Said George Clooney.
The thing we've gotta read is "The Thing I Am." According to Bannon's co-writer, Julia Jones, it's "a rap film [based on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus] set in South Central during the L.A. riots." Here, experience a table read of the proposed film.
Clooney continues: "Here’s the truth: if Steve Bannon had Hollywood say, ‘Oh, this is really great, and a really good script,’ and had they made his movie, he’d still be in Hollywood writing his fuckin’ movies and kissing my ass to be in one of his fuckin’ films! That’s who he is. That’s the reality. Someone in Hollywood should’ve given him a script—or approved one of his scripts—just to keep him out of the right wing."
The world is full of would-be artists. Famously, Hitler was one. But there's no way to cherry-pick the Hitlers and mini-Hitlers and hand them artistic success to keep them from deploying their visions outside of the imagination-land of art.
(Downloaded from "Was Hitler's art work good?" where you can see more of the painting that if only people might have seen fit to love at the time, so much suffering could have been averted.)
Posts
180 comments:
How does George know that's not what is happening with him?
Perhaps Clooney is the Hitler they are giving scripts to, to keep him busy.
Ah poor Butt Hurt Clooney - his corrupt queen lost.
boo hoo.
Clooney. Ugh.
He should have gotten a physics degree so he could have helped with Gravity (2013).
Guess what bitch cloney, trump is still the president. And bannon had a lot more to do with it than all of your kiss ass Hillary fundraisers. What a pathetic bunch of actors we have now. But it kind of goes with the rest of the antifa-democrats.
George, Please stop the hate! Your mom would be embarrassed.
Last night I was surprised by a major celebrity. He walked by as we were standing in the new plaza in front of Taco Bar. It was Alex Honnold.
To be sure it was him I mustered up the courage and said "Hi Alex" and he turned around. I introduced myself and shook his hand. I shook the hand of the dude who climbed half-dome with those bare hands. He was very nice.
A real celebrity
If I saw George Clooney walk by, I'd say, "sod-off, leftist corruption supporting a-hole."
Seems a bit extreme. Does Clooney know his extreme language will garner super-sized publicity for himself and his career?
Clooney is a cunt, in the UK sense.
It's like being a tit but less harmless.
Amazing how Hollywood doofuses and media feel a need to demonize Repub advisers like Bannon, Rove, Kelly Anne Conway, Stephen Miller, etc.
And what has Clooney contributed to mankind that should make us care one iota what he thinks?
My lord that man is insufferable. Nice language, Georgie. Do you kiss Amal and the twins with that mouth? Amal and the Twins...there's a joke in there somewhere.
Show biz folks seem to know what's working, what makes money. They tend to find a channel that works for them. This is the way most money-makers work. If you're a pretty lady who can sing, you do that. If you're a pretty boy with a good voice, you do that.
George Clooney has been at it for a long while. He knows where the dollars are.
(BarTaco)
"Perhaps Clooney is the Hitler they are giving scripts to, to keep him busy."
Yes, a corollary of what I'm saying is that many of the successful artists among us would be doing terrible damage if the door to the life of an artist had been closed to them.
Look at the horror stories on the screen today. The big movie right now is "It," which I think is about terrifying and murdering children. The fact that there's a big audience for Hollywood horror movies and super-hero stories suggests that it should be no surprise when we vote for fascists.
Clooney sounds jealous that he has less influence than Bannon.
"Steve Bannon is a pussy. Steve Bannon is a little wannabe writer who would do anything in the world to have had a script made in Hollywood. He wrote one of the worst scripts I’ve ever read—and I’ve read it. His fake Shakespeare-rap script about the L.A. riots. Oh, you’ve gotta read it! It’s just fuckin’ terrible...."
Who gives a shit? It's Bannon's politics that matter, not his idiosyncrasies and whatever Clooney may claim to know about them. It's kind of laughable to paint Bannon as some extreme figure when his policies are popular with broad swathes of the American public.
Man, Clooney's words really pissed me off. This is coming from someone who doesn't really align with Clooney politically but nonetheless always sort of liked him.
Background on me. I've worked in corporate finance for 15 years and for the last 2 have taken improv classes to expand myself creatively. Improv has really opened my mind and helped with my career in finance, a career I am not giving up.
One of the best lessons improv has taught me is getting over my fear of failure. Failure is a given. You have to dust yourself off and try again. And again.
I am sure if I felt like dedicating the time to searching the internet today, I could find countless Clooney quotes reaffirming this fact that to succeed creatively, you must first fail time and time again.
It bothers me when creative types who know this failure concept to be true, tout some one-off failure by someone else as a point of criticism.
I am not making a positive or negative judgment on Bannon's success in life, but whatever this Shakespeare rap thing is--no matter how good or bad--should be called out by creative types as worthwhile and necessary step on one's path to success.
If Clooney is such a terrific judge of scripts then maybe he'd like to explain 'The Men Who Stare At Goats'. I still haven't figured out how that got made.
The world is full of would-be artists. Famously, Hitler was one. But there's no way to cherry-pick the Hitlers and mini-Hitlers and hand them artistic success to keep them from deploying their visions outside of the imagination-land of art.
Althouse trolls her readers again but gets no bites.
