby was a closely held corporation; close enough where the owners' religious beliefs could be infringed upon by ACA birth control mandates on the corporation they controlled.

I believe the Trump empire is a closely held corporation like Hobby Lobby. Per the Supreme Court a closely held corporation like Hobby Lobby has a personal connection unlike widely held corporation. Simply saying payments made to Trump's corporation is a sufficient separation from the person to avoid the emoluments clause may not be a strong argument for those arguing Trump's side.

Edit: IANAL, but rather a politics major.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee is not a "foreign state".

No, but the committee is directly appointed by the Norwegian parliament, so the argument could reasonably be made that they're essentially accepting a prize from a foreign state.

No, "Despite its members being appointed by parliament, the committee is a private body tasked with awarding a private prize" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Nobel_Committee

Yea, I know that's the official line. But it would be fairly easy for a lawyer to argue otherwise.

That is what lawyers get paid for, but no attempt to impeach Obama was made for accepting the Nobel peace prize which indicates any such argument would have no chance of succeeding, would not be valid.

But Obama did turn down the cash part of the prize, only accepting the medal and diploma, specifically to avoid any such potential problems.

I wouldn't think there is a legal distinction between the cash and the medal. Accepting the money would probably been politically unacceptable even with out any legal issues. But I accept you are correct about the potential legal difficulties in accepting the prize at all:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10...

I don't know about that. Look into the 2010 price to Liu Xiaobo. Norway worked for 6 years to try to repair relations with China after that and trade has only recently been opened again.

The Liu Xiaobo case shows that (some) other countries see the Nobel committee as an unofficial extension of the Norwegian government. If China thought that the Nobel prize was handed out by 6 random dudes in some private club then the Nobel prize probably wouldn't have had such an impact on the relations between the Chinese and Norwegian governments.

Or perhaps China is trying to pressurize the Norwegian government into removing independence from committee, as well as warning other countries not to do anything similar.

Trump has had reams of lawyers on this one for a while.

If the Dems thought they could 'get him' on his ownership of whatever, they would have been pressing it already.

I think as it stands, he's on decent legal footing.

Which admittedly is a little ridiculous, you'd think the Prez. would not be above conflict of interest.

Aside from that, Trump says ridiculous things, but they are mostly in the vein of ridiculous populism. It makes him look ridiculous to most people, I don't know why he does it, that said, none of his policies so far are as gonzo as his ridiculous rhetoric.

Give it time. Maybe he'll cool down, or maybe he'll do something impeachable.

I predict: tons and tons of PR snafus, but nothing illegal.

The Dems are just standing by for this lawsuit:

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/24/14358654/tr...

The interesting thing about this is that it's a bipartisan affair as far as party affiliations go: the two main guys behind it are the ethics people for Bush and Obama, respectively.

> The lawsuit asks the court to declare that Trump is in violation of the emoluments clause. Even if he is, though, it would be up to Congress to decide whether that merits impeaching him and removing him from office — and Republicans in Congress so far have been reluctant to look into Trump’s break with tradition on ethical issues.

But it would mean Trump would be serving at the mercy of Congress, and at the mercy of maintaining a Republican majority, which could have substantial effects on policy in itself even if he's never impeached.

If SCOTUS were to rule for the plaintiffs in this case, the Congress would be in a much more difficult spot. Right now they can dismiss it all as "he said she said" and "not really illegal". But if there's a SCOTUS ruling that the president is in violation of the Constitution, and they don't impeach, they'd basically be saying that either they don't care about the Constitution, or they don't care about SCOTUS. Either would cause a major constitutional crisis with unclear consequences.

I don't know. I think Trump could literally say that he doesn't care about SCOTUS and it would be unlikely to be the wildest thing he said that day. A Republican majority Congress could definitely ignore a SCOTUS ruling.

I'm not saying that they can't do it. I wouldn't even be particularly surprised if Trump does it - he is, allegedly, a big fan of Andrew Jackson, the only president to date in US history who openly defied the Supreme Court ("John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it").

I would be somewhat surprised if the Congress ended up doing it, but seeing how spineless they already are wrt Trump even where he contradicts them, not super surprised.

My point, rather, is that, should such a thing happen, it would be a bona fide constitutional crisis. If two branches of government are openly in defiance of parts of the Constitution, it becomes a free for everyone else, as well. Secession would suddenly be on the table for real - after all, the Constitution is what makes the Union, so if the Constitution is no longer the supreme law of the land, then the states could reasonably argue that they aren't bound to the Union in any sensible way. Or they could simply state that per the Emoluments Clause, they consider the president illegitimate from there on, and so no EO and no act of Congress signed by him has force of law on their territory. Or even invoke the 9th and the 10th Amendments in a full-on literalist vein (stealing the book from fringe factions of the right), and just claim that the feds simply don't have most powers that they claim as well.

This is all very far-fetched, but in the event of an open defiance of SCOTUS by the other two branches, we'd already be in the realm of far-fetched things, so the impossible becomes possible, and unlikely becomes probable.

> I predict: tons and tons of PR snafus, but nothing illegal.

I predict something illegal

> If the Dems thought they could 'get him' on his ownership of whatever, they would have been pressing it already.

Impeachment is sort of a legal process but it's really political, while Republicans control congress and he hasn't sunk with the base impeachment won't happen.

Do people really want him to get impeached and convicted, with Pence being the successor? Seems like a terrible idea...

Pence has successfully kept it more or less between lanes for the ~17 years he's been a career politician. The guy might have snakes in his head but part of me would rather risk that than what is, to all appearances, an unhinged budding fascist surrounded by sycophants. YMMV.

>an unhinged budding fascist surrounded by sycophants. YMMV.

I'm not so sure. I almost get the impression that he doesn't really care about a lot of those things except as a means to get that part of the republican base to the polls.

I've heard people say this on a number of occasions. Let me say why I'm not so worried about it. The thing that makes Trump different from almost any other politician I've seen is the control he has over his followers. They don't care if he lies or if any unpleasant fact about him comes to light. They're just transfixed by the guy. I don't believe that Pence or any other current politician has the same power or the same ability to do this. I imagine that, if Pence did have to assume office for some reason, he would just come off to Trump supporters as seeming like a typical politician. He wouldn't be able to drum up the same kind of enthusiasm.

Going to take off the objective hat and talk as a liberal. The answer I give to this is for the US, the President is both the head of state and the head of government. As is clear from recent articles about Trump's manner in the white house, his team is very much making many of the small policy decisions while Trump gets to strut out as the figurehead.

So yes, Trump stepping down wouldn't mean much difference when it comes to his role as a head of government since his team seems to be handling that, but the head of state is still a very important role. Don't forget, he said,

"I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything[,]"

essentially describing sexual assault, emphasized by me. Not to mention his poor demeanor, his lack of likeability, his unpopularity, the fact he was a reality-TV star. Having such an individual represent the nation is an embarrassment and does not inspire confidence in the nation nor does it abroad. Understand, no international body would respect Trump if he weren't the President. He does not prop us up as a country, he receives respect because we prop him up, and even then, he still depreciates his image by trying to project and strengthen his fragile pride and by involving himself in frivolous engagements on Twitter.

So yes, having a different head of state would be beneficial for us, at least in our view. It would not make much of a difference in terms of actual policy, but it would give us with a better representative, which isn't a difficult bar to exceed.

EDIT: I almost forgot, despite the politics of it, I do personally feel that a conflict of interest as a President is detrimental to the role as the head of government. We have already seen for example his orders on DAPL, which he still owns some shares of, a direct conflict of interest. And worse, of course, there are his foreign investments, which is worse from a national security standpoint. Sorry, but a head of government should represent us, not their own personal financial interests. You don't even need all my feeling about Trump as a figurehead, although that is important, but his conflicts of interests are a significant issue with him as an elected official.

I hear what you're saying. For me, actively working to make someone president (Pence) who has a proven track record in politics doing things for many years I disagree with seems even less desirable to me. Hard to say what the 'lesser of two evils' is here.

Perception of the country and international policy and diplomacy.

his team is very much making many of the small policy decisions while Trump gets to strut out as the figurehead.

Which is pretty much exactly how you would expect a "I have no idea what I'm doing but I don't want to fuck it up so I'll fill my cabinet with people who know what they're doing and let them do their thing" administration to work.

>Not to mention his poor demeanor, his lack of likeability, his unpopularity, the fact he was a reality-TV star. Having such an individual represent the nation is an embarrassment and does not inspire confidence in the nation nor does it abroad.

Are these seriously that much more important than how well the job gets done. On some level I don't care if the president is a member of the goddamn KKK if the job gets done well enough.

i think some of those things are part of the job, right? is your country getting rich really worth it if it means you cross every moral boundary and inflict continual psychological trauma on half the people in it?

>>Which is pretty much exactly how you would expect a "I have no idea what I'm doing but I don't want to fuck it up so I'll fill my cabinet with people who know what they're doing and let them do their thing" administration to work.

Sorry, but have to actually seen his cabinet? Ben Carson heading Housing and Urban Development. Betsy Davis heading Department of Education. Rick Perry, a guy with a bachelors degree in animal science, heading the Department of Energy... these people are some of the least qualified people on the planet.

> Are these seriously that much more important than how well the job gets done. On some level I don't care if the president is a member of the goddamn KKK if the job gets done well enough.

You should

The fact that he is openly racist is one of the biggest marks against him

> Are these seriously that much more important than how well the job gets done. On some level I don't care if the president is a member of the goddamn KKK if the job gets done well enough.

That's very true, if they're the sort of person you trust to put their personal feelings and opinions aside when they make decisions. If you don't feel they're that sort of person, you better hope their values align to your own.

Absolutely. Without a second thought. My issue has nothing whatsoever to do with politics.

While Pence may have worse policies than Trump on average, Trump has much worse downside risk because he is unpredictable. Today we have the worst of both: Pence already implementing his domestic policies plus the chance that Trump might nuke someone.

"plus the chance that Trump might nuke someone."

You're delusional if you think Trump will perform a first strike. That's complete nonsense.

He's a businessman, not a warmonger. His rhetoric is entirely along those lines as well.

From my (quite far-left) perspective, I would be very okay with that outcome. The Presidency's most unchecked power is in foreign policy, where Trump truly scares me. Pence as President would not change the balance of power in Congress, which is where most of the social and economic decisions (where I really have problems with Pence) would be made.

Putting on my non-partisan hat, though, I am nervous about the precedent of removing a president from office iff it is seen as a partisan move. The removal of Trump without widespread Republican support (as opposed to a small defecting faction) might be seen as precedent for a higher frequency of partisan impeachments - a danger to be weighed against (in my not-very-objective opinion) the dangers of a Trump presidency.

Is there something about Pence's track record that suggests he'd be better for USA on foreign policy?

I doubt Pence would accidentally put American international agreements, institutions, and treaty organizations into question with weird rambling tweets. I also doubt he'd find any value in antagonizing Mexico over a silly monument to xenophobia.

Pence is no foreign policy wiz but I'm not worried about him precipitating huge geopolitical shifts against America's interests.

As far as I know he's more or less the proverbial generic Republican on foreign policy. Which sounds a lot better to me than Trump's uneducated unpredictability.

Pence is predictable. Diplomats can build plans around predictable. You can make deals, treaties and alliances with predictable. Your opponents know what to expect from you.

If nothing else, it at least provides some stability.

In other words: Who knows, because we don't know what Trumps foreign policy will be tomorrow. And every day will be like that.

Or in Hacker News terms:

Downvote only if the comment detracts from the discussion, not just if you disagree.

Impeach only if the President commits crimes while in office, not just if you dislike the President's politics more than the VP's.

>Putting on my non-partisan hat, though, I am nervous about the precedent of removing a president from office iff it is seen as a partisan move. The removal of Trump without widespread Republican support (as opposed to a small defecting faction) might be seen as precedent for a higher frequency of partisan impeachments - a danger to be weighed against (in my not-very-objective opinion) the dangers of a Trump presidency.

We already have a one-party state in which the Republican Party plays partisan hardball, as much as possible, to prevent elections from altering their control over the government. Why not fight back for once?

Unilateral disarmament is not a good idea, but neither is escalation.

Yes

Pence is at least a sane conservative theocrat

Trump is a lying corrupt racist who is extremely unpredictable and may or may not blow up markets, start wars, abandon our allies, or deport millions of people

>Trump is a lying corrupt racist

Whenever I read something like this, I always wonder whether people posting it legitimately think this kind of rhetoric will advance their argument, or is it all just about social signalling.

If I was to criticize someone with the intent of changing others opinions about the person in question, the last thing I would do is interject my criticism with a bunch of derogatory and emotional labels. It would simply make me sound biased, irrational or extremely partisan/dogmatic.

And yet, this is exactly what people do, even in the media, who has all kinds of incentives to project a rational and detached image. Extreme social signaling is the only explanation I can come up with.

