Watch for the nod
Trump is pretending to disavow the “Send her back!” chanting at his Nürnberg rally Wednesday, and the media are helping him, but the disavowal is absurd. He stood there smirking while the MAGA hats chanted.
Trump attempted to distance himself from the racist chant on Thursday, saying “I wasn’t happy with that message that they gave last night.”
“It was quite a chant, and I felt a little bit badly about it. But I will say this, I did — and I started speaking very quickly. But it started up rather fast,” the president added.
However, as NPR’s Tamara Keith noted, “in reality, Trump stood there for 13 seconds as the chant continued, waiting for it to die down before he resumed his remarks.”
Stood there and smirked.
Watch it again.
Trump fans eventually break out in "send her back!" chants directed toward Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee who serves in Congress who Trump viciously smeared. pic.twitter.com/LX3eAEkfci
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 17, 2019
Not only does he smirk, he also gives a little nod as the chanting gets going. It starts while he’s still talking, then he completes his sentence and gives a little nod as the chant gets louder. Like hell he disavows it.
Vox reports that in fact a member of his family prepped the audience to chant before the official start of the rally.
Trump’s ire is laser-focused on the lawmakers’ purported un-Americanness for inadequately loving the country in which they were born or, in Omar’s case, emigrated to. In fact, before the rally in North Carolina began, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump led the crowd in a call-and-response chant, saying, “If you don’t love our country, the president said it, you can…” to which the crowd responded, “Leave.”
But he disavowed it later? Give me a break.
There has always been more than one way to skin a cat.
I’ve been talking and writing about the breaking of checks and balances in the tech industry for a couple of years and there’s a possibly useful analogy to politics. We know that checks and balances aren’t worth anything now but I think that’s because we’ve forgotten what checks and balances are
In the tech industry, we’ve got used to everyone stealing and misusing our data in return for supplying us with things we probably don’t really want in the first place. We’ve got used to DRM being the norm so that we don’t own any of the things we buy (including things like vehicles and houses as well as things like music and books) and don’t have an unrestricted right to repair or sell them.
We’ve become used to companies like Facebook and Google overturning the sort of rights we thought we had. And some legislators around the world have started to think that perhaps we were wrong to allow those companies to be so big and have so much influence and perhaps we should break them up.
I’m all for that in principle, but I’m not sure that throwing laws about the place is really going to help. I think that because of the ease with which such companies ignore or rise above laws. These buggers pay very little tax and simply ignore laws for years or decades. Facebook’s share price went up when it received a fine of $5bn. It was less than expected. It’s about a month’s revenue. Facebook knows it got away with rather less than a slap on the wrist for doing dodgy as fuck everything.
Laws seem unlikely to work, although I welcome better ones. What we really need to do is remember what checks and balances actually are and who owns them. We do. We are the ones who need to hold companies like Facebook and Google and Amazon to account. We can’t do much about laws or how they are enforced, but we can collectively do things about the checks and balances.
For instance, there’s an Amazon warehouse opening in the town nearest to me. The checks and balances here are about exposing awful working conditions and zero hour gig economy contracts if and when (and it’s when) they appear. Changing the laws won’t work (at least, not for a while) but changing what we stand for might.
Isn’t the same true about government? Aren’t we the ones to agree to the legitimacy of democracy, for example, but refuse the false idea that MPs ought to support Brexit by default?
It’s checks and balances that are broken and we own those. We can mobilise around them. I’m sick of everyone feeling that checks and balances are things governments are supposed to do. They’re what *we* should do.
Nice way of putting it. I was having dinner last night with a theatre professional who was trying to remember how it was possible to pull a performance or a festival together without text. My words should have been “Shakespeare managed without even a phone – or a car – or indoor plumbing”. We’ve forgotten how to do basic things because we have the illusion that everything is easier with technology. Some things are, some aren’t. Like, when I was in college, I went to the library and searched the card catalog when I needed data. My students type a keyword into Google and get millions of hits in an instant. The problem is, many of those hits aren’t relevant, have totally wrong information, or are just tripe. And they take the first thing that comes up, because they don’t know how to narrow the material, or they don’t want to try, or there is just so much it overwhelms. I didn’t have that problem. It was, in some ways, easier the old way, though it doesn’t seem like that superficially.
And the cost? Loss of our privacy, our intimacy, our very selves? The ability to be hacked quickly and have our accounts drained and our credit cards maxed out before we know what’s happening? It definitely is easier for the marketers and the crooks.
As for Amazon, we do get caught in a Catch-22 on that. Over the past year, the two department stores remaining in my town shut down. Now I have to choose between WalMart and online shopping, which usually means Amazon. WalMart is a non-starter for me, so I usually head to online unless I happen to be going to one of the nearby towns which still have department stores. But that exudes extra emissions, so unless I am going for something else, I don’t do that. I’ll be in really bad shape if the two remaining non-WalMart grocery stores shut down (there were six when I moved into town 13 years ago).
Yes, Ikn. As someone who is partly responsible for quite a lot of the things that we’re all now misusing to everyone’s detriment, I say burn it all to fucking atoms. And, you know, super sorry, it’s kind of my fault. A callow youth, I thought I was making things better.
The internet became something I didn’t expect on my watch while I was looking right at it. The very definition of being asleep at the switch. I’ve tried to make up for it in recent years. There are some successes and some failures. Guess which one is winning.
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So often in the blush of youth, especially educated youth just out of an expensive degree and ready to change the world, we do stupid things that we know later in life were stupid (and should have seen at the time, but our lack of experience led us to ignore warning signs).
If we’re lucky, our stupid things don’t mess things up for other people. Most of the time, they do. Most of my stupid mistakes were limited to hurting me or those close to me, and for that I have deep regrets. But genies don’t go back into bottles once you let them out.