(So far. Or I could be wrong - maybe they don't find the Bannon/Hitler analogy silly or funny so it doesn't work as bait.)
The fact that there's a big audience for Hollywood horror movies and super-hero stories suggests that it should be no surprise when we vote for fascists.
When the trollin' gets tough, the tough trolls troll harder!
The trouble with Hollywood movies today is they're boring. You can see the plot coming. A character makes an idiotic choice. WTF. Bailing out. There's going to be bad acting.
Horror has never worked. I notice the music. The production values become the plot.
Throw in some humor and it's okay. Deadpool, anything with Simon Pegg.
Clooney professional judgement on Bannon's artist efforts has some weight, given that he is a very successful actor and producer. It obviously doesn't encompass Bannon's entire professional career.
You see a lot of that castle (Schloss Neuschwanstein) in "Chitty Chitty Bang-bang", which #1 son was wild about in his toddler years. We became quite expert in that film. Anyway, Neuschwanstein is used extensively and to great effect. It almost counts as a character in that thing. We can still lead tours I think.
Neuschwanstein was a tourist attraction from when it was still under construction. No surprise that it would have been marketable as a "souvenir of Bavaria".
A point of interest in the picture, in that it has a rather photographic character. There is a depth of field effect which is not typical even of naturalistic painting, the human eye does not work that way. He was very likely working off a photograph, as he was in very humble circumstances and would not have had the means to travel just for the sake of a single painting.
There is also the curious matter of the washed-out colors in Hitlers paintings, also seen here. In photo terms everything was desaturated. He was not into color, I guess, or he used poor quality paint that has consistently faded?
I recoil at the idea that I MUST worship some asshole because he can play dress up and cry on Que.
Nah.
Where would Clooney be if he had different luck and was not born famous, connected, and handsome? Those are huge levels of privilege. What if he was born to look like Bannon, Hitler, or unluckiest of all, Himmler?
He started out on the facts of life and attack of the killer tomatoes 2, Clooney was a serviceable conman in oceans 11, he want acting.
I'm sure Bannon could say similar things about Clooney in the area of politics, but I don't think he has, which leaves him the better man, so far.
Lets tote up the score:
Steve Bannon:
1. Success in the Navy
2. Success at Harvard B School.
3. Success as investment banker
4. Success at Breitbart
5. Success in helping Trump get elected
George Clooney:
1. College drop out
2. Success as an actor
3. Success as movie producer
Who's the pussy? BTW, let Ted Cruz call Bernie a pussy, like he was when that BLM guy grabbed his mic-super beta male move, and listen to the liberals howl.
Who cares what these Carney people say
I liked "Up In the Air". I think that is one of the only Clooney films I have watched. I was interested in the Venice spectacle of his wedding. That's it. I wish him well but not contributing to his bank account.
There is a smugness about Clooney that I have never liked, and in my opinion he is a mediocre actor at best. I have also never seen any evidence of particularly remarkable intelligence, either.
The camera loves George. But then George loves George. So there is that.
What a confluence!! Hitler paints Mad Ludwig's castle. I know from reading "The Monuments Men" that the nazis used the same castle as a major warehouse for their stolen artworks. Clooney turns the same serious book into a "buddy" movie, which in turn becomes a major disappointment. And yet Clooney criticizes Bannon's script, while profanely fantisizing about him kissing Clooney's ass. And Althouse brings it all together in a single post. Brava!
P.S. There are a lot of happy little trees in that painting.
Dear virtuous mr. clooney,
Your spittle is showing.
Your lack of temperance, kindness, compassion and respect for others is its own Prescription for what ails you and Your Kind.
All the best to you
"Clooney sounds jealous that he has less influence than Bannon."
Yes. Clooney's anti-war movies vanished without a trace.
"It's kind of laughable to paint Bannon as some extreme figure when his policies are popular with broad swathes of the American public."
Well...Hitler's policies and even more extreme rhetoric (than Trump's) were popular with wide swaths of the German public. Does this mean Hitler wasn't extreme? Or does it simply illustrate that he was able to skillfully play on the German public's fears, angers, and resentments to build broad public support? Never underestimate the capacity of malevolent con men to seduce or gull the public, or the public's willingness to go along with extreme or hateful policies.
If Hitler had lived in modern day America, he could have been Thomas Kinkade...his paintings are akin to but certainly more palatable than Kinkade's.
Poor people made poorer in Cuba. Cuba, run by a leftwing dictator for-life - the system of government approved by most hollywood elites like Clooney.
Clooney's best role was in "Oh Brother where art thou".
Perfect in the part.
An underappreciated American classic IMHO.
Bannon has an eye, or an ear, for the bizarre, which I can appreciate. It seems that he made "Titus" (1999) happen. This is the only film version of "Titus Andronicus" of course, which is without doubt Shakespeares most extreme and off-putting play. "Titus" is IMHO very well made and true to the material. Not for everyone, or for rather few, but in many ways, and unexpectedly, Shakespeares most realistic play concerning the nature of power and the risk of degeneration of power struggles.
Worst summer box office in 25 years suggests Hollywood isn't opposed to bad scripts.
Robert Cook: Well...Hitler's policies and even more extreme rhetoric (than Trump's) were popular with wide swaths of the German public. Does this mean Hitler wasn't extreme?