In most cases I would agree, and I get your point about the language not helping the case the poster is trying to make, but is there anything inaccurate in saying he is lying, corrupt or a racist? You'd have a hard time arguing against any of the accusations.

I haven't seen any very compelling evidence that he's a racist.

He may be (most likely is) corrupt but, as has been extensively discussed elsewhere, it is not clear that has done anything strictly illegal, which makes it tricky to say definitively.

He definitely spouts outrageous lies all the time, though.

>He may be (most likely is) corrupt but, as has been extensively discussed elsewhere, it is not clear that has done anything strictly illegal, which makes it tricky to say definitively.

Legalized corruption remains corruption. It was when Clinton did it, and it is when Trump does it.

> Whenever I read something like this, I always wonder whether people posting it legitimately think this kind of rhetoric will advance their argument, or is it all just about social signalling.

I'm not the one who commented that, but I think it's simply true and easily demonstrable given any widely-accepted definitions of the terms. Will saying it "advance an argument"? I don't know. But it is true.

Does it sway you at all that the market reacted extremely positively to Trump's win?

If you are correct, you must know something that most people who are willing to bet money on their opinion do not.

> Lying isn't usually a crime

It also isn't lying if the person saying it believes it to be true.

What is it then called when you could and should have easily verified your belief and even after pointing out that your belief is wrong, you refuse to admit that your belief was actually wrong, if not lying?

"No, sir. I did not lie in my CV. I _believe_ that this funny looking letter I received from my mother some time ago means that I have Ph.D from MIT"

Technically it's still not a lie. But you would be delusional. I don't know what is worse in a president.

> even after pointing out that your belief is wrong

Some people believe their arguments are so strong that the other person must have been secretly convinced, and is therefore lying.

Setting aside for the moment that people often believe their arguments are far more convincing than they actually are, people can and do believe anything, so a better reason than that is necessary to accuse people of lying.

"Failure to give up business interests is breaking precedent and confounding ethicists, but also doesn't seem to be illegal."

It is not "breaking precedent". George Washington kept his farm.

It's entirely unreasonable to expect a regular citizen to give up his business simply because he's elected to public office. Trump has taken many steps to ensure there's no conflict of interest.

He's taken the appearance of many steps.

Owning a farm is a little different to being involved in sprawling international ventures that leave you open to pressure from foreign powers.

Since he's gifting all profits from foreign ventures to the US Treasury, there is no "pressure".

When did he say he was gifting all profits from foreign ventures to the US Treasury? Last I read about it, his pledge only related to profits from foreign governments for his hotels and similar businesses. The WaPo addressed the shortcomings of that pledge in [1].

Since it is a pledge, it also supposes that his word has any value. Anyone who looked at his business or charity dealings knows that his promises are worthless.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-plan-to-donate...

Even if that was true, this would not solve the issue. Consider if any Trump company decides to pursue a big new project in, oh, say China.

Consider that just the knowledge of that, which might not be more than he might read in the papers, could very well cause him to adjust his policies either in the hope of favours, or even just subconsciously to avoid causing trouble for them.

Beyond that there is plenty of scope for outright blackmail. E.g. what if some Chinese representative whisper in the ear of some Trump employee that significant legal problems might appear as long as China's relationship with the US is still strained over Trumps apparent lack of support for the One China principle. They'd not even need to mention his company, for that matter, or contact him.

A slightly pointed press release about how there will be a crackdown on companies believed to not represent interests that don't fully support the One China principle would work too.

Chances are we'll never find out how Trumps policies are affected (or not) by foreign interference, but it'd be naive to think that there aren't multiple powers that have people considering how they can take advantage of Trumps business ventures presence or prospective interests in their country to curry favour with him or try to pressure him right now.

I know if I was running a country, then at this point I'd have a whole team on looking into opportunities, because even though it'd be rather unethical I'd want something in my back pocket in case Trump were to do something unpredictable that'd harm our interests. I'm sure there are plenty of regimes with less scruples about unethical methods.

>Trump has taken many steps to ensure there's no conflict of interest.

This an outright lie.

Is lying about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a crime?

Is lying about WMDs and then destroying the lives of millions of human beings (also known as iraqis) a crime?

> Failure to give up business interests is breaking precedent and confounding ethicists, but also doesn't seem to be illegal.

On the contrary, it's explicitly legal as nothing the President does is considered a conflict. It's like that because otherwise everything and anything could be a construed a conflict of interest. In the interests of not having a continual flood of lawsuits the top of the executive branch is considered to be exempt from conflict of interest laws that otherwise affect the rest of government.

It doesn't, in any practical sense. It requires an extremely unpopular president, and a congress who dislikes him enough to vote him out.

To be fair, alternative facts wasn't meant as sinister as you may have been led to believe. What was meant was "additional" facts.

Don't piss in my pocket and tell me it's raining. We all saw the same video. Her intent was quite clear and was backed during the same interview with a naked threat.

> "alternative facts"

I think people are taking this and running at breakneck speed without stopping to look at what they actually mean by this.

After watching the first few press conferences and Kelly Anne's interviews where she said that, it seems clear to me they weren't trying to say there were more people physically at the inauguration in their "alternative facts" but what they are referring to specifically is the viewership.

It's very possible they are correct in saying this and I guess their point is "well the media isn't reporting on these facts so we are going to present them ourselves".

but only the media can be right cause DRUMPF

https://youtu.be/pa9YUDNHobE

FYI, NSFW

> * they are referring to...the viewership*

Charitably, Conway might have meant that Trump's inauguration may have been the largest if TV viewers are counted. Unfortunately, that's not what she said. You can't be both unambiguous and wrong, repeatedly, in any human game (EDIT: and win).

Bet you I can!

No, it's still false when you count viewership. This has been covered by countless news organizations. You are making a mistake by imagining that these people are operating in good faith.

Has anyone actually done an unbiased comparison? I've seen the picture but there are plenty of possible explanations for that.

And people seem to be reading far to much into it in any case.

> people seem to be reading far to much into it in any case

Executive orders, cabinet appointments and apparently agency gag orders left right and centre with more, plus SCOTUS nominees, to come. But all my Facebook feed talks about is rain and lawn coverings.

Really? My facebook feed is a nonstop stream of political organization, grass-roots advocacy, media takedowns of the day's latest outrage, and the odd picture of someone's dog.

Good chance you've created your own bubble.

Chance has nothing to do with it. I've intentionally sought out the groups that I follow and the people I socialize with.

Just don't look surprised if Trump gets re-elected. And don't pretend to know what his voters interests are.

>Has anyone actually done an unbiased comparison? I've seen the picture but there are plenty of possible explanations for that.

What better way to compare attendance of an outdoor event other than photos? There are also DC metro numbers, but they don't seem necessary as we have high-resolution images.

>And people seem to be reading far to much into it in any case.

Seems emblematic of bigger issues. Such as: unwillingness to correct previous mistakes, a penchant for conspiracy theories, ego disrupting day-to-day operations.

> What better way to compare attendance of an outdoor event other than photos?

Someone posted a good list of possible ways this could be misleading yesterday: http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/there-are-l...

As far as reading too much into it, I meant that the election of the first black president was a much bigger deal then the 40 somethingth white old dude. I'd expect trumps turnout to be lower and I'm not sure why it would be news in the first place.

> I meant that the election of the first black president was a much bigger deal then the 40 somethingth white old dude

But that (and many of the questions in that link) are not relevant to the specific question of how many people were at the inauguration. Which is the topic at hand. Those questions would be more relevant in a discussion of drawing other conclusions from the attendance numbers

I'm just trying to work out why it became a thing in the first place. Was Trump trying to play up attendance numbers or was someone trying play up the lack of them to be something meaningful?

The media mentioned it a bit on Friday, even more on Saturday due to the Womens March outdrawing the Inauguration itself, and Trump couldn't handle the coverage.

There are tons of valid reasons why there was less attendance at this inauguration (many listed in the link you posted), which is exactly why it's weird and disgusting that Trump is blatantly lying about having attendance he very clearly didn't have.

It's not that big of a deal, and doesn't mean much that there was less attendance. The weather was bad and it was not historically significant because he's not the first black (or anything significant) president ever. So why is he so blatantly lying? He could just move on and it would be no big deal... but instead he makes a very large deal about it, dedicating a special press briefing specifically to make up lies about to explain how the media got it wrong.

He's 70 FWIW

GP wasn't giving an age. GP stated Trump was the 40-something-th white old dude to be president.

I'm guessing it wound up news because of the boasts and claims made by Trump and his staff about how it was the best turnout ever, with fictitious numbers added in to the claims.

For the health of the republic, I'm keen to see the media become the adversary calling out lies, lies, and all damn lies. No matter what they are. Maybe then we can be free of all the lies.

You can watch the full timelapse PBS compiled that shows from start to end of the inauguration[1]. It's nowhere near the numbers they were trying to suggest.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdantUf5tXg

Direct quote from Sean Spicer:

> This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in-person and around the globe

If "in-person" doesn't mean "physically at the inauguration" what does it mean then? It is not ambiguous.

Spicer made an unsubstantiated claim, and has since been defensively walking it back to the equally unsubstantiated second part of "around the globe."

"The media" is a very broad category, so I am not going to universally defend or attack them. But the Trump administration has simply been making things up and, as of yet, has not backed up any of these statements with evidence.

The media is a bit more hit or miss. It is true that some media outlets seem determined to make fun of Trump no matter what he does. That doesn't give Trump a free pass to make up shit. Obama had to deal with the same crap.

Why are you ignoring the second part of the sentence? He even clarified that he was saying total number of viewership (in person, TV, streaming). There is way more access to watching the Inauguration today than 4 years ago.

> If "in-person" doesn't mean "physically at the inauguration" what does it mean then? It is not ambiguous.

The ambiguity isn't what "in-person" means, it's what "both in-person and around the globe" means. Does it mean "both 1) in person and 2) around the globe (each independently)" or does it mean "both (the total sum) in person and around the globe"?

Obviously the second is more strained, but it's not completely absurd, especially if you allow for the inelegant phrasing common in live briefings.

It's easy to find things like this if what you're really looking for is to start a fight.

Good point. Of course, it's still total B.S. since they just made the claim up.

On the other hand he spent the whole press conference talking about metro ridership, the national parks service, and the physical event, which leads me to think in context that they weren't talking about tv. Never even mentioned the word tv actually.

The phrase "both in-person and around the globe" is ambiguous. It could mean either that there were more witnesses in person, and more witnesses around the globe, or it could mean that the total number of witnesses, anywhere, was the largest ever. This is the (terrible) beauty of it: a supporter can believe the former, while the administration needs only to defend the latter.

The phrase "alternative facts" too is ambiguous and, in the way it was used by Conway is classical doublethink. Doublethink involves two actions: a public lie and wilful self-delusion. One interpretation (without context) of the phrase "alternative facts" is that the facts are merely unknown and up for debate. But one merely needs to look at a photo of the inauguration to see that the facts are that Obama had higher attendance in 2009. [1] To claim otherwise is a lie.

Another is that the _true_ facts are known, but Conway is explicitly stating: these are the facts which I am telling you to believe. This is the wilful self-delusion.

From 1984:

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. "Reality control," they called it: in Newspeak, "doublethink."

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38716191

>> This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in-person and around the globe

>If "in-person" doesn't mean "physically at the inauguration" what does it mean then? It is not ambiguous.

You're right, it's not ambiguous. "In-person and around the globe" is clearly means viewing on TV or online streaming.

You are deliberately ignoring the "around the globe" part to create "alternative facts" of your own.

See I don't even know why people care. Everyone latched on that phrase and keep belaboring it. Wonder how many hours were spent totally talking about how many people at the inauguration. Why not talk about other stuff, cabinet picks, TPP, aid cancellation, Federal hiring freeze except such and such, etc.

This is like the media equivalent of bike shedding. Other stuff is complicated so they latched on to that phrase...

People care because the White House was seen to be lying in one of the first statements made to the press.

If, instead, they'd just said n-thousand people attended, and made some comment about bad weather, the attention would have moved on to the next thing a lot sooner.

Well when wasn't the White House lying :-). I guess I've come to expect very little from govt officials. It still seems like bike shedding to me

> After watching the first few press conferences and Kelly Anne's interviews where she said that, it seems clear to me they weren't trying to say there were more people physically at the inauguration in their "alternative facts" but what they are referring to specifically is the viewership.

In the original claim, Spicer explicitly claimed Trump's audience was the greatest both in-person and by remote media (and stated I. a way which clearly implied this was beyond debate and supported by incontrovertible evidence), and, in any case, the only metrics I've seen anyone bring out for the revised claim (for which, incidentally, the Administration provided no evidence) also are indicative of it being false (but not absolutely conclusive on that pointz as published metrics aren't available for all media channels, particularly many non-YouTube online channels.)

