Real Time blogging

As I watch the Rev. Al in for Joy on A.M. Joy, I want to blog as I hear the arguments against Trump’s stripping Brennan of his security clearance. I will blog on the pov of the Trump supporter.
First up is Trump not following procedures in granting or stripping people of security clearance, something he has a constitutional right to do. The fact that it is destructive of our national set of norms is EXACTLY what his supporters want; they hate the norms b/c they believe those norms are what put them in the barrel, which is where the norm-followers want them. So anything Trump does to disrupt and destroy the national and international order is EXACTLY why they elected him.

With a president like Trump, we have lost our protection provided by the intelligence officers who serve to do just that, protect us. One FBI agent has already lost his job b/c he expressed opinions unfriendly to the guy who won. Such vengeance-taking totally reframes what it means to serve the government and the people it serves. Now we are in banana republic territory. I am sure the reactionaries who support Trump do not fathom the end point of where they are taking the country. They believe things will go along in their favor: roads, electricity, water, safe food, breathable air, medical and emergency facilities. No they won’t, b/c without the norms of governance Trump is destroying at the behest of his supporters, those things will go away.

8 Comments

  1. 伟思礼 says:

    Since he is the FORMER chief, removing the clearance is just theatrics. We are not “protecting America’s secrets” because (1) since he no longer has a need to know, he no longer has access and (2) removing a clearance does not remove what he already knows from his memory.

    1. Pat Barrett says:

      But what do Trump supporters think of this? After all, millions of Americans working for the Deep State are out to deprive Betty Lou of her privileged place in her small town, swamp her life with Mexican culture, and give her job to a Mexican welfare recipient…… or something like that.
      Every time I think I’m being too snarky about these people, I see a focus group of them and realize I’m on target. I wish more of them would come forth and argue their point of view without citing nonsense from Fox and other generators of nonsense. There are plenty of reputable conservative outlets for them to draw on but they seem addicted to crazy spin farms. My neighbor certainly does not access reputable sources of information, left or right, academic or popular, easy of access or dense, domestic or foreign. It’ll but fun to ask him my questions. I don’t understand why more Trump voters (not necessarily supporters) are not willing to enter into discussion but instead get mad when you question their premises and so forth. “We don’t need no stinking premises.”

  2. 伟思礼 says:

    I long ago gave up trying to guess what anyone else is thinking.

    1. Pat Barrett says:

      What we look for are patterns. Any book titled “The X Mind”, the Arab Mind, the Indian Mind, the Russian Mind, makes me perk up my ears and look for facile generalizations that disappear into the sand like a quick rain here in Arizona. OTOH, I was an anthropology major interested not just in other cultures and my own but in how cultures differ from one another. When you observe cultural practices, there are patterns: e.g. meal times and the sort of food consumed then. If you say Spaniards eat a large meal in the early afternoon and a light breakfast (the continental breakfast so hated by hotel guests) and Midwestern farmers in the U.S. eat large, hearty breakfasts, you concomitantly recognize that that doesn’t mean that every last person in that designated culture eats that way.
      The way people think is another matter. People are born into and raised in a culture and they absorb attitudes, values, and approaches to solving problems inherent in their cultures. Some absorb completely, others less so. Anthropology is not an exact science, nor is psychology or sociology.
      OTOH, I just finished that book, The Reactionary Mind, and the author decries a major pattern in conservative thought (which he sees as all reactionary b/c no one is conservative until something changes in a way they don’t like and react against it) and that is the sense of hierarchy. That makes sense to me in terms of what I’ve heard and read conservatives saying all my life: there has to be someone on top and someone on the bottom and we struggle to rise and fall in that but it is the way society is ordered.
      That latter word triggers another book, A Colony in a Nation, where Chris Hayes detects order as the principle conservatives operate on. That is why they call the cops on Black people getting in a nice car (like they showed on TV the other day – as they showed the woman [White] calling the cops, I thought, “I’ll bet the guy is Black,” and sure enough, a Black guy getting into a real nice car); they don’t necessarily have anything against Blacks, they just know that Black people don’t have anything nice unless they’ve stolen it. That’s why conservatives get so upset at being called racist; they don’t feel racist b/c their patterns of thinking tell them something is out of order if a Black person appears in a White neighborhood or a nice car. They are very offended at being called racist. When you understand their concept of order, a concept that comes from their culture, you can refine your description of them as racist.
      So you may have given up on figuring out what other people think, but these patterns still jump out at you. They are just extremely complex.

  3. 伟思礼 says:

    I see patterns in things I can see, like behaviors. I can only guess at things I can’t see, like motivations. The motivations you attribute to conservatives may or may not be useful stereotypes. I am fairly certain they are not accurate descriptions of some¹ of the conservatives I know. But of course, the conservatives and liberals I know are only a tiny percentage of the nation. (And of course I must point out my disagreement with the binary notion of this is this and that is that and there is a vast void between.)

    ¹Yes, some others have confirmed with their words that they think like you say.

    1. Pat Barrett says:

      Can we at least look at and compare the platforms of the two parties, for starters? Maybe that’s what you call behavior but it reflects thinking. When a White woman calls the police on a Black man simply b/c he was getting into a nice car, you really can infer nothing from that act, no idea of what her thinking about Blacks might be? When 90% of Republicans oppose immigration in general and declare illegal immigrants criminals, you see no patterns there? By their surnames, a lot of conservative Republicans come from a recent immigrant background; and now they are leery of immigration. Why? Because so many are brown? Gosh, if they don’t come out and say that, then we just have to throw up our hands and say, “Well, I don’t know……”

  4. 伟思礼 says:

    When their behavior is obviously wrong, that’s what needs to be dealt with first. I can try to influence the way people think (even if I am wrong about what they are thinking). But I don’t want to pass laws against what they’re thinking, even if it were possible to enforce such laws (which it isn’t).

    1. Pat Barrett says:

      I don’t want to influence the way people think. I want to give them the tools to think with…… education.

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