Do you think wide swaths of the American public have extreme views?
Cooney was a regular on The Facts of Life during the 1980s.
#Artist
I liked George Clooney because I though he was very handsome. He hasn't aged as well as I hoped and expected, so I don't like him any more.
Batman and Robin.
Bat Nipples.
That is all.
So "pussy" is cool now? Or just for leftist actors? Like "fag" is all good if it's Alec Baldwin using it?
Hitler never won a majority. The best they ever did in a free election was 37% of the vote. They took power in a parliamentary government-forming coalition.
By that standard France should be run by Madame Le Pen today.
And it is the case that while Hitler and most of his close staff were more extreme than the German populace, Trump and his people are LESS extreme than the US public.
I think it's fair to say that Hitler was a more accomplished artist than Churchill. Churchill, in turn, was a better artist than Eisenhower. Artistic ability has very little correlation with political skills. .......Good looks and the ability to speak horseshit with conviction might give you a leg up, however. Clooney is better at that than most people. Still, when judging the pros and cons of Clooney's insights, it should never be forgotten that he put tits on Batman.
Man, when actors speak about politics!! Listen up. His two years at Northern Kentucky and his acting career put him in the same category as a Virginia Tech graduate with seven years as a Naval officer followed by stints at Goldman Sachs and, yes, Hollywood where he produced 18 films. So, George, who is the pussy? Oh, and Bannon worked for a time as the head of Biosphere 2. So fuck off, George.
Syrians and good night was financed by the Dubai film authority.
Just noticed the other day that Clooney is not as striking as he used to be. His contours are darker, off putting to me. Perhaps all that hate inside is taking its toll.
Robert Cook
Thomas Kinkade is certainly not to my taste but I wonder how many modern "painters" could duplicate his schlock? Even close?
When he a corrupt former marshal in burn after reading, also nor acting.
Cook cracked the Code. Trump = Hitler.
Someone better warn the son in law.
It looks like Hitler spent a lot of time keeping his hands busy while thinking about other things. Copying stock photos may be useful exercise, and calming for a turbulent mind, but it is not art.
And there is something not quite right about the perspective of his Neuschwanstein painting that is disconcerting. I think especially the building to the rear is a little off.
Clooney is reverse Bannon. A guy = like his dad - who wanted to make it in Politics and couldn't, so he went into acting.
I noticed a lot of left wing Historians are like that. Judging by their comments, books, and twitter feeds, its obvious they wanted to work for DNC or be a great Journalist but they weren't smart enough, so they became a Professor.
Hollywood certainly isnt into new material these days.
The standout movies of the summer have been "Dunkirk" and "Wonder Woman", both of which have been rather outside the modern mold.
There is a tremendous amount of material out there, outside of cliches and formulas.
Niven and Pournelles' "Mote in Gods Eye" has been begging for a movie since 1974. It was probably impossible to make pre-CGI, but it is a natural now.
Does this mean Hitler wasn't extreme? Or does it simply illustrate that he was able to skillfully play on the German public's fears, angers, and resentments to build broad public support? Never underestimate the capacity of malevolent con men to seduce or gull the public, or the public's willingness to go along with extreme or hateful policies.
Then, in that case, what does "extreme" even mean? It's not a particularly helpful word and rates up there with "far-left" and "far-right" as practically meaningless words except as use by opponents who do not like the policies being advocated. With the exception of the Final Solution, there was not much that Hitler did that could meaningfully be called "extreme" given his political and historical contexts. The Nuremberg Laws had contemporaries in Europe and other parts of the world, and even Nazi racial theories were not all that extreme for the time. Antisemitism and pogroms against Jews had been a feature in Europe for hundreds and hundreds of years. Martin Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies advocated persecution and expulsion of Jews almost 350 years before Hitler was born.
All that said, I'd normally accuse you of violating Godwin's Law, but since Godwin's Law is all but dead, I suppose we're back to the tedious task of pointing out that comparisons to Hitler are invariably problematic and historical to boot. The most important being that the fascism of Italy and Germany were really born in the experiences of the First World War and the notion that such total wars would be a familiar occurrence. Under these notions, fascism advocated a totalizing concept that would allow states to survive such catastrophic encounters. That coupled with the unfavorable terms of the Versaille Treaty go a long way to explaining events in Europe from 1917 to 1945. Attempts to take the events of that timeframe and act is they are some kind of historical template we are constantly at risk of replaying has always seemed to me to be wrongheaded. The contestant effort to metaphorise terms like 1939, Munich, Chamberlain, Hitler, and capitulation are examples of this.
"it is the case that while Hitler and most of his close staff were more extreme than the German populace, Trump and his people are LESS extreme than the US public."
It's all about setting the baselines in the extremer-than-thou game. I'm sure for the leaders of, say, the Democratic Party, it's the deplorable half of the population that is extreme, not them. Or maybe they look at their antifa base and think, hey, we're between the antifa and the deplorables – how can we be the extremists here?
George Clooney reminds me of John Roberts, formerly of CBS News - quite handsome, but not much else there.
Good that Althouse started a Hitler thread, cause people are obsessed with Nazis. Someone should start a "Hitler Chat Room" where people can just yak abut Nazi's all day.