At best Spicer both seriously misspoke and referenced separate standards when he meant to reference an aggregate and, even so, presented rank hopeful speculation as certain fact.

But even that stretches plausibility considerably.

The process requires a majority of the House, and then it goes to a trial that requires two thirds of the Senate for conviction. Considering the Republicans have a majority in both, I wouldn't get your hopes up.

Exactly. Clinton's impeachment passed the House majority hurdle but never got the 2/3rds majority of the Senate required for the conviction.

Agreed on the Republican majority. I suspect the best the US can hope for is a Republican bloodbath in the 2018 midterms to deliver House and Senate back to Democrat control. I don't believe the chances of that are high though.

Once everyone loses their healthcare they might change their minds

Well, the legislators won't be losing their healthcare :)

If you mean the voters, my understanding is it's a fairly high hurdle from a structural standpoint -- there are far more democrats up for reelection than republicans.

I didn't know that last part. Well, shit. Reagan years are here again...

Even elizabeth warrens reelection looks rough. Im really hope the non wall street democrats get their act together.

Impeachment is about politics and power.

For whatever reasons (and I still don't fully understand it, no, check that, I don't understand it at all), the Clintons were an absolute hate-magnet for the Right. Clinton's sexual relations -- essentially no different from what any of the GOP opposition leaders turned out to be engaged with, if not far less serious (Dennis Hastert's long-time homosexual exploitation of minor boys under his care, for example) -- turned out to be the hook that the GOP could finally snag him with.

In the case of Trump, I suspect there's a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes jockeying and assessment of power. Questions over who the party (or any possible coalition or new political force) wants to see him replaced by -- Pence might well be no better, potentially worse. The question of how deeply tainted Trump's entire cabinet (and more) may be.

The GOP has been fractured for years, and only barely holds itself together. The prospects of real violent rebellion or reaction to a deposal of Trump may also be staying hands.

> For whatever reasons (and I still don't fully understand it, no, check that, I don't understand it at all), the Clintons were an absolute hate-magnet for the Right

It's funny you mention that, since by all metrics Clinton was about the most conservative democrat to gain office recently. A shame we've steadily moved away from middle-of-the-road since then.

The whole point of lying is to blur the lines between truth and lies so people believe nothing.

HyperNormalisation2016

Going to share that thing until I'm blue in the mouth. That documentary mentions that Surkov[0] uses this tactic, confusing the public about what is true and untrue.

I have to say, whether people on the right believe this or not, this has been at least subconsciously adapted as one of their tactics. When there is no truth or lie, then whatever you want is true, which makes you ripe for manipulation by the powers that be.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislav_Surkov

Adam Curtis bingo!

https://twitter.com/chrisapplegate/status/787751065315840000...

> Clinton was impeached for perjury and abuse of power

Interestingly, Clinton was impeached for breaking his own law, the Violence Against Women Act, which he created to win reelection. (The rape shield part of the law is what created the ground rules for how he was questioned in court, and what he was allowed to say and not say in his defense.)

This law also created a series of social programs that Trump defunded today via an executive order.

I'd say we're probably closer to 25th amendment territory than impeachment. It isn't clear (to the extent the law requires) that Trump has high crimes or treason, and whether he will or not is immaterial until he does. It does appear very clear that he is not fit to discharge his duties, however. What is going to happen the first time there is a crisis like a shooting or a hurricane. The next time the south gets wiped out by a cat 5 they are going to be BEGGING for Brownie to come do a hell of a job.

it's actually phrased "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" in the Constitution, so the President could be impeached for a misdemeanor.

Different meaning of misdemeanor. "High crimes and misdemeanors" was a phrase in common use at the time of its writing:

http://www.crf-usa.org/impeachment/high-crimes-and-misdemean...

Sounds like by that measure we should have impeached every President we've had so far. They all at some point probably told lies.

Also just because Clinton was impeached doesn't mean he was removed from office. Those are different things.

I think you answered the question, he was impeached for perjury. Trump hasn't committed perjury yet. I think the best case to make against him is that he is violating the Emoluments clause, but that's not really lying because we already know he won't really divest himself of his businesses and investments.

To answer your possible subtext on Clinton's impeachment, the answer is yes, that impeachment was political.

Trump has been in office for 4 days. Conflict of interest laws do not apply to US Presidents, so the business interest argument is moot. We don't impeach Presidents because a loud group of people dislikes the fact that they lost an election. We impeach Presidents when they commit crimes, which he has not done and hasn't even been in office long enough to do.

The emoluments clause of the constitution applies to all members of government.

Yeah I guess to you breaking the Foreign Emoluments Clause in the Constitution is nothing. And its funny you say that when that is exactly why they impeached Clinton.

They impeached Clinton for committing the crime of perjury, so your comparison makes no sense. With regard to the Foreign Emoluments Clause, Trump is donating all proceeds from stays in his hotels by foreign officials directly to the US Treasury. I am not a constitutional lawyer, but apparently he has been advised by those who are that this solution solves that particular legal issue.

I realize that this issue will never be solved in the minds of Clinton voters, but as long as it legally resolves the problem, opinions simply don't matter.

Trump claimed that he will do so with hotel profits, but we have no evidence that he's actually doing that. This is exactly the place where his finances should be disclosed, at a minimum, to a bipartisan ethics commission for review.

And it's not like he only has hotels. He owns, or has stake in (not necessarily controlling, but still enough to derive profit) many other businesses. Some of which aren't even in US.

As many people - including several specifically involved in government ethics compliance - states, the only thing that can truly and definitely resolve this problem is divestment and transfer of control to a blind trust. Anything else is going to be suspect.

>Trump claimed that he will do so with hotel profits, but we have no evidence that he's actually doing that.

Given how hard he fought for the Presidency, I seriously doubt that he would endanger his ability to continue in office just to keep a few tenths or hundredths of a percent of his overall hotel revenue.

Given how he actually used one of his campaign speeches as a hotel infomercial I have no doubt that he will use the office for his own benefit.

You may be right you may be wrong. Do you remember that time when he claimed he was going to personally donate money to veterans and then only did so when the media caught him having not done it (though others in his fundraiser had)? [1] And then he bought a giant portrait of himself with charity money? [2]

The point is when it comes to ethics in leadership is that you are supposed to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. For that to happen, we must see evidence. If its good enough for rank and file members of corporate America, it's good enough for the President of the United States. He must disclose his financial conflicts of interest and resolve them -- in public.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/05... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-clue-to-the-wherea...

>but we have no evidence that he's actually doing that.

He has been President for exactly 5 days now.

it is one hell of a stretch to claim that any foreigner making standard use of a business you own or have interests is somehow violating this law.

if anything it seems tailored made to keep non politicians from ever taking office without sacrificing a lot. funny how many politicians come in with little and leave with a lot more

"We impeach Presidents when they commit crimes, which he has not done and hasn't even been in office long enough to do."

Can you clarify how long one must be in public office to commit a crime?

Conflict of interest laws do not apply to US Presidents

That is Trump-level spin. Wow.

The President is exempt from conflict of interest laws.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/208:

(a) Except as permitted by subsection (b) hereof, whoever, being an officer or employee of the executive branch of the United States Government... has a financial interest—Shall be subject to the penalties set forth in section 216 of this title.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/202:

(c) Except as otherwise provided in such sections, the terms “officer” and “employee” in sections 203, 205, 207 through 209, and 218 of this title shall not include the President, the Vice President, a Member of Congress, or a Federal judge.

>We don't impeach Presidents because a loud group of people dislikes the fact that they lost an election.

That's an incredibly disingenuous statement.

I think that will be up to the Supreme Court to decide. Not you.

The Supreme Court does not try impeachment cases. That would be the Senate, and it requires a 2/3 vote, after Congress first adopts articles of impeachment with a majority vote. It is unlikely that either would happen.

> We don't impeach Presidents because a loud group of people dislikes the fact that they lost an election.

As a matter of fact, that's exactly why they impeached Clinton. Face it: America impeaches Presidents for being not-Republican, and empowers Presidents for being Republican. It's a one-party state.

Nope. Clinton was impeached because he committed perjury.

Why tell such obvious falsehoods? - because it gives the media something to report on and like a child with ADD the media goes CRAZY for one lie, then CRAZY for the next, meanwhile DJT does 10 other "crazy" things and it's hard to even keep up. Why tell so many such obvious falsehoods? Because it distracts from other stuff he wants to get done. Just like how he made a big deal about the judge in his trump university case. Making a big deal about the judge distracted everyone from what he actually did with trump university!

Clinton was impeached because Congress was Republican and was trying like heck to pin something, anything, on him. It started with Whitewater and went wherever they could push it after that. Remember, this is when the government shutdowns started.

Trump is a Republican, so the current Republican Congress isn't going to be too picky.

Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice, not abuse of power.

He was voted in by the people, through a legitimate democratic process. Democracy works. Freedom of speech works. 1984 didn't get it right. It's not the government that needs to be feared. It isn't the big evil corporarions. It's the people. The mob.

4chan ran a more effective propaganda/misinformation campaign than any dark shadowy corporate entity. Our insitutions are less than stellar, but at least they are run by adults. Americans are run by bedtime stories and mass hysteria generated by their own delusions, the manifestation of which now occupies our highest office.

1984 was a warning against communism, but China has a brighter future than we do. Nobody wrote a science fiction novel taught in high schools warning us against democracy in the age of decentralized peer to peer media. Government surveillance isn't ruining lives, but a poorly worded tweet can.

1984 was a warning against totalitarianism of any kind, communism, fascism, nazism.

Hitler was also democratically elected, democracy can fail.

>He was voted in by the people, through a legitimate democratic process.

Every part of this is wrong. The people voted for Clinton by a plurality of 3 million votes. The Electoral College is a device for permanent Southern hegemony and, consequently, Republican supremacy -- there's nothing legitimate about it.

I really wish people and the media stop over emphasizing about every gaffe and focus on real news stories. For instance, the "alternative facts" comment/incident is being talked about everywhere, from TV news channels to news parody shows to talk shows to social media etc. But, at the same time it seems like there is so much more important news that one would think deserves more attention like the executive orders, withdrawal from TPP, revival of oil pipelines, changes in healthcare spending etc. I even just saw news articles headlining on the guardian now about agencies being banned from sharing information on social media or to reporters and few journalists getting felony charges after covering the protests around the inauguration.

It almost makes me wonder if it would be a good idea if there was a website that covered the latest gaffe and the corresponding actual news worthy story that was lost out on optimal coverage because of it.

Edit: I couldn't find this before but here is an interesting article I read yesterday [0]. It's an opinion piece by Alexey Kovalev. - "I’ve reported on Putin – here are my tips for journalists dealing with Trump".

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/23/report...

This is what people have been noticing during and since the election, you can't pin down Trump on anything because he is a controversy machine. He says something ridiculous and the media gives it attention and even begins to get some momentum on the story, but a week later, sometimes even days later, he does or says something that's even more ridiculous and now most people are concentrating on that new thing. Its hard to say if this is intentional or if his bombastic style is just something we're not used to in politics, but it seems to be effective in that the media is always chasing after the latest controversy.

For me it looked like the media had really nailed him on not releasing his tax forms, even going so far as to uncover damning ones from the 90s, but then the inside edition tapes came out and everyone focused on that instead.

Berlusconi used to do the same. They know the media cycle and play it to their advantage. It's a sort of "fire and motion" strategy where you keep enemies talking about the previous position while you're already gaining a new one. Anyone can play it, but your "suppressing fire" must be strong enough to distract effectively; that sort of bombastic bravado doesn't come naturally to "reality-based" personalities on the left who are constantly walking a tight rope between very different positions in their base.

I think your description is definitely spot on and Trump has also been playing this game — in one form or another — since the 80s.

The similarities between Trump and Berlusconi are terrifying - and Berlusconi was in power for what, 10 years?

Trump has tapped in to something and I fear it's going to work quite well.

More like 20, considering the years in which he passively controlled part of the political narrative.

More like 20 years, but Italy does not have the hard culture of "8 years and GTFO" that is so ingrained in the US. There are no term limits for Prime Ministers, election losers are not required to step down from party-leadership roles, and even the unofficial limits for President (which is mostly a ceremonial role) reelections, have recently been broken.

It is one of the great achievements of US democracy, although one has to question how much meaningful change can realistically be achieved in a massive country with little more than 7 years available (because re-election campaigns and lame-duck status in practice will consume a full year). For all the drama that they generate and the feeling of electoral power, strict term limits are a very conservative measure. On the other hand, you're guaranteed Trump will be gone by January 2025 at worst.

Makes me think of a certain tech personality that is no longer with us...

