Always wrong
Trump says Lincoln should have just gotten his act together and negotiated that whole Civil War thing.
It’s not exactly clear what Trump thinks Lincoln should have done to “settle” the dispute between the North and the South, the latter of which seceded from the Union largely because it wanted to keep enslaving people.
The South thought it had a right to keep enslaving people. It’s weird to think that, because what about the rights of the people being enslaved? Why should a purported “right” to enslave outweigh a right to be free, to be not enslaved, to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Elsewhere in Trump’s sit-down with Fox, he claimed that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “very much into women’s health,” that Kamala Harris is “a low-IQ person,” and that in a Harris presidency, “you won’t have any cows anymore.”
I don’t have any cows now. Most people don’t have any cows. We don’t have any place to put them, or any need for them if we did have the space, or any desire to milk them.
Well maybe if they’d seceded without attacking Fort Sumter that would’ve been an option, but we all know how it turned out. The traitors had no way to win with their inferior extractive economy vs. the USA’s industrial economy, especially once they lost their best military commander.
The cow thing he’s talking about probably has something to do with vat grown meat, something the tech bros and futurists are generally into (so why they’re backing this dinosaur is mildly perplexing). We need to be doing that: carbon footprint will be lower, the animal cruelty is reduced, and for people that don’t care about either of those things the quality and customizability of the meat products will be out of this world. Cows are extraordinarily inefficient.
I’m quite amazed that Trump’s rhetoric appears to be working with many people. But then again, I can kind of understand why it’s striking a chord.
For example, I had a long conversation with a MAGA guy last night. A former liberal, so he says, and I believe him, this being solidly left Toronto. But now he’s on the right and he’s buying it all: war will go away if Trump gets elected, the culture war “craziness” will die down, and — this is what surprised me the most — Trump will thwart the billionaire global elites’ sinister plot to… do something or other… something something immigrants.
And then, with a shift in his tone, as if testing me, he asked me point blank what I thought about “trans in sports.” And I told him. Suddenly we were on the same page, and he could trust me and open up to me.
But as I really listened to him, I came to see that his real anxieties are that he feels deeply distrustful of the legacy media after having discovered that so many things he was told were lies, and he’s resentful at his liberal friends for attacking him whenever he revealed even the slightest disagreement with the liberal message of the day. He talked of being scolded and unfriended on Facebook… and he talked of seeing outright lies in the headlines, to the point that he abandoned the legacy media altogether. I sense his extreme views reflect a reaction against the left and the media, but taken to extremes, to match the extreme sting of anger he feels at the betrayal — a retaliation mindset, as Adam Gopnik put it in the New Yorker:
Comic but effective-seeming figures, like his cinematic hero (as he told me), the Joker.
From the sound of it, now he gets all his news from alt-bro podcasters, and much of it is way more conspiracy-fringe-extreme than I had even imagined was going on over in Rogan-world.
It’s telling that he started opening up to me only after he asked me about trans in sports. A-ha. Just as I’ve increasingly suspected: the gender mess is the gateway to the far right. It offers unambiguous proof that the legacy media are liars and that the alt-bros are trustworthy. From there, it’s a short walk to “Trump will save us” and then “Ukraine must be given to Russia.” It always leads to Putin in the end, because, as the Department of Justice has revealed, Putin is the one financing the alt-right bro mediasphere.
And then, with a shift in my tone, I made it clear that I think Putin is a monster, a thief, a thug, and a murderer. The spell was broken, and the conversation cooled and died off.
The far right hooked him with trans, and he’s theirs now. I don’t think we’re getting him back.
I doubt that Trump is even aware of the existence of synthetic meat but he does identify as a cowboy so it’s not surprising that he’d fantasise about a left-wing plot to take away the nations cows. That’s just the level at which his mind works.
Ohhh synthetic meat. Literal cows. I thought he meant cows in the Bart Simpson sense, that we won’t have any fits of anger anymore. As in, “Don’t have a cow, man!”
D’oh!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3sdZw1gThE
Hahahaha if only Trump were clever enough to make a joke of that kind. He probably was once but now…
Well, that settles it. That means that Trump won’t be able to play cowboys and indians any more, which is an iconic, all-American mass pastime.
Likewise for many of Trump’s MAGA supporters. So best we saddle up and hit the trail, Tonto. Our work’s done here.
Y’all are giving Trump way too much credit, here. This wasn’t some subtle dig about vat-grown meat. Instead, it’s got two components:
1: Simpler than the above, it’s just that leftists are all militant vegetarians. This is your bog-standard ‘anti-elitist’ pose.
2: On a deeper level, it’s a racist (and Christo-Nationalist) dog-whistle. Kamala is half-Indian, and was raised in a mixed Christian and Hindu household. And what is the one thing that Amurrikans know about Hinduism? Cows are sacred. This is another round of the GOP emphasizing Barack Obama’s middle name in order to convince people he was a secret Muslim. It’s just that now, it’s a secret Hindu.
Possible, I guess, but considering lab meat is banned in Florida as far as I know he’s probably heard something. In any case bringing up Hinduism isn’t good with Vance out there as much as he is.
He could also be referencing the popular climate denialist meme that the left blames climate change on “cow farts”. (Which actually is mostly belches, and yes, the methane they produce is part of the problem.)
This gets more interesting by the hour.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on Always […]
Back to the negotiating theme – Trump seems to think everything can be solved by ‘making a deal’. It’s been his mantra all along. “I’ll make deals”. He believes he is the world’s greatest deal maker (he’s not) and that everything can be solved by ‘the art of the deal’ (it can’t).
I share a distaste for war, and believe most things we go to war over could, theoretically, be solved by negotiation at some point before it starts, but I am realistic enough to know that ain’t gonna happen. Deals had already been made in the case of slavery, deals that made it easy for the south to continue holding people as property. It was time for deals to end, and the south to be made aware that was not acceptable. Thanks to botching the post-war, they didn’t really get the message, though I doubt many in the south would agree that slavery is good in the twenty-first century. They just feel white is better than black.
I recently ran across the claim that Lincoln was ready to accept a deal in which the Confederate states could keep slaves, but slavery was not to be extended to any new states. This was unacceptable to the slaveowners.
That was the issue that led to the Civil War – the ferocious wrangling over slavery in the new states west of the Mississippi. See: the Missouri Compromise; the Kansas-Nebraska Act; John Brown; etc.
Well of course it would’ve been unacceptable; they knew that sooner or later enough “free states” would exist that their enterprise would be voted into illegality. Now economics and logistics, those were things that perplexed their little heads. “Must make economically nonviable way of life last forever!” may as well be the chud battle cry of every age.