I bet those black leather, SS trench coats would be even scarier if they had nipples. Clooney should bring out a line of nippled sportswear for the active man.
Hitler did buildings well, didn't he? Degas mainly did dancers and no one criticized him for that.
Classic blunder:
"Never fight a land war in Asia"
Updated:
Don't pick a fight with Breitbart
Oh gosh I forgot the Batman films,
Pournelles was a wrong thinker. A movie on any of his works will not be made by traditional Hollywood.
And if by some miracle it is as, look what happened to StarShip Troopers.
I don't get the "He's a pussy" part. It used to mean physically weak or cowardly, what does it mean now? I remember a DI saying, "Oh look, I think I see a tear in the corner of your eye, is your pussy hurting scumbag?" My eyes were watering because he had just smacked me on the side of my head with the butt of my rifle which wasn't cleaned well enough for him. To be a pussy was one of the worst things you could be back in the day and it all had to do with physical or mental toughness.
You know Pournelle died a few days ago, right? He had a heck of a life, RIP.
Kincade was rather good at dramatic lighting.
Very much overdone, but he could do it.
In photographic terms, his stuff is done with extreme settings for soft-focus (very often), saturation and dynamic range.
He was a much better painter than Hitler of course. If you look at his stuff carefully, past the wild color, he could also be a better draftsman.
The worst hit at Kincade, and the most just, was his choice of subjects. If he had chosen the standard genre subjects of the 17th-19th century, or some modern analogue, he would have been much less commercial but much more interesting.
Yes, I know about Pournelle. I have been a fan for ages.
I met him a couple of times, once sitting and listening for hours to his "table talk" at Philippe Kahns place in Santa Cruz. We were there for a Byte magazine function.
Ray, I think the fun part about the "Starship Troopers" film was that I was still rooting for the good guys. They tried to make it a parody and failed (I think).
I've always rather liked Clooney, but lately, with this and donating $1 million to the SPLC fake-hate group (now stashing their money overseas), his appeal has curdled.
I kept getting this feeling while watching "Hail, Caesar," where he played a not-very-bright actor, that he didn't have to stretch to get there.
If anyone should be using templates, it's Chamberlain and the rest of the world's appeasement of a dictator who keeps upping the stakes with each successful renegotiation. A Venn diagram of Chamberlain and Bush/Clinton/Obama's record vis a vie North Korea and Iran would consist of a single circle.
And there is something not quite right about the perspective of his Neuschwanstein painting that is disconcerting. I think especially the building to the rear is a little off.
yep, I noticed that too.
Is that painting so terrible? Yes, it's self-consciously technical and doesn't exactly awake the soul, but maybe some gifted professor could have ignited Hitler's inner passionate Aryan and moved him to express it in his painting. I'm told these inspirational teachers exist though I never had one.
Bannon's script must have been bad indeed if it was worse that the shit Hollywood routinely shovels at us.
Nipples didn't work on the the Batman outfit, but I bet they'd be quite something on the Wonder Woman costume. To my mind, they would emphasize rather than subvert the feminist message of Wonder Woman,.......I don't think Ronald Reagan was the only nor even the best actor to sit in the Oval Office. He said his lines well, but he wasn't a method actor like some of the others, and that's what it takes to sell the lines. JFK really got into the part of a devoted family man in vigorous, blooming health. No one ever doubted that part of his performance. And who can forget Obama talking about lowering the oceans. It takes a truly gifted actor to recite horseshit like that with a straight face.
That coupled with the unfavorable terms of the Versaille Treaty go a long way to explaining events in Europe from 1917 to 1945.
Yes, Foch said, "This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years."
I have blamed the Kaiser for WWI but Clemenceau for the second. He had himself buried standing up in his grave facing Germany.
The Allies should have marched to Berlin and hung the Kaiser from a lamp post. That might have been the end.
The punitive treaty, coupled with an Armistice that did not dismantle the German General Staff was a fatal error. Fatal for France anyway,.
Clooney wants to be consequential in the worst way.
He is.
Take away the great good looks and how gifted is Clooney compared to Bannon? Give Bannon Clooney's good looks and what would Bannon have done?
It's really a hard question, because I think, if you switch out Clooney's looks and give him a Bannon-level face and body, Clooney would have had to work much harder to get somewhere and to attract sexual partners. He might have achieved much more. And if Bannon had begun with the fabulous beauty that fate gave Clooney, he might have coasted on the pleasures of good fortune for decades and never done much of anything.
Maybe we should be looking at musical ability rather than artistic aptitude or acting skills when seeking our Presidents. The ability to find harmony is very important in a democracy, and I believe this ability corresponds to an ear for music. Maybe we should be giving Kid Rock a closer look.
The treaties did actually dismantle the German General Staff. This was a specific clause of the Versailles treaty. It also dismantled the German armaments industries, restricted weapon manufacture, etc.
One problem with these treaties is that the allies, by the 1930's, were simply unwilling to enforce them. There is no point in having a treaty that the other side is permitted to violate.
J. Farmer: Attempts to take the events of that timeframe and act is they are some kind of historical template we are constantly at risk of replaying has always seemed to me to be wrongheaded. The contestant effort to metaphorise terms like 1939, Munich, Chamberlain, Hitler, and capitulation are examples of this.