I think that Joel Spolsky popularized "fire and motion" (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/) but the Hebrew original more accurately translates to "fire in motion" or, more awkwardly "firing while moving"

The Youtube channel Charisma on Command has interesting videos explaining Trump's success.

https://www.youtube.com/user/charismaoncommand/search?query=...

It's completely intentional, and very effective. Mix big lies and small lies with truths and half truths. Lie about friends and enemies, and that's what the media will focus on. So much misinformation that nobody knows was what is truth.

This is why he got that far in the primaries and then eventually got elected. Every gaffe was reported on and some of it also not true which muddied the water to a point where people stopped listening when serious things came up.

All of this just for profit and tv ratings. There is also ego in there because who want's to be the last to break a story.

We see the same thing happening when a disaster occurs. For example the airport shooting. So much false information is reported just because they have to be the first/exclusive.

> Every gaffe was reported on and some of it also not true

Just about everything was true.

> Every gaffe was reported on and some of it also not true

What wasn't true? Honestly curious as I don't remember any truly spurious accusations against him.

> All of this just for profit and tv ratings. There is also ego in there because who want's to be the last to break a story.

Certainly, but that doesn't discount the validity of the reported incidents.

> We see the same thing happening when a disaster occurs. For example the airport shooting. So much false information is reported just because they have to be the first/exclusive.

Yes and no. I think a lot of that comes from reporting on a developing real-time situation where information is constantly revised. That's rarely the case with speeches or political coverage of this sort.

His obsessive marijuana habit as a youth; his decades-long black nationalist religious associations; his gangster affiliations; his lengthy professional work with convicted terrorists; his family's foreign intelligence connections, etc, etc.

I suspect all of these things were widely reported, yet largely spurious accusations.

This sounds like you just took the largest aspersions of the last 5 presidents and threw them together. That's intentional, right?

  I don't remember any truly spurious accusations against him.

The only one I can think of is the MLK story. In 2009, Obama removed a bust of Winston Churchill (lent by the UK to George W Bush after the 9/11 attack) from the Oval Office, returning it to the British Embassy in Washington [1].

Obama had a bust of Martin Luther King on display in the Oval Office.

After Trump's inauguration, a WH press-pool reporter noticed and reported on Twitter that the Churchill bust was back in the office (it was), then added that the MLK bust had been removed (it hadn't, it was simply obscured by a door).

It was never really a story - just a handful of tweets - and the reporter tweeted the correction within an hour [2]. Trump has used this as an example of "media dishonesty:".

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/462314...

[2] http://www.snopes.com/mlk-bust-oval-office/

There's a meme that Trump is anti-gay or even dangerous for LGBTQ people when he's pretty liberal-to-ambivalent about LGBTQ issues. At least given his statements and positions so far.

Peter Thiel got the same treatment despite being gay and clarifying his position, which wasn't at all unreasonable.

While his personal opinions don't seem to be broadcast regularly I don't think this serves as a great example given his choice of VP.

Only if you don't count virtually everyone he has picked in his administration, starting with his VP.

Here's a more in-depth record of some things that have been inaccurately and widely reported[0], and interestingly enough, from a right-wing magazine that refused to support Trump's nomination.

[0] http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/23/mainstream-media-still-b...

That's a great reference. And very accurately describes the state of the media (broadly speaking).

In one respect, the gaffe is insignificant to current events. In another, it's vastly more important, because while small it erodes the underpinnings of the system by which we actually disseminate information.

It's like having to choose between being upset about the person that mugged you for $500 on the street, or the bank that surreptitiously added 0.05% APR or the loan you just got for your house. One feels more important in the moment, but the other has much farther reaching implications, not just to your pocketbook, but as to whether you can trust anything about that institution going forward.

If this is the beginning of a new trend for the Whitehouse where nothing presented can be trusted, and it continues through future presidencies, I can definitely tell you which I think will be more important in 20 years.

The cynical among us have been saying that nothing presented by the White house (and any other government institutions) can be trusted at face value for years. I guess now is the time where everyone becomes a cynic.

But is that such a bad thing?

They say access journalism is dead, but access journalism is just repeating stuff said by people with power. Making them accountable is a good thing.

Trump may have unintentionally restored investigative journalism...

>> Trump may have unintentionally restored investigative journalism...

This can happen if they can find a way to monetize text that costs 100x more to produce and has 100x less engagement than clickbait.

If there's 10000 times less competition in investigative journalism than in clickbaiting those numbers add up to being profitable

Maybe people will actually pay for something that isn't trash.

(Or, maybe not, who knows.)

> I guess now is the time where everyone becomes a cynic.

For a transition of normative systems it seems that it is required that at some point people "don't believe in anything" anymore.

> But is that such a bad thing?

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

Your point may be valid, but I think the current (up until very recently, anyway) situation is just as bad.

A new trend?

You think Trump is inventing Whitehouse lies, right before our eyes? Politicians have a looooong history of lying, big lies that get peole killed ("Iraq WMDs are a slam dunk!") . Where have you been?

Those lies were not immediately able to be proven wrong. This is different because not only did they lie about something that could be checked but the continued to lie even after being called out on it. Further the president repeated the lie and continues to repeat the lie. O bet both George W. Bush and Tony Blair would agree that there were no WMDs in Iraq if you asked them today, if you also Trump, today or in 10 years, about the turnout for his inauguration he would repeat the same lies.

Those lies were not immediately able to be proven wrong.

But there was serious doubt even if it did not constitute a clear proof. And doesn't this actually make matters worse? An obvious lie about something without much if any consequences versus a somewhat convincing lie about something that affected the lives of millions? To me the former one seems more like a stupid thing to do, the later one seems ruthless, evil or what ever you want to call it.

> O bet both George W. Bush and Tony Blair would agree that there were no WMDs in Iraq if you asked them today, if you also Trump, today or in 10 years, about the turnout for his inauguration he would repeat the same lies.

You can use the Obama birth certificate turn around as counter point and that was definitely less than 10 years.

Right. That and the birth certificate thing wasn't a "lie", it was ignorant, dog whistle politicking.

Telling people you are going to strengthen whistle blowing laws to empower workers, then prosecuting a record number of people under the Espionage act is closer to a damaging lie.

No, I don't think you can since it's entirely possible Trump will simply declare he never backtracked and that he still has doubts or evidence Obama wasn't legitimate. He's repeatedly denied saying things _he is on video or twitter_ saying. He can simply make up any facts whenever he wants because no matter the evidence to the contrary, what he says is true simply because he's said it.

> No, I don't think you can since it's entirely possible Trump will simply declare he never backtracked and that he still has doubts or evidence Obama wasn't legitimate. He's repeatedly denied saying things _he is on video or twitter_ saying. He can simply make up any facts whenever he wants because no matter the evidence to the contrary, what he says is true simply because he's said it.

President Obama is on video, audio, Twitter, and just about every other form of media saying things that subsequently were proven false. A brazen example of that is the infamous line, "If you like your plan you can keep your plan." which he knew to be false (and Ezekiel Emanuel, architect of much of the ACA had apparently laughed at as impossible).

I don't mean to single out President Obama as it's really all Presidents, or more generally politicians, that do it. It's not unique to Trump, didn't start with him, nor will it end with him.

All politicians lie, what's seemingly different about Trump is the scope and frequency of those lies, and his refusal to admit he even said them given evidence.

Just the refusal to admit them would be bad enough, but since he's gotten away with it just about every time, it shows a worrying trend of there being no accountability. Combined with the frequency, the problem is just multiplied.

I find a politician that can't seem to be held accountable for his actions and that trades on this for more political power very troubling.

So it's more acceptable for politicians to admit to their lies at a later date, that to stick to them? Hmm...

Is that what I said?

> if you also Trump, today or in 10 years, about the turnout for his inauguration he would repeat the same lies.

I bet good money he'll be saying billions of people watched his inauguration by then.

Why Trump's Staff Is Lying (https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-23/why-trump...)

I choose my words carefully. I even emphasized specific words to attempt to make my point more clear. Then you ignored all that.

I wasn't trying to imply that the White House could be trusted in all things, but that there was some level of truth you could probably assume, especially about things that were already known or weren't worth lying about. What we have now is an example of disputing obvious facts, and over something inconsequential, as issues the White House responds to about go. This is clearly different than what we could expect before, even if we couldn't always expect for an entirely honest answer before.

That actually sounds like a great idea! Or even better, two columns on the same site - on first one latest gaffe, on the second one proper news. You can't avoid having "popular" stories on the page, but if they compete with themselves and not with the important news, they can't push them to oblivion.

Yes, and that is exactly the way Trumpet wants it, bait and switch.

the horrifying stuff were his campaign promises, yeah? though, in fairness his campaign was also all about alternative facts.

For instance, the "alternative facts" comment/incident is being talked about everywhere

That's exactly why they said it. Notice how it distracted everyone from talking about the marches? Trump knows how to change the media narrative.

The part I hate is that the media and everyone is eating up all these new sound bytes for things like "alternative facts" instead of just calling them what they are, lies, and moving on to more important things like focusing on the actual issues. To give it a fun name like that plays into the spectacle and is exactly what he wants.

Because "The standards you walk past, are the standards that you implicity accept/allow"...

Most of the worst dictators and tyrants in the world didn't start off at 'maximum mayhem'. They tend to start with lies, misinformation, subterfuge and misrepresentations, then they move up to things like false accusations, inquisitions, persecution and the like.

Every step just makes it easier to move closer to full blown deportations, incarcerations & executions etc.

A bit harder to stop them at the last step, when you have allowed the previous 99 steps to go unquestioned.

A few good governments too. Wilson, usually rated in the top 10 presidents, ran with "America First" and "He Kept Us Out" for his re-election. We joined the war only a month after his re-inauguration. In hindsight, that was likely for the best but it seems a misrepresentation.

> In hindsight, that was likely for the best but it seems a misrepresentation.

Was it? American involvement created a decisive winner in what would have been a stalemate. Imagine if Versailles hadn't been so one sided?

WW1 was a stalemate, it was only really ended by strike action and mutiny within Germany. Hence dolchstosslegende.

How was that for the best? American involvement in WWI led to the Treaty of Versailles which was the direct cause of Hitler and WWII. All of that could have been avoided if America had just stayed uninvolved.

> It almost makes me wonder if it would be a good idea if there was a website that covered the latest gaffe and the corresponding actual news worthy story that was lost out on optimal coverage because of it.

There are publications that tend towards policy focus, and there are even more publications that are half policy-wonk half-commentariat but at least not trapped in the gossip column soundbite minutia.

If you look at circulation numbers, though... The Economist is about 1.5 million in the US. Time seems less news-digest these days and more commentary, but it's got double the circulation.

But both of those are, of course, below Sports Illustrated, People Magazine, Better Homes And Gardens, and Costco Connection in terms of regular readers.

One could surmise that the real issue is that there isn't a large audience that actually wants what you (and I) think we should be paying attention to. Most of us are used to having a set-it-and-forget-it approach to how government works, and don't really believe we should have to pay attention.

And on top of that, some large portion of the country resents the very idea that expertise, education, and focused thinking should represent any authority worth respecting more than their opinions. Why would anyone in that demographic care to read news and policy details at all? The only important thing is knowing that people who are in their ostensible tribe are in charge.

This isn't just to bag on people -- everybody has limited attention and if possible it's nice to not to have to give it to things unless you have to. It's to underscore the problem: in a market economy, publications that stay afloat are going to try to provide what people pay attention to and/or pay for. And that may not be the same thing as what "deserves" attention.

There are two forces at work, Trump and the Republican party. The gaffes are all Trump, the sweeping executive orders mostly the party.

He never had much of a platform beyond "build the wall!", and is happy to roll with Republican dogma. The Republicans proved during the last administration that they're willing to bend the rules to breaking point to damage their opponents; they've decided they're willing to humor Trump so they can get him to do what they want.

If the president were a more established Republican like Ted Cruz, we'd still be seeing huge and destructive changes to health care, climate change policy, etc.

It's hard to know which is the bigger threat. Trump is a new style of threat in the way he arrogantly ignores the old polite conventions and even the law itself, lining his pockets in plain sight. Letting that pass unchallenged could result in a permanent autocracy, one "strong man" after another.

The Republican party is "just" pushing an extreme agenda, similar to what they did under Bush, which is more of a known threat (or not a threat at all if you agree with their platform). But they're also neglecting their duty to push back against Trump's abuse of the system. They should be fighting tooth and nail to force him to sell his businesses.

"This is probably a good time for people to be reading 1984."

This is ridiculous.

The hate for Trump has caused people to go into utterly misguided tizzies, and it's pathetic.

I loathe Trump - but he's not a totalitarian.

He has given no indication of encroaching on civil liberties, there's no indication he wants to socialize large parts of the economy, or expand control by government, or even expand surveillance programs.

He's boorish, loud-mouthed and says crude things - but his policy actions are not that drastic.

'Enforce immigration laws' - fairly reasonable.