In many cases, it's the only history the "metaphoriser" is (dimly) aware of.
The neo-con right was flogging the hell out of this (Munich!) back in the day, now the usual suspects are trying (extremely ham-handedly, imo) to restrict historical analogies to that timeframe because they think crowding the right into the "Nazi" corner gets the left off the hook for violent, rights-suppressing actions. A dessert topping and a floor wax, I guess.
I would think that the whole "But they're Nazis! How can you draw any moral equivalence between anybody or anything else and Nazis!" shtick, which has been in high gear since Charlottesville, would make even minimally historically literate people turn away in embarrassment for the speaker, but hey, maybe it works on enough people.
I doubt that Bannon cares what Clooney thinks of him.
Clooney worries a lot about what people think of him.
Oh gosh I forgot the Batman films,
To be fair, Clooney only starred in one, Batman & Robin. Val Kilmer donned the mask in the earlier Batman Forever, and both were directed (horribly) by Joel Schumacher, who pretty much stalled the series until Christopher Nolan picked it up in 2005 with the Dark Knight trilogy. I think the trilogy, like Nolan himself, is a bit overhyped and overrated. Tim Burton's two entries (and Keaton's starring role) are still the best efforts at bringing the comic to the screen. That is, if you don't count the animated feature film Batman: Mask of Phantasm, which has a better story and more insights into actual humans than anything the live action films have been able to accomplish in almost 30 years of trying.
History of the German General Staff,
When Germany was defeated in 1918, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles specifically forbade the creation or recreation of the General Staff. Despite this, the German officer corps led by Hans von Seeckt, the chief of the Weimar Republic's army, carefully set about planning the next war in a camouflaged general staff hidden within the Truppenamt ("troop office"), an innocent-looking human-resources bureau within the small army permitted by the peace accord. The Kriegsakademie had also been abolished, but training of General Staff Officers continued, dispersed among the Wehrkreise (Military District) headquarters but overseen by tutors from the Truppenamt.[21] A new Kriegsakademie was established in 1935
Sorry to disagree.
"He might have achieved much more." Then again, judging by what Clooney says when he has to use his own words, maybe not.
Strip out the racial aspects of the Nazis and what is left isn't that much different from current Progressive wing of the Democrat Party.
If I saw George Clooney walk by, I'd say, "sod-off, leftist corruption supporting a-hole."
I'd say, "I liked your aunt" if I were feeling in a pleasant mood, otherwise it would be, "Hey, Batman, show me your nipples!".
As I said, the treaties were, progressively, poorly enforced or not at all. The Germans were cheating on them through various means. On a technical level, for instance, they moved R&D work to Sweden, the Soviet Union and Switzerland.
I have never voted for a fascist.
@Michael K:
I have blamed the Kaiser for WWI but Clemenceau for the second.
I think the weight of historical evidence squarely puts the fault for the Fist World War on Germany's shoulders. Germany's decision to support the Austro-Hungarians in delivering an ultimatum to Serbia designed to be rejected by the Serbians and thus give a pretext for war was the most proximate cause of the war. Unfortunately, the Barbara Tuchman thesis of everyone just blindly walking off a cliff and finding themselves in a catastrophic war has become the popular notion. Her 1962 Guns of August is a seriously flawed book, even as it has become the most influential popular history of the Great War, and Clark's The Sleepwalkers carried that thesis to an even more untenable position.
There was a prewar joke about a German who worked in a bicycle factory who decided to steal enough parts to make his own bicycle. He would sneak them out under a cloth in his tool box. The trouble was that when he tried to assemble the bicycle, he kept getting machine guns instead of bicycles.
I continued the comments in the cafe post.
The one I was posting when disaster struck (Only if you like my comments, of course) is lost but resembled the one I posted in the cafe.
Clemenceau said war was too important to be left to the generals. That's definitely true of the German generals, but less so with the French generals. Foch and Petain didn't want the war to end with an armistice. They wanted to press home the advantage and march all the way to Berlin. Had such a thing happened there would have been tens of thousands of more casualties and WWII would have been avoided. Counter history is a bitch......,.Germany had to pay some onerous reparations after the war. Those reparations were, however, much cheaper than the expense involved in losing WWII.
The perspective distortion in this painting may also be an artifact of the original photograph.
Also the relatively in-focus background on the right vs the shallow DOF on the left.
It may come from a side effect of view camera movements, which are intended to manipulate the plane of focus and modify perspective.
The artist did not manage to create a convincing naturalistic picture from the photograph in any case.
Hitler was not all that proficient even at architectural painting.
"Do you think wide swaths of the American public have extreme views?"
"Wide swaths?" It's very possible, but I really don't know. First, a majority of Americans did not vote for Trump and do not support him. Even among Americans who voted, a small majority voted for Hillary, but not in states that could help her. Second, many who voted for Trump probably didn't so much vote FOR him as AGAINST Hillary, or against the establishment Democratic party. So, it's hard to assume anything about a particular people's beliefs simply because they voted for Trump.
Even movies I really like have script problems, but I judge them by the best parts.
They focus-group the scripts and that puts in dramatic mistakes.
"Ray, I think the fun part about the "Starship Troopers" film was that I was still rooting for the good guys. They tried to make it a parody and failed (I think)."
Not a parody, but a satire. Different things. STARSHIP TROOPERS the movie was much better than STARSHIP TROOPERS the book, (which I read years before the movie was made and reread some years after I had seen the movie).
American polls on matters such as immigration are on the whole far more "right wing" than the party positions, or even Trumps expressed views indicate.
The political establishments are, on the whole, unwilling to go where the public seems to want to go.
The "Starship Troopers" book was much more human, realistic than Verhoevens cartoon.
It smelled right, as an analogy of the WWII Pacific campaign. The POV from both the foot soldier and Naval institutional bureaucracy was very true to life. Read Morison or Tregaskis on that war, and you will recognize much of the "voice" with which "Starship Troopers" was written.
The problem with "Starship Troopers", in this modern world, is that he "voice" it is written in is now that of a foreign land.
"I'd normally accuse you of violating Godwin's Law, but since Godwin's Law is all but dead, I suppose we're back to the tedious task of pointing out that comparisons to Hitler are invariably problematic and historical to boot."
I only brought him up to point out that a nation's populace can be convinced to support a malevolent but charismatic demagogue, and can be influenced to accept ideas and behavior that any civilized nation would presumably find appalling. Germany was a civilized nation, and many of the Nazi officers cultured men. (Even many Jews could not believe how far things would go in their country, among their fellow Germans, whom they perceived as civilized, and so many of them did not flee when they still might have.)
"The 'Starship Troopers' book was much more human, realistic than Verhoevens cartoon."
To the degree this is true--my take on the book is that it's fairly two-dimensional--it is because the book was written at a different time than the movie. The movie was an apt presentation of the story given the different world in which it was made, where thinking people must be skeptical of "rah-rah" militarism.
Most German and Austrian Jews did flee in time.
@80% survived. Unlike Polish and other Eastern Jews.
Did Althouse mean to link to a "table read" in the above post?
Speaking to The Daily Beast about his impressive new film Suburbicon, actor and humanitarian George Clooney addressed Bannon’s Hollywood failings ahead of his good pal Charlie Rose’s exclusive sit-down interview with the Breitbart overlord on Sunday’s 60 Minutes.
Now that's the Daily Beast playing it straight down the middle.
The world of 1945 certainly wasn't "rah rah" militarist.
It was war-weary.
Much of the book is indeed severely critical of the military mind.
The milieu certainly was immensely different, but not in that simplistic way.
Like I said, it has to be read in context, if you are not used to that "voice".
For other examples of that "voice", much of the journalism of the 1930s-50's is like that.
Try Cornelius Ryan's popular histories, "The Longest Day" for instance.
That inability to hear the context of another age is a severe fault of the current one. The 19th century can't be understood, the 16th is populated by aliens.
And Clooney conveniently forgets that his first directorial effort, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, was one of the worst movies ever. I didn't walk out but came close. Tedious, pretentious and a waste of Sam Rockwell's talents. I'm assuming he learned from that failure.
@Robert Cook:
I only brought him up to point out that a nation's populace can be convinced to support a malevolent but charismatic demagogue, and can be influenced to accept ideas and behavior that any civilized nation would presumably find appalling.
I understand that, but let's do a thought experiment. Leave Hitler out of it. Who would your second example to illustrate the point be?
"Even among Americans who voted, a small majority voted for Hillary,..."
False.
Again.
Per usual.
"Did Althouse mean to link to a "table read" in the above post?"
Yes. Sorry, I had to reconstruct this post and forgot about that link. It's there now.
"The world of 1945 certainly wasn't "rah rah" militarist. It was war-weary."
STARSHIP TROOPERS was published in 1959.
So, Clooney was a closet misogynist, but now he's out and prideful.
Published in 1959 thinking in the same terms as 1945. Heinlein was a 1930s Naval officer who served in military R&D in WWII.
Go watch "The Longest Day" film from 1961 (on Netflix and available on Amazon). It's got the same mindset.
"The Longest Day" is to my mind the best WWII movie along with "12 o'clock High."
I have seen that movie many times and visited all the scenes many times. It does the geography so you can follow it.
The only jarring note is John Wayne in the movie. He is too identified with westerns.
Eddie Albert and Mitchum were both excellent. The Germans were excellent.
Richard Todd, who played Major Howard, was in the British 6th Airborne and jumped on D Day but at another site than the Pegasus Bridge.
Although I really enjoyed the movie O Brother Where Art Thou?, I'm not sure I would enjoy watching it again knowing what Looney Clooney has been spouting since the election. Why can't the Hollywood set [and pro athletes!] just keep their mouths shut?
BTW, my younger daughter's husband both looks and sounds like Clooney but the resemblance, thankfully, ends there.
"Leave Hitler out of it. Who would your second example to illustrate the point be?"