'Build pipelines' - outside of environmental concerns - absolutely normal.

'Re-negotiate trade deals' - not sure if I agree but not crazy.

'Get NATO allies to pay their share' - not crazy.

A 'mild' social conservative totalitarian might roll back laws on gay marriage, abortion etc. - but Trump hasn't mentioned it at all.

He has been forceful on trying to get American jobs back, and he'll likely overhaul the tax code, likely with some tax breaks.

He hasn't been nearly as aggressive in terms of foreign policy as Clinton.

He's indicated that he wants to get along with Russia. Is this such a bad thing? Clinton/Obama tried it earlier as well.

I think he presents himself in a manner unfit for someone who's in public office, but in the end, his actual actions are not particularly outlandish - and nowhere near totalitarian.

Obama would have socialized the entire healthcare system if he had the choice, and vastly expanded the welfare system, and would likely have introduced far more controlling legislation if allowed - and we do know he oversaw a fairly robust expansion of the surveillance state.

So Obama happens to be a 'nice guy' and 'not boorish' - does that make him any more or less totalitarian.

People need to grow up.

Trump is kind of a blow-hard, not a Nazi.

Wait...why do you loathe him? You seem reasonable in everything else you say. Trump is basically Nelson Rockefeller with the difference that he never got denounced as the liberal he is outside the pages of the National Review.

> He has given no indication of encroaching on civil liberties

You mean, except for that part where he mentioned that he wants to strengthen the [non-existent] libel laws, so that "press can't get away with lies about me"?

Or his early remarks on Muslims? Surveillance etc?

> A 'mild' social conservative totalitarian might roll back laws on gay marriage, abortion etc. - but Trump hasn't mentioned it at all.

Now we're firmly in the "alternative facts" territory. Watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dngW-FKKuo Or when he said that Japanese interment camps were a tough choice, but "that's how you win wars"?

" he wants to strengthen the [non-existent] libel laws, so that "press can't get away with lies about me"?"

The press has called him out for his lies - but they have also blatantly lied about him - and others.

There is nothing 'totalitarian' about being able to sue someone for printing lies.

You're blaming me for having 'alternative facts' when you're inventing them?

The video indicates that 'campaign trail' Trump indicated that he was pro-life - because he was asked. (Of course, his whole life before that he was pro-choice, but to get GOP votes, he had to have this position publicly).

But in the very video you offered as 'evidence' - he didn't at all indicate he'd be legislating on the issue. In fact - he said it would be decided in the courts.

So a president indicating that issues 'decided in the courts' is now a 'Hitler totalitarian'?

Just today, on Charlie Rose - the leftist PBS commentators were indicating that he's made no real indication of anything related to social justice.

He did not mention 'abortion' in any of his policy docs, nor during any of his major speeches.

I'd argue you're making up facts if you think Trump has any plans to press the abortion issue in any meaningful way. There will be zero legislation.

But it doesn't matter - there's nothing at all in Trump's outlined policies that hint at 'totalitarianism'.

Nothing.

Obama murdered American citizens without a trial via drone strikes - and oversaw a massive expansion of the surveillance state. Those are 'scary totalitarian' things.

And I don't even like Trump.

> I'd argue you're making up facts if you think Trump has any plans to press the abortion issue in any meaningful way. There will be zero legislation.

He literally already has signed an executive order about it.

'Donald Trump has signed an executive order to ban federal money going to international groups which perform or provide information on abortions.

'The US president's order shows he "wants to stand up for all Americans, including the unborn," his press secretary Sean Spicer said.'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38724063

He should have done that. There is absolutely no reason why other people should pay for someone's abortions.

The US already had a ban against paying for international abortions. This is a ban of funding organisations that even talk about abortions, even if the US funding isn't related to abortions.

(I also disagree with your point from an ethical point of view, but that's not relevant here.)

Federal funding. You are free to fund it yourself.

Twist it however you want, it's still about abortion.

>There is nothing 'totalitarian' about being able to sue someone for printing lies.

There is everything totalitarian about being able to sue people for printing anti-Republican lies, but not pro-Republican lies. If you could sue people for printing or broadcasting lies, we would have driven Fox News off the air years ago.

The body politic is slow to react but swift and harsh once engaged. It is literally the first week on the job for this guy, and while it is not showing a lot of promise it takes a couple of months before people really get settled in.

That said, if it looks like he is going to put the nation at grave risk by his actions, and grave risk is something a bit more serious than being the butt of a lot of jokes, then there are a wide variety of tools built into our institutions to address that.

Theoretically

> "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

Practically it's all about politics

The other impeachment was of Andrew Johnson who barely avoided conviction by one vote was also by radical republicans and also about politics. Although in their case they were radically pro civil rights for former slaves so I'm a lot more sympathetic. Still the law they passed to try to explicitly trip up Johnson (banning him from dismissing Lincoln's secretary of defense) was arguably unconstitutional.

The reason Trump may not be impeached is because his party controls both houses of congress and they are afraid of the base. If his popularity craters finding a reason to impeach won't be that hard. The emoluments clause makes for an easy one (no proof of corruption needed just benefit, ultimatley congress is the judge). For other formal charges it may be my bias and low opinion but I have no doubt that if congressional investigations occur something about pre-election russian ties, corruption, or abuse of power will be found.

Think of something highly dangerous and highly improbable any POTUS could do and it most likely it will happen with this guy.

One has to be careful not to get carried away by those little mistakes, lies and glitches as it may be just a bait to distract general public from the bigger picture and his agenda.

There is no apolitical mechanism to impeach. And the Republican congress, for all they can't stand the man in private, knows they rise and fall with Trump. So essentially he can get away with murder right now.

Now is a good time as any.

If only now you become worried about politicians lying, boy do I have bad news for you.

Impeachment is done by the congress. We currently have a republican congress as we did in '98 when Clinton was impeached. However, this time there's a republican president, so it's much less likely.

I think we're past impeachment, and need to get people on the streets. The women's march was a good start, but it needs to be followed up every weekend.

What we really need is a general strike. We have to shut down the economy to force him out.

If there's another book that people need to read, its "Strange Defeat" by Marc Bloch, as its a commentary/oral history on the fall of France to the Nazis and Vichy regime. The comparisons are eerily similar to what many of us are seeing now.

>Already screeching for impeachment when he's been in office for two days

And this is why you lost the election.

Orwell's work beside 1984 is better (in the sense of more complex/relevant to our time, not as entertaining.) In particular, his writing on the Spanish Civil War has seemed relevant today:

"I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys."

1984 is largely about the surveillance state and oppression, with a bit at the end about Orwell's views on truth; for those who say 1984 was a worse predictor of the future than Fahrenheit 451, I say the idea of the destruction of truth was more important than the methods anyway.

http://orwell.ru/library/essays/Spanish_War/english/esw_1

> I say the idea of the destruction of truth was more important than the methods anyway

I agree. I'm appalled that Trump feels free to lie about something as falsifiable as the weather (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/22/us/politics/president-tru...). And it does make me worry about totalitarianism.

But in American culture, the use of "alternative facts" is hardly an invention of the government. Postmodernism made deep inroads into the thinking of average people. "What's true for you" or "true for me" became a common idea in religious conversations. And it extends into our debates about things like gender.

When everyone is allowed to have their own facts, we can quarrel, but we can't debate, because we have no common assumptions. And if we can settle anything by debate, coercion is the only option.

It's an intellectual environment ripe for authoritarianism. But not created by it.

To what are you referring when you say "postmodernism"? Which postmodernists have you read?

Kind of ironic given Bush and Obama were the ones to expand the surveillance state, Hillary demonised the shit out of Russia to try create an enemy/scapegoat, and here Trump is, only a few days in power, not having done anything particularly bad.

Also, I should add - for Democrats out there who keep trying to compare Trump to Hitler, say he's fascist, etc... That weak rhetoric is what gave you guys your worst election result in what, 80 years? The more you cry foul over nothing, the less people will actually believe it. Just an outsider's opinion after an entertaining and somewhat perplexing election.

Yes, it's very interesting to see them apply even more of the same logic that failed miserably last year. Also in other countries with the same tendencies, they still don't seem to get that crying about how terribly racist and fascist these people are doesn't actually reach the intended audience.

Maybe we can blame echo chambers for this...

If you think Trump did nothing bad then you missed the last 24 hour news cycle. Hillary is a little old lady who ran for president a long time ago so I'm not sure why you brought her up. And also an outsider here, but I've seen Republicans call Obama a lot worse things then Hitler. So apparently weak rhetoric works well on the right.

Did calling Obama "Hussein" have a positive result on their popularity? I don't think so. Maybe there's a pattern.

Can you give an example? Being compared to Hitler is pretty high on my list so I'm interested.

And how did that thetoric worked for right if Obama won?

Do a search for "Obama Antichrist" and you'll see plenty of examples. "Obama devil" gets some hits, too.

Worth a try.

Obama antichrist - 445 thousand results

Obama anti-christ - 2 million

Trump Hitler - 32 million

Try

Trump antichrist - 447k

Trump anti-christ - 1.7mil

Obama Hitler - 27mil

I think the takeaway is that stringing a couple terms together in google gives us little in the way of political insight.

Interesting.

I think the takeaway may be that both sides of the political spectrum are equally inclined to name calling.

(One tiny piece of evidence these results are not mere coincidence: there are 4x as many such results for Trump/Obama Hitler than for "Jesus Hitler" - 9.5 million)

The worst result in 80 years is winning the popular vote with a margin of about 3 million?

When your opponent is Donald Trump: Yes.

The worst election result is losing the house, senate, and presidency all at once. Look at who has power, not the votes.

In an electoral system that doesn't take the popular vote into consideration? Yes. Democrats are now pretending that they lost "by chance", but their campaign (like the Republicans') is engineered and fine-tuned/optimized to get the swing states, not to optimize by how much they will win in traditionally blue states.

Oh you want to go with popular votes? Then Bernie Sanders should have been your candidate by a big margin but was prevented by the DNC's superdelegate system.

Congratulations for winning a game that wasn't being played.

No, the worst result was losing the presidency, house, senate, and 3+ Supreme Court seats to Donald Trump.

I'm down-voting you, here's why:

This is a headline and an article about "alternative facts", relating them to a book about comprehensive "alternative fact" propaganda. Not about any of things that you listed.

You didn't add any meaningful information to the discussion, but have added divisive and heavily argued opinions, in a way that only furthers their divisiveness.

This is not a comment on your opinions. This is a comment about whether expressing those specific opinions on this specific news item and in that specific manner was constructive or destructive to this community; I'm saying it's destructive.

I don't see the phrase "alternative facts" (or even the word "facts", for that matter) in either the headline or the article. Nineteen Eighty-Four is very much about surveillance and totalitarianism (which is why, here in the UK, it seems even more prescient right now) so, while I disagree with Mikeb's political stance, I think your dismissal of their comment as not contributing to the discussion is unfair.

Well expressed!

There is exactly one non-Orwell link in the article, and it's to an article with this headline: "Sales of George Orwell's 1984 surge after Kellyanne Conway's 'alternative facts'"

The first explicitly political thing in the OP is "alternative facts"; so that's where I grabbed that from.

This is a perfect example of why downvoting shouldn't exist. None of the things you think you saw in the OPs comment are there. He is expressing an opinion that is widely held, here is a good essay on the habit of anti-Trump people of crying wolf:

   http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/

Trump's spat over crowd sizes is stupid, but reflects someone terminally thin-skinned rather than a cunning well thought out attempt at mind control.

Meanwhile, those of us who have read it will remember that 1984 dwells on hard-left totalitarianism and its habit of doing things like censorship, the desire for unitary thinking, interfering with disagreement by controlling the language and so on.

Your comment doesn't actually rebut anything about what the OP said, but does try to lower the visibility of his views (suppressing speech) and does attack an entire class of speech on the grounds of "divisiveness" and "destructiveness" (unitary thinking).

Trump is many things but hard-left is not one of them. Stupid phrasing today by his press guy aside, Trump's path to victory was built on a repudiation of 1984 style tactics:

• Language control: political correctness, where words and phrases are redefined or suppressed through taboo

• The 5-minutes hate: the establishment against Russia

• Loyalty to the party: in our world the closest equivalent to a vast unaccountable power structure would be called "Washington" or "the elite".

The parallels aren't perfect by any means; Trump loves surveillance just like Democrats do.

I really like your comments here, but some of them leave me confused / unable to respond.

What do you think I saw in the OP's comment?

> doesn't actually rebut anything about what the OP said

I mean, I wasn't trying to. I said that explicitly.

> but does try to lower the visibility of his views > does attack an entire class of speech on the grounds of "divisiveness" and "destructiveness" (unitary thinking).