No direct analog in America on the national level comes to mind, Trump himself being the closest example. I don't think of Trump as a Hitler, but he is sufficiently crude, ignorant, boorish, narcissistic, bullying, and clownish that I could never imagine him winning the nomination for President, much less the office itself, and his success in the election points to the kind of more malevolent figure who could attract the American public's support in a future where present economic and employment trends prevail, (that is, continue getting worse for more people). That so many Americans were taken in by the Bush/Cheney administration's lies and fear-mongering as a result of 9/11 such that they supported our baseless (and pointless and criminal) invasion of several countries in the Middle East by troops or drones, squandering American treasure and the lives and limbs of American soldiers and countless men, women and children throughout the region, and that there is no public discussion or objection to these ongoing actions, is also a grim foretaste of what could come. That so many are so oblivious or indifferent to the increasing militarization of our local police forces also shows we are becoming conditioned to accept as normal that which would not have been seen as normal at all in just our recent history.
Hitler never won a majority.
Hahaha. Neither did Trump!
Robert Cook: "Wide swaths?" It's very possible, but I really don't know.
Correct, you don't know. And it's not "very possible". Unless by "extreme views" you mean "views that were held by progressive voters like you as of noon yesterday".
Ritmo needs a copy of the Constitution, too. Electoral college is the section you are looking for,
Here. I'll even help.
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
(The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not lie an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President,
See how easy that was ?
Michael K doesn't know the meaning of the word "majority."
Michael K - if you don't know the meaning of a word it's ok not to discuss how you misunderstood its use.
Good lord, Clooney is an insufferable asshole. No one cares what he thinks. He's famous because he is good looking (I guess) and he's pretty good at pretending to be someone else. Oh, and he married a hot chick and had (is having?) a baby. Congrats. Now shut up and go to work on your next fiction piece.
-SW
Hahaha. Neither did Trump!
Neither did Bill Clinton.
"Michael K - if you don't know the meaning of a word it's ok not to discuss how you misunderstood its use."
I generally avoid you but you made a couple of sensible comments elsewhere.
Sorry I responded. You are such an idiot.
For fools like you who don't read links:
and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President.
See? Majority ?
You're welcome, dope.
Usually if I'm (supposedly) shocked by something someone says I don't go out of my way to mimimic it i.e. Pussy. It's interesting how suddenly celebs use that word for everything. Pussy this, pussy that. Woman wear pussies on their head? It's shocking? It's just normalizing something they think we all should be in the vapors over.
Subj: Bannon
From Harvard University Friday:
By Christina Pazzanese, Harvard Staff Writer
"If you thought that media coverage during the 2016 presidential election seemed, more often than not, to boost Donald Trump and criticize Hillary Clinton, you didn’t imagine it, a new report says.
"According to the report from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, which applied data analysis techniques to 2 million election stories to understand better what people were reading and sharing, Trump not only got the most attention from media outlets across the political spectrum, but his preferred core issues — immigration, jobs and trade — received significant coverage and were widely shared online. In contrast, news about Clinton focused negatively on her family charitable foundation, her use of a private email server as U.S. secretary of state, and the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, the study found.
"Surprisingly, while 'center-left' mainstream news organizations such as The New York Times and CNN remained popular and influential news sources, far-right upstarts such as Breitbart and Daily Caller, and even hoax-peddling sites such as Gateway Pundit, were able to drive mainstream election news coverage and dominate social media sharing of election news with far greater power and effectiveness than previously understood, the researchers found.
"In fact, Breitbart, a pro-Trump site run by the president’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, M.B.A. ‘85, dominated the conservative media, drowning out legacy power players like the Wall Street Journal and even Fox News. The site had the most widely linked stories across the web, Twitter, and Facebook, and led the national coverage of immigration, the election’s most-discussed policy issue. It did so, the study said, by acting as a kind of bridge between far right elements and the mainstream media. 'By developing narratives that have currency in right-wing circles, then both enticing and demanding coverage from center-left press, outlets like Breitbart were able to set the agenda for the election,' the report concluded.
"Breitbart’s effectiveness came not only in getting people to share its stories, but in shaping what other, more mainstream outlets did with them."
Link:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/09/conservative-media-dominated-coverage-of-2016-campaign-report-finds/
and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President.
See? Majority ?
Actually, no. buwaya puti, to whom the comment was posed, said that, "Hitler never won a majority."
By this, he meant, that Hitler never won more than 36.8% of the vote. Since Weimar Germany didn't have an electoral college, the analogy was to Trump's (previously called "Drumpf") inability to win a majority of the popular vote - at 46.1% - and a margin of over 3 million votes lost to his rival.
So I understand that you feel you should have a gold star for reciting rules, like a referee would from a playbook - but that's not and never was the point. The point was that he lacked popular legitimacy from the beginning, no matter how much more important you think state party bosses who comprise the EC are compared to the voting public upon whom you regularly reap your scorn and contempt.
I think we can all applaud Mr. Clooney's bravery at attacking a former Trump staffer. He is obviously taking his life and his career in his hands with such open pronouncements. Let us pray that he doesn't become a martyr to the resistance.
On a more serious note, while Clooney's name may get a project out of development hell, that doesn't mean it will get people in seats to see it.
"Hitler never won a majority."
Hahaha. Neither did Trump! (46.1% to 48.2%)
Blogger Michael K said...
Ritmo needs a copy of the Constitution, too. Electoral college is the section you are looking for...
So which section of the Constitution regarding the Electoral college applied to your friend and ideological comrade - Adolf Hitler?
I generally avoid you but you made a couple of sensible comments elsewhere.