I mean, yes? But it sounds like you're confusing divisiveness with disagreement. I wouldn't quite say that Mikeb85's comment is trolling, but it's getting close enough, and yeah, I'll attack that category of speech on those grounds.

Your entire post is an excellent example of disagreement without divisiveness, and is constructive to the HN community.

I'm down-voting you, here's why:

Context is a thing, and you even make use of it in your comment. You have set up a false scenario where (according to you) we are only allowed discuss what is explicit in headline, yet "alternative facts" isn't even in the headline.

If you seriously believe that comment sections should not discuss the context around its subject, you are wasting your time here because there is an entire internet you there for you to police.

I think I see where you're coming from...?

First - I'm straight up not talking about only the headline.

Strawman'ing is a real thing, and Mikeb85's comment is doing it. The article has six sentences, and then a bunch of Orwell links.

Only one of those sentences is about anything other than Orwell, and that sentence is a link to an article about Orwell, and how "alternative facts" sounds a lot like Newspeak.

At no point is either the original article, or its sole political link, making any kind of comment of argument on any of the things in Mikeb85's comment.

Context is great! Establish some, and then present your points, arguments, and comments.

Why is voting disabled on the parent comment? Is it just me who has that or is it disabled for everyone?

I also find it funny that people compare him to Hitler. As if Hitler was the only and the baddest of them all.

There were also: Stalin, Mao Zedong, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Francisco Franco, Pinochet, Ceausescu...

Just in the 20th century there were hundreds of what we call 'dictators'. So it's a relatively common phenomenon.

Some of the common traits that they shared: they got shit done, they were egomaniacs, extravagant, sometimes talked crazy and were obsessed with lies, deception and then spies and enemies.

Killing (or creating the conditions for the death of) lots of people wasn't necessarily in their plans, it was just a necessary means to a glorious end.

> I also find it funny that people compare him to Hitler.

I've seen him compared to Kim Jong-Un, Mussolini, Putin, the Roman Emporer Caligula, King Louis XVI of France, Emporer Maximilian I of Mexico, and to the leadership of the Communist Party of China generally, as well, among others. Your post seems to be premised on the idea that Trump has been compare exclusively to Hitler, and not or other authoritarians, which is not the case.

Its right to question which direction the country is headed, but i have to wonder what damage is being done to the nation's psyche with all the apocolyptic imagery. What's it like to feel in constant crisis. It makes people scared all the time and drives divisiveness. Its as dangerous as anything the prez may have planned.

It's a tricky question. On the one hand, you can try to calm yourself and avoid living in constant paranoia which could be a net gain. On the other hand, you can risk the water slowly coming to a boil all around you without your noticing. I've tried to remain as calm as possible throughout all of this, but I can't get the image of the frog on the hotplate out of my mind. I seem to recall that people who lived through the rise of Nazi Germany described things in that way. No one really realized how insane things were getting until it was too late.

Literally millions of people will die during our lifetime because of climate change.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs266/en/

And Trump did not cause that.

> What's it like to feel in constant crisis.

Look no further than the forty-year period of constant crisis that was the Cold War.

Also highly relevant is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

Came here to say this.

I think what we're seeing is a mixture of the two social and political situations: some from column a and some from column b. Turns out they were both right in large measure. In fact, Huxley and Orwell were contemporary and corresponded on the matter -> http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/1984-v-brave-new-world....

Highly relevant is Marshall McLuhan. 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 didn't anticipate what the internet would do to us at all in any way.

Both were influenced by _We_ by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

An incredible book if I may add. Zamyatin was one of few dystopian writers to actually be involved in the going-ons in the Russian revolution at the time.

Thanks. Huxley is much more relevant than Orwell, today. 1984 is a masterpiece but describes a stalinian totalitarism, which probably belongs to the past. Today, the threat is more diffuse and hides in mass entertainment, consumerism, etc. The danger we face is the lose of our ability to think (not because of thinking would become forbidden, but because it would become unnecessary)

I'd like to recommend Huxley's "Island". It isn't as relevant or famous, but it's a great book. If 1984 and BNW are "how dystopias could work", this one is "how utopias could work".

It also had a (possibly smaller) resurgence after the Snowden revelations.[1] I only wish that Orwell's masterpiece was better understood and appreciated.

In addition, I should point out that the book's title is "Nineteen Eighty-Four", not "1984".

[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/1984-rockets-amazon...

> In addition, I should point out that the book's title is "Nineteen Eighty-Four", not "1984".

So it is....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Requ...

Just hope it doesn't get deleted from your Kindles again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...

More people need to read Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here" (1935) which I didn't take so seriously when I first read it in high school.

That book is #1 for classic american literature on Amazon right now.

From NYT Book Review: Reading the Classic Novel That Predicted Trump https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/books/review/classic-nove...

1984 is out of copyright in Australia and many other countries so you can grab it from project gutenberg for free

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=1984

Don't seem to be able to find anything?

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

The Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) PDF is available on archive.org: https://ia800201.us.archive.org/8/items/NINETEENEIGHTY-FOUR1...

The original 1948 audiobook is also available: https://archive.org/details/NINETEENEIGHTY-FOUR1984ByGeorgeO...

This is amazing. The womens marches over the weekend and these seem to be an indicator of a very sudden awakening.

And a falling asleep as soon as a better clown takes control. Trump is marginally worse in content but infinitely worse in presentation. I mean ffs Obama care was a heritage foundation proposal and that's his shining achievement, it would be like Lincoln abolishing slavery by buying all the slaves and then making them work to pay off their freedom.

According to [1], it's similar to a Republican bill from the 1990s, but was not a Heritage Foundation proposal.

> More hard-line senators such as Phil Gramm, R-Texas, House Republicans and the Heritage Foundation saw the Chafee bill as an unacceptable compromise.

[1] http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2013/nov/15/...

I think you're seeing two pieces of outrage over Trump. The first is the predictable liberal outrage: he's proposing policy that conflicts with what liberals want.

Then there's the anger and fear from what appears to be fascist, authorities tendencies in Trump. That's one reason why a President Pence doesn't scare me (and apparently others who are calling for Trump's impeachment). Sure Pence won't work for liberal interests, but at the same time I don't believe he'll be actively working to gut non-partisan areas such as a free press, due process, a free and fair voting process, etc.

Where is Trump actively working to gut free press, due process, and a free and fair voting process? Can you share sources with those claims?

One example of Trump acting against free press was his refusal to answer a CNN reporter's question because he didn't like their coverage of the golden showers thing.

That said, parent didn't say Trump is already doing all these things; they said that people fear he will, based on his actions and statements so far.

Most presidents do that if a network is attacking him. Obama shunned Fox News a bit as well. It is all 'politics' to be fair.

True at saying the people fear he will, but the fear is really bases on nothing and out-of-context quotes.

On his efforts to undermine a free press, just a couple that come to mind:

  - he threatened legal action against the NYT [1]
  - he said he would 'open up those libel laws' [2]
  - he lies about falling subscription numbers at the 'failing NYT' [3]
  - in his first press conference in the White House he attacked a reporter as 'fake news', and refused to answer questions by CNN [4]
  - he tweets [5] incorrect ratings numbers about Fox vs CNN, calling CNN 'fake news'.
  - he's been singling out and attacking/mocking individual reporters [6], [7]

All these actions are efforts to undermine and discredit the free press. They should be alarming to anybody who cares about the US democracy.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/us/politics/donald-trump-...

[2] http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/donald-trump-...

[3] http://fortune.com/2016/11/17/trump-new-york-times-subscript...

[4] http://uk.businessinsider.com/president-elect-donald-trump-c...

[5] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/82407841721374720...

[6] http://fortune.com/2016/11/03/donald-trump-katy-tur/

[7] http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/11/26/donald-trump-mocks-r...

[2] Talk is cheap. Honestly, what do you think is going to happen? And in 4 years when we look back, if it doesn't happen - what will you think?

[3] How is it a lie?

> is losing thousands of subscribers

You interpret this as net subscriber count to suit your narrative.

Now if the NYT lost subscribers during the election which they almost certainly did then the first part of the statement is literally correct.

Now the "because" phrase implies causation of "poor coverage". This would be difficult to work out unless the NYT had an exit survey and that data was public.

Without information, Trump is inferring that this is a reason. So if 1000 people left because of poor coverage, his statement is still literally correct.

So I do not understand how you can say it is a "lie" when the statement is "literally" correct.

If you wanted to say that it is "incorrect" then you must argue for your interpretation based on relevance.

If you wanted to say "vague" then you can also say that.

It seems very common place to call everything a "lie" these days, when there is never enough information to evaluate the factuality of it.

Modern "fact-checking" is a scary thing because depending on how you want to define things, you can "prove" any statement true or false how you like. This is a very scary thing.

[5] FOX 8.7M vs CNN 2.6M

[7] didn't happen. That is fake news.

> [2] Talk is cheap. Honestly, what do you think is going to happen? And in 4 years when we look back, if it doesn't happen - what will you think?

You think it is ok for a presidential candidate to make those statements? Do you know of any other democratically elected leaders making those statements? You do not think this could have a chilling effect on the free press?

> So if 1000 people left because of poor coverage, his statement is still literally correct. > So I do not understand how you can say it is a "lie" when the statement is "literally" correct.

You assume it is literally correct, after admitting that there is no evidence for it.

A literally correct statement can still be a lie. From Merriam-Webster:

  Definition of lie
  1  to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive <She was lying when she said she didn't break the vase.> <He lied about his past experience.>
  2  to create a false or misleading impression <Statistics sometimes lie.> <The mirror never lies.>

Can you agree that saying the NYT is losing thousands of subscribers without saying they are at the same time gaining 41,000 net new subscribers is misleading?

In some of the other tweets in that article he is claiming readership is way down, and they are failing. I can not find any evidence for that, quite the contrary: their digital subscribers are way up and even though profits are down, they still aren't losing money.

> You do not think this could have a chilling effect on the free press?

I personally do not think it will. And I don't think anyone can make that argument that is has as of yet.

But if it does, what objective measures can we point to, to say that it has?

> You assume it is literally correct, after admitting that there is no evidence for it.

No hard evidence. But are you going to make the argument that 1000 ppl did not leave NYT over the course of the campaign. No, its a pretty reasonable churn rate for a newspaper.

Did they leave because of poor coverage? I personally noticed the coverage deteriorate, and tracking the sentiment against the NYT from Twitter, Reddit, etc. I believe this statement to be true. Am I certain of it. No. But do we need hard evidence of everything we say? No. Only if it matters. And this, simply does not matter. The question is would you hold a similar statement by Hillary or Obama with to the same standard. Depends what side of politics you are on.

> A literally correct statement can still be a lie.

If you had 100% proof (voice recording) that someone knew something, and then they stated publicly that they didn't, what do you call this? I would call it a lie.

Calling everything else a lie that cannot be proved is like the boy crying wolf. The word loses its meaning and is less effective at pointing out proven lies which both sides of politics could agree on. The left likes to cry wolf a lot over sexism, racism, etc. These words are almost meaningless now - whilst there are still proper racists in the world.

> Can you agree that saying the NYT is losing thousands of subscribers without saying they are at the same time gaining 41,000 net new subscribers is misleading?

They could be gaining 41K left wing supporters while losing moderates. Personally, I feel that they are losing a lot of moderates and republicans, and accruing a new base of progressive leftists because the paper has headlines that they agree with and don't want to question. So I don't think its misleading. It can be read as saying that the Times reader base is shifting, and the people who are reading it now are just looking for something to confirm their narrative. So in this scenario, net numbers don't matter so much. You can agree or disagree with that, but all I am arguing is that using lie is too strong and if you call everything a lie it has no meaning anymore.

Thanks for posting the links so that everyone can see the ridiculous hyperbole that your arguments are based on.

Will this awakening by introspective at all? Because punishing wrongthink seems to be endemic with third wave feminists and modern "progressive" groups.

I thought the exact same thing myself when I saw this news. It made me think of this: https://medium.com/@aristoNYC/social-justice-bullies-the-aut...

My favorite is http://reddit.com/stormfrontorsjw

How much right-wing authoritarianism by a sitting government will or would it take to convince you that authoritarian governments are more of a problem than ideologically incoherent university students?

> ideologically incoherent university students?

If it were kept in universities I wouldn't care, but it's infected left wing politics and HR departments everywhere.

I'm much more worried about left wing authoritarianism in the near future than a rather bland right wing authoritarianism today.

Third wave feminism has absolutely nothing do to with equality, it's all about getting people to attack the people to the side rather than look above.

Can you please elaborate on this?

A major tenant of third wave feminism is intersectionallity, which is pretty much exactly the opposite of what your just said.

Intersectionality is intellectually lazy and divisive. It separates people into broad groups and then makes assumptions about the identities of people purported to be in those groups, rather than treating people as individuals.

Third wave feminists are also being divisive when they label and villify those who challenge their dogma.

Definitely.

First off some context for this rant: a lot of people don't realize it but we are a lot closer to a post-scarcity world than the world would have you think. Check out this chart which shows GDP per capita since the 1950's. The productivity gains since the 1950's have been absolutely incredible, and the quality of life back then was pretty good. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA

So, have you ever noticed there's never any dialogue about encouraging men to be stay at home dads, or reducing the overall household number of hours worked per week? Never. The dialogue is always about the "wage gap" and "women have value too" and "rape culture" and "microaggressions". Men who are stay at home dads still get shamed just as much as they did during the 1950's. This is how you know it's a sham - there is never any serious dialogue about actual equality. Income has in no way, shape, or form, kept up the with the GDP per capita shown in the chart above. There's never any explorations of policies that would actually increase equality, like restricting the number of "investment properties" a man or woman can own, behavior which is clearly parasitic. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_productivity_and_...

It's not in corporate interests to have people have actual equality. Increasing the labor pool without discussions of actual equality makes it so that people can be kept in debt, wages go down and the nexus of power moves away from the family and towards the corporation, which is what is happening.

There's also the constant screaming of "women have value too". The implication here is that if you are not working for money you have no value. Despite common belief, in fact it IS possible to generate value outside of a money context. Many of the world's greatest achievements have occured outside a money context, eg. the discovery of calculus, wikipedia, linux, countless famous works of art, literature, and philosophy. By saying that you only have value if you earn money is throwing many of the world's most accomplished people under a bus. The reason why "money is the only form of value" is such a horrible mentality is that it leads to people like Mozart dying in poverty and being thrown into a ditch, which actually happened.

Check out charts of combined household numbers of hours worked, you'll see it's going way UP not down, despite the GDP per capita chart shown above. There is clearly something dark in that picture. http://www.bls.gov/opub/working/chart17.pdf

I don't think these are idle complaints - feminism in its current form (money above all) is an ideology that's on a direct collision course with the whole 'robots are about to take all the jobs' reality, which I think is going to come a lot sooner than we realize, and when these two phenoma collide, what's going to happen is that it's not going to be equality (sorry folks) it's going to be Brave New World, an immensely stratified society.

What's incredible to me is that someone predicted this nearly 100 years ago. Aldous Huxley, you are a genius.

I should just buy a ticket to Iceland already.

See comment below.

> So, have you ever noticed there's never any dialogue about encouraging men to be stay at home dads, or reducing the overall household number of hours worked per week?

Actually, I've noticed dialogue on both of these points, and even some modest, narrow policy progress (e.g., states that have adopted gender-neutral paid family leave, and some expansions in overtime coverage [0].) But, yes, it doesn't get enough focus.

[0] overtime rules mandate extra pay, but their fundamental purpose isn't to increase pay as much as to incentivize employers to limit the use of hours over the cap, and expand the size of the workforce in preference to longer hours where ongoing needs and available skills exist.)

Sorry I clicked on the wrong 'reply' button, comment now moved to the right location, sorry again.

Why would a march be more significant than the votes of 62 million people?

I agree that an awakening is overdue given that for instance, America’s child poverty levels are worse than in any developed country anywhere, including Greece and only Slovakia, Chile, Mexico and Turkey have worse infant mortality rates. Median adult wealth is 27th out of 27 high-income countries; internet speed and access is 16th out of 34 countries and for people living below the poverty line - US is 36th out of 162 countries, behind Morocco and Albania.

However the US does score a first in its prison population. It comes #1 out of 224 countries. Only China comes close.

people living below the poverty line - US is 36th out of 162 countries, behind Morocco and Albania

You do realize how ridiculous that stat looks right?

Are you arguing the poor are worse off in the US than in Morocco?

And let me guess, the poverty stat is excluding income transfers?

I swear to god politics has gotten even nuttier in the US than it has been. And it was nutty before! Facts don't matter, crushing your opponent matters. Truth be damned!

*Speaking as an American.

People living below the poverty line seems to be discussing # of people, not their quality of life. Whatever study this is presumably controls for poverty line country-by-country.

So: sure, ridiculous if you came to the stat looking for "worse off," I guess?

and for people living below the poverty line - US is 36th out of 162 countries, behind Morocco and Albania.

What else could that comment be claiming? It wouldn't really make much sense if the claim was "more people live under the poverty line in the US than Morocco, but they are among the most wealthy people in the world."

It does if it's wealth distribution one is interested in and not absolute wealth. Large wealth/income disparity within a country is a bad thing in several ways.

You're bringing up the popular vote? You know Clinton won that, by 3 million votes?

Identity politics hides issues like this more than anything. A poor black person in a ghetto and a poor white one in a trailer park should be the same voting block but they've been polarized by both sides trying to lock down their demographics.

Are you saying poor black and white people are too naive to vote for themselves? Should they vote the way we tell them to? Is principled politics a luxury of the privileged?

I'm not a fan of this meme.

I'm saying the political system is far to tribalistic. We all fall for tribalism but it seems to have become way to set in lately.

I'll agree with that. We discuss membership in groups, not ideas. It's signalling and dog whistles all the way down.

This is what intersectionality addresses. It's meant to address all forms of oppression, including race, class, gender identity, sexuality, sex, religion, ethnicity, etc.

I honestly don't understand why intersectionality has become this bogeyman for mainstream liberals. It attempts to bring people together to fight for common interests.

Did you not hear the hyperbole coming from the celebrity cheerleaders at those marches? Ashley Judd sounded like a loon, going on about Hitler and ECT.

Not to mention the whole idea of the march is based on identity politics.

Isn't it a bit too late to read 1984? I'd say it is too late get into cyberpunk too, because most if not all of those "warnings" came and passed largely unnoticed. It is quite pitiful "waking up to the corporate state" just because "not-our-candidate" won, while living in one for past 2-3 decades.

The 1954 movie version is on YouTube.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajWC_J-jgLc

Wait, so the "#1 bestselling" of something can just mean for that day? They might as well call it a trending list at that point.

1984 and Brave New World are my all time double plus good books. We've been gradually sliding towards those worlds over the last number of decades, regardless of Trump. If nothing comes of this election but stronger protections around all sorts of freedoms then I'll be happy for it even if just by way of grassroots demand from the general public through awareness and engagement.

I really do hope this election increases citizen participation in the public sphere.

Instead I can recommend Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, or to understand presently overwhelmed United States: Cervantes' Don Quixote. Both much less stale and dry in their prose, but incredibly more insightful.

Do we really need Trump news on HN. I've left Reddit because of the political insanity there, I'm hoping it doesn't come here too.

This book is available for free download through archive.org

https://archive.org/details/Orwell1984preywo

The recursive irony is strong, could only be increased if the "Customers Also Bought" included The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, E. Goldstein, Brotherhood Press 1949.

I agree with Isaac Asimov (review: http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm)

Very interesting

Nice! Maybe people will stop comparing the current state of things to 1984, when they actually read it...

I think 1984 painted a scary, but important fictional picture of what life behind the iron curtain was like, several similar books attempted to deal with the issues of 20th century life in similar fashion, but I think it should be recognized that much of this is no longer as applicable to the discussion we should be having -- the post modern situation has become way more subtle in its presence, despite the loud and brash way it's presented.

An interesting book I read recently about a relatable topic is home the book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev, about early 2000s Russia and the oil boom years, the role of the media, young money, memetic content created by the media and the way all of that affects population, it's scary and some of it kind of can be seen reflecting back on today's western society as well.

I just wish (and was secretly hoping for) that media and oppositional politics recognized the role they played in this fiasco and tried to change their behaviour up to try and change it. I seem to be wrong, sadly.

We're jumping from one nice sounding headline to the next one (like this one!) and we're ignoring much of the actual discussion we should be having, because this is more convenient. It kind of hurts to a large majority being aware of the issues and then just pressing on, choosing to ignore it, because it's more convenient to share a dumb meme about numbers, complain about alternative facts or to watch SNL.

I wouldn't say that this is the end of the leading role of western civilisation in the world (I am not smart enough to make such statements), but it really seems to me that we are opening up our weaknesses to foreign powers that will try hard to exploit them and it's a pretty damaging process.

/rant

And if you like this book, you will probably like Netflix series, Black Mirror

Fun fact: Mark Zuckerberg is born in 1984 : )

Maybe the Americans are just over-dramatic

More than Orwell's 1984, I think that people should start reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis - a very old concept which unfortunately keeps repeating itself.

Buy one and give it to someone else.

I think what the careful reader of 1984 will realize is that the book is perfectly good at explaining not just Trump but most other politicians.

... ironically(?), at this moment, a post on the USA previously having 4 billion chestnut trees is #4 while this is #1.

Doublethink is pervasive in a lot of modern thought. Hopefully this trend will make people evaluate it a bit more.

Here you can Download it for FREE and search through the full-version of the book http://ambardemo.rdseventeen.com/?query=1984&doSearch=true

I would actually argue that what we have today is worse than 1984. If you read the book, the protagonists have economic security/stability, even if in a totalitarian government. We have both nightmare spying AND economic insecurity.

Becoming more relevant by the day.

"In a time of deciet, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

The strangest tangent from reading this article.

> George only has the new administration to thank

But George has been under the Earth for the longest time hasn't he? He couldn't be thankful for anything any more. Off to Wikipedia I go, yup since 1950 from tuberculosis.

But a section on the article mentions the his homophobia, and so I read that because I find it surprising that it's mentioned when it was the norm at the time and seems like some kind of revisionism.

That then leads to a segue on phrasing Orwell used in 1984 to describe the "nancy left" or "pansies", and the presence in the Chestnut Tree (at the end of the book) gay men.

Then another segue to David Bowie and his last album which contains "Girl Loves Me" as it references the Chestnut Tree and contains polari... and this morning on BBC 6 Music I had heard a long forgotten Morrissey track that was on an album called Bona Drag, and when I put the album on over breakfast I listened to the opening track "Piccadilly Palare" and some of the same strange phrases were present as in the Bowie track, and now I also recognise them from having read 1984 (except Orwell was using the slang phrases pejoratively).

A further segue as I remembered that Lucky Lisp from the same album has references also to polari, and on the Orwell wikipedia page there was a mention of the Chestnut Tree scene again, and how Orwell included a lisp for the "Nancy" characteristics which he identifies in detail and with "some disgust".

And this leads to the most fascinating Wiki discovery of the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_lisp . The tested hypothesis being that sexual orientation of men can be determined from how gay men phonate their s's distinctively to the degree that measurements of guesses were accurate beyond a rate that could be chance.

The rabbit hole goes deep when one strays onto Wikipedia.

This is double-plus-plus-plus ungood, as either Trump or Big Brother might say.

Seriously, I have pointed out before that Trump seems to have actually learnt the rules of Newspeak with terrifying effectiveness.

I can't help but perceive this as being a result of people thinking Trump is somehow kickstarting our Orwellian future/present, when he's probably the highest profile person to point out how government before him has been working on this plan of ultimate control for a very long time. The biggest examples being:

1) that he pointed out there were no weapons of mass destruction and--false flag or not--our government used that to manipulate our perceptions to perpetrate an atrocity.

2) the supposed Russian cyber attack; he's one of the few that spoke out against the lack of evidence and that the US Intelligence report was propaganda. That document was so obviously propaganda--I read the whole thing and there wasn't even one word such as "system log" regarding what was redacted. For my purposes, it doesn't matter that he spoke out against it solely because it served him to do so.

So not that Trump won't continue more of the same control tactics or do more, but as we all know as programmers when we break things, only to rebuild them better: things almost always gotta get worse before they get better. I'm under no delusion that Trump in it/himself will be good for us, but if it finally unveils the lies and false flag politics/acts that have been far more harmful to society, I'm all for it.

The problem has been we have politicians that knowingly manipulate us and have another "face" behind the scenes. There is clearly some Machiavellian things going on behind the scenes. In addition, I don't blame headlining politicians. Clearly US Intelligence has a stronghold over them--either directly or indirectly through manipulating their perception just as ours.

Our country has clearly been on a decide path of the following 2-fold strategy:

1) project strength no matter what 2) convince us it's for higher ideals to maintain the perception of being the "good guy"

That's all it boils down to. It's looking like the US Government has killed about 1 million people in the middle east since 9/11. The numbers I've heard for Vietnam were 3.5 million. We're talking people that are basically defending their land here. And against the biggest military force the world has ever seen. In other words, in comparison, these victims were all civilians. The "Dominos" never fell, and ISIS is a small fraction of muslim people in the middle east. It's also very clear that ISIS is a result of our actions. What they are up to is retribution, not an attack on american ideals. We are talking highly religious people who see everything through a religious lens, so of course the way they are going to communicate their mission is that of a religion one--but at the core of it is anger and hatred that we invaded them, destroyed their land, dominated them and tried to control them. How would we feel if an invading force from across the world made our home a warzone--we wouldn't be like "well, it's for higher ideals, we'll just let this slide." Yea right. America seems incapable of putting ourselves in the shoes of others.

As if human lives and suffering isn't enough (well, it obviously isn't if it is far away), we are now paying the debt from both Bush administrations for years to come. Numbers I read stated that 72% of our national debt is from the 2 Bush presidents. We are currently paying $250 billion per year for those wars. By 2020 the numbers suggest it will be $500 billion per year. The numbers also stated that's 6% in 2015 and 12% in 2020 of where the taxpayer money will be going to. Over however many years to pay that back, that's enough money to have revamped our education system, invested in R&D and lived up to the potential we once had. Techcrunch just last week said the government is only investing $86 billion in tech investments. Imagine if that was $500 billion year after year.

Now all that said, I agree that the perception republicans and Trump portray of america being in shambles is far from accurate. What I think is accurate is that we aren't living up to our potential and we don't have the economic acceleration we had before. People can feel that. That's a problem. What's also a problem is that the numbers for unemployment which are good and other positive figures seem to primarily reflect improvements for the lower class. It is a major problem if the middle class isn't benefiting similarly. These are the people most invested into the system, paying the most taxes into it, and things have gotten harder for them.

So in conclusion, conspiracies aside (of which many are likely true), we have sacrificed much to project strength. I don't believe in believing what I can't see for myself, but I clearly see that projecting strength is the core of our philosophy. I believe it's an incomplete (as well as aging) viewpoint. For one, it's where all civilizations go to die as they overextend themselves through military and far-reaching interests (history teaches us that--do we have to be the next Roman empire?). But secondly, perhaps its just enough to be able to defend yourself when push comes to shove. We have the buttons to press, which few others have--do we really need to be a military presence everywhere, especially now in this digitally connected world which devalues actual physical presence?

So it's my conclusion that we have created more harm than good; we have created enemies. We can hide behind ideals, and frame others as the bad guys--but, for example, how much militarism has Russia really shown since WW2? And compare that to how much we have shown. I deal with Russian developers all the time--they seem to be participating in a form of capitalism not too different than ours. It's almost as if we need a bad guy to make us look like the good guy. Is Russia a staple of our perception control? I think so. From what I've researched, Gorbachev wanted to do a major dis-armament deal and the Reagan administration turned them down. Why? For one, we don't want to disarm, but 2, Reagan had too much riding on his Star Wars plan, and 3, that would make Russia look like the good guy. Did you hear Obama's last address about a month ago--he said "Come on, Putin was the head of the KGB...", implying he was such an evil foe. So what, are they not entitled to have an intelligence group too? George HW Bush was the head of the CIA. How is being the head of the KGB somehow meant to imply he's evil. Consistency is why. Consistency of message. Clearly, the US Government needs to keep justifying their lie/thread that Russia is so evil. It's the same as in every day life: if you acknowledge a mistake, you actually acknowledge the chain of mistakes that lead up to it. America simply isn't ready to acknowledge our past mistakes. Other countries have called for us to apologize for Vietnam. Is apologizing for something so big easy to do, not to mention costly? So going down this path of righting our wrongs would bring up a bunch of dirty laundry. So we have to continue our lies. The powers that be--besides seeing the world completely differently--would never backtrack and exhibit what they perceive as weakness. I however think it could be a moment of strength for humanity.

CONTINUED...:

At the end of the day, the hardest part is that we are talking a country here, and many/most of our leaders believe the perception imposed on them. I don't believe in some grand conspiracy. I believe in people susceptible to taking on information they don't know for themselves as truth. So the result is we have ultimately good people--hopefully--in congress that literally believe we are helping the world by policing it. And because the layer cake is so deep, of course there are people in the midst who have much to gain by current perceptions, and as a result find it easier to justify our violence, destruction and militarism. It's a bad concoction. And on top of it, there likely are some truly selfish people with nothing but self-interest in mind. My hunch is that the scare about communism after World War 2 has a lot to do with the fact that wealthy Rockefeller barron types were absolutely terrified of communism and what it would do to their wealth that they got politicians on their side to scare the nation about communism. Now in the age of public corporations, that's less likely the case--and with billionaires devoting their money to the greater good--but back in the day it was a different world. Communism isn't good, but what I see in history is countries trying to find themselves as the suffering bottom portion of the population tried to fairly get a piece of the pie. We might have stumbled through communism/socialism in many places, but in almost all, the result has been a hybrid. Perhaps we have "American Ideals" and American FORCE to thank, but it's my viewpoint that for civilization to mature any farther we can't continue with the "gun against your head" liberty America has enforced that perhaps made it all possible. And that's if it made it possible--maybe it wasn't necessary throughout the 60s, 70s, etc.

Lastly, without a doubt civilization has improved greatly over the past several hundred years, perhaps the most this past century. And the fact that we were able to do that as our population exploded this last century (I think it went from a billion in 1900 to approaching 10 billion now), is an even more amazing thing. So things are getting better. In the states, things like the civil rights movements were successful; I can now talk on forums like this positively about communism/socialism without being persecuted like in the 50s and 60s. We have minds more open than ever and venues to express the thoughts that come out of them. I'm not pessimistic. I just think we could and should be moving a lot faster.

On a side note, that's basically what Trump is pointing out, even if it requires denigrating any progress made since the Bush administration and the Wall Street near-collapse. So I think for the first time a better different future is in reach. We can almost grab it, but with the government--the same Government Hillary would keep alive--we could stagnate unnecessarily for a very long time. That's not to say Trump will just become complicit--let's just hope not.

I think a lot of us technologists see the obvious future: DE-CENTRALIZATION! Decentralize money, decentralize government (give more tax money to localized smaller governments that can actually do something; crypto-governments maybe one day?), and create an environment where we can "vote with our feet" and money. For example, I think if all the states got more money and we cut our military and federal budget by a lot, that would kickstart a lot of competition for the states. Europe seems to be doing better than us--and I'm willing to bet it has a lot to do with the fact that it's comprised of a lot of competing smaller countries. In addition, this is all identical to the promise of decentralized cryptocurrency goals and the sharing economy. That's clearly the future. Well maybe not clearly what's gonna happen, but clearly the future that would serve us best.

On another side note, part of that challenge is acknowledging that the Republicans are right on one thing: big government is not the way. That's one of the hardest things to reconcile with the fact that democrats and liberals clearly are pitching a more compassionate message. I don't see us escaping this endless stalemate without liberating ourselves from the prism/prison of 2 party perception and the religion of government in general. That is, the religion of somehow the government is gonna be what saves us and makes our lives better. That's where the less government aspect Republicans tote is so important.

We need something big and different to happen for us to have any hope of getting past this any time soon. It likely won't be Trump, but will it be the aftermath? And if so, ARE WE PREPARED TO WELCOME THE IDEA THAT SOMETIMES THINGS MUST GET WORSE BEFORE THEY GET BETTER?? That's a pill most aren't willing to follow, but also such doubling down on touch decisions, the difference between our successful projects/startups and those that join the 99.99999% that fail.

Let's take advantage of the next time those in power try to manipulate us with such things as bogus reports on Russian cyber attacks. Those are blessings in disguise. Silver linings in the clouds. The less credibility they have, the more power new viewpoints can have. Very few--if only the US Government--can state something as fact without evidence and get the entire media repeating their claims as if facts. That's dangerous.

The revolution begins now--as ironic as it is that it's been kickstarted by a megalomaniac that will do and say anything if it serves his self-interest. We don't need to let that get in our way. Let's use what we need from it and keep our eyes on the prize.

Transparency and decentralization is the war cry! That's the war cry of economic advancement.

The war cry of stability and humanity is: no more invasions (of other countries and, secondly, privacy). Iraq may very well be the last "Iraq"--the next battles very well may be fought at home to protect us from a truly Orwellian future.

I was very happy with what I finally put to words, so I mediumed it too: https://medium.com/@faceyspacey/in-response-to-george-orwell...

The irony is that spending all that money on education, infrastructure, science and technology would have been a much better way to project strength by setting an example to follow.

Amazon Best Sellers: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/

Is it because of Putin or Trump?

If Trump then it should be the Atlas Shrugged instead.

You're doing it wrong. You should get Brave New World instead.

Orwell was an optimist.

People should also read Down and Out in Paris and London - a fantastic book about being a poor vagabond in England and France.

It's ironic that the CIA rakes in on that, since they have the publishing right for several of Orson Welles books

Orson Welles and George Orwell are different people, despite the latter's last name also being a common subsequence of the two names.

I don't see a blog post about a best selling book, I just see a load of Amazon affiliate links everywhere.

Someone was clearly using the arithmetic from 1984 in the inauguration attendance figures. 2+2=5, indeed.

That's strange, I just bought the book off Amazon yesterday. Coincidences, coincidences.

"The worst kind dystopia story is one that's easy to believe"

It's a good book. Especially the book-in-a-book part with the manifesto.

I bought it for a friend this year on Amazon, she still hasn't read it

Who would imagine Donald Trump would cause a surge in reading...

Pretty amazing a public domain book is still selling so well.

You should also read "Propaganda" by Edward Berneys.

It's properly called Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Customers also bought: Anthem by Ayn Rand. Irony.

Trumps protectionism is right out of the Ayn Rand villains handbook.

This is simply untrue. Ayn Rand doesn't speak about international free trade in Atlas Shrugged, as the rest of the developed world in her story turns into People's States. She did support international free trade, but not "free trade" of TPP and TTIP.

What remains to be seen is whether the domestic trade policies of Trump will be in alignment with what Ron Paul and other Ayn Rand devotees propose. He promised deregulation, so it might happen [1].

tl;dr: Trump might be moving the world towards a Galt's Gulch analogue without being an Ayn Rand devotee.

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/23/trump-tells-business-leaders-...

Ayn Rand in the novels has 'villains' who bring politicians into power who then decide upon legislation that then protects those 'villains' from cheaper and better competition.

The 'heros' in Ayn Rands novels embrace competition because they invent new things and know/think they are the best and the best should win.

So yes, protectionism as a concept to protect factories from cheaper and better competition is right out of the 'villains' playbook. This is also something that Thiel doesn't understand about Trump.

Also Trump supports coal against competition of cheaper energy. Not Trump, but the recent legislation efforts in Wyoming do exactly the same (protecting coal) and I'm sure Trump is at least happy with it.

"Trump might be moving the world towards a Galt's Gulch analogue"

No Trump is moving the world straight in the other direction. Protectionism is just the first step to protect his cronies (e.g. textile), next moves will be protecting coal against solar, oil/gas against electric cars etc.

How did Trump make his money? Not by inventing (e.g. Musk would be a 'hero' in Atlas Shrugged) but by shady deals on casinos, buildings and using the system (tax breaks etc.) for him, like the 'villains' in Ayn Rand novels. So for sure Trump is on the 'villain' side in Atlas Shrugged - if you don't agree, read it again ;-)

It's not an instruction manual...

The most amazing thing to me is that the 0bama administration was very good at Orwellian manipulation, yet it was rarely remarked upon.

I mean, the guy got a Nobel Peace Prize, then proceeded with eight years of undeclared war on many different countries. "Droning" became a verb...

zero-bama?

It's a dog-whistle term. Politically neutral persons think it is a typo, but it is recognised by the anonymous poster's fellow associates, and marks the poster as someone they should upvote, endorse and agree with.

It was remarked on, just using different terms that weren't in use back in 1948 and generally not by the media who were complicit in the manipulation (and frequently the target of it).

The whole phenomenon of political correctness and the flattening of unrelated things into hate words e.g. how dislike of Islam (not a race) is now routinely called "racism" is all very reminiscent of how Big Brother set about restricting the space of what citizens could think by changing the language. Of course the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has largely been discredited now, but the basic tendencies still exist. And lots of people have been expressing frustration with a PC culture for years, Trump simply realised that giving lip service to the concept of being anti-PC was far less effective than actually being anti-PC.

The way the administration manipulated the media through controlling access to press conferences, and then eventually abolishing media Q&A entirely, was remarked on at the time. But it was a subtle move that most people were not consciously aware of, they just felt at a subconscious level that the telescreens were more overtly propagandistic than in the past.

"0bama"

Is this a typo or some snarky attack? That seems distasteful.

I don't think you can call getting the Nobel manipulation by the Obama administration. They didn't arrange that I believe.

Obama seemed a little embarrassed by the prize, although he handled it in a graceful way. It would have been a bigger blunder for him to reject the prize. I certainly don't think that anyone can call him a hypocrite for receiving the Nobel Peace prize though. If anything, it reflects badly on the Nobel committee.

Please don't use HN for partisan battle. It's not what this site is for, you're way off topic here (even more than others in the thread), and dropping a lit match like '0bama' on a petrol-soaked battlefield amounts to trolling whether you meant it that way or not.

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