Translation: I, Michael K, as a total partisan shill, equate sensibility to agreement with my bizarre political sentiments.
Anne - data shows conclusively that horror film fans are more likely to be right wing in their politics.
Ritmo is back to lunacy. The moon must be full tonight.
Sorry to have disturbed your slumber before sundown. I know how you hate the light,
Hitler did not win a majority in the Bundestag, and the other parties, should they have wished, or the Chancellor, should he have wished, could certainly have formed a unity government, which would necessarily have been one of the left, run by the SPD as senior partner.
This is in fact what effectively happened in France in this years elections.
Ritmo is back to lunacy.
Back to?
Hitler did not win a majority in the Bundestag -
Yeah, I know. This is part of the same simple point that Michael K was too much of a self-righteous idiot to understand.
Like a thread rapist, he insisted on inserting himself into the conversation without having a clue what it was about, just so he could throw his weight around into it and make himself feel important. That's usually what he does. I realize it's not normal, but neither is Michael K. He can't stand to be anything other than the most prolific contributor to a discussion, even if he doesn't have a clue what it's actually about.
Ritmo, go back to the cave or your mother's basement,
Geez mock turtle. Usually sloppy seconds is something that beta males are relegated to. But I see that in your instance, you can't help yourself, and sidle along to stick up for a defeated moron like Michael K while he's down. You tell 'em! Go get his adversaries! Avenge his theory on how if only Adolf Hitler had won the Electoral College vote, he would have been as popular as Trump! (Another German).
They should make a hashtag: #conservatives still missing the point.
Oh that's original, Michael K. Did you think of it all by yourself?
Tell us again about how popular Hitler was in the German Electoral College. LOL!
Fucking idiotic!
It's just easier to admit that you totally missed the point, isn't it? But you're too proud for that.
It just sailed miles above your stupid head. A retired surgeon arguing on Blogger about Hitler's standing in the Electoral College! Hilarious! What a maroon!
Which article of the U.S. Constitution applied to Germany's elections in the 1930s? Hahahaha.
When you were born, did the doctor say to your parents, "Congratulations! It's an asshole!?" Lol.
Night-night, Old Timer.
@Robert Cook:
No direct analog in America on the national level comes to mind, Trump himself being the closest example.
That, I think, is illustrative. We seem to be told all the time that we are at the risk of Hitler-like figures emerging from populist far-right impulses if left unchecked. Yet, what are the examples of this ever happening, beside Hitler himself? It's really just an excuse for people to say that anything that is too "far right" to their liking is some version of Hitler or fascist or on the verge of fascism or the verge of a new Hiterlism and on and on. Hitler was, in many ways, a sui generis figure. And the peculiar political, social, and historical forces that were in play in 1920s and 1930s Germany are only marginally similar to any of the similar forces in today's world, except in the broadest sense. So broad, in fact, that you can make similar comparisons with any other major military or strategically competitive event in history. Classicists like Donald Kagan have made a career out of publishing books that compare whatever world conflicts are going on at the time with some other event in Athens in the 5th century BC and how whatever comparisons the author chooses to draw between the two events, they are somehow important, descriptive, or predictive.
But Trump, unlike Hitler, won control of the US executive branch through its automatic mechanisms entirely. As far as majorities went, he had a majority of the Electoral College, which is entirely analogous to a parliamentary majority.
And for that matter, which it didnt matter constitutionally in this case, his party also won a legislative majority.
Your argument, Ritmo, or rather your snark was about not winning a majority. Trump won one, of seats/electors, far greater than Hitler managed.
Hitler could only take power with the acquiesence of several other parties and the President, Hindenberg. And likewise, in the beginning, wield power also with their acquiesence.
The circumstances between the US and Germany are also wildly divergent, and such snark only serves to infuriate and heighten national divisions. You certainly could get a US Hitler (though the US political failure mode is very different) or some such disaster, but it will be caused by the constant stream of acid and poison you all direct at each other, not Trump the man.
Grow up Ritmo.
Donald Kagan wrote an excellent history, "The Pelopponesian War", worth getting regardless of your opinions of Kagans strategic ideas. It is the best, easily available single book on the subject. If you want more depth, you can hunt down academic works, including Kagans, that are much more heavy on the inside baseball textual analysis of obscure sources and misc speculations on minor points.
Trump won one, of seats/electors, far greater than Hitler managed.
Trump was running in a two-party system. Hitler had to run against many more.
Hitler could only take power with the acquiesence of several other parties and the President, Hindenberg. And likewise, in the beginning, wield power also with their acquiesence.
Right. So explain how that made it unconstitutional or unparliamentary. Or as you said, not "through its automatic mechanisms entirely."
The circumstances between the US and Germany are also wildly divergent, and such snark only serves to infuriate and heighten national divisions.
You will always be divided from the mainstream. That is why your lackeys here bang on about the EC, because they can't stand to hear how Trump lost a popular majority decisively, keeps losing more support with every month, took office with the lowest approval ratings ever, and supports policy that polls at around 17%. (e.g., the ACA repeal). Just because your party has gerrymandered its way into choosing the voters, instead of having the voters choose the party, doesn't make Republicans or Republican policy popular. I think you know this and you just don't care. The maps have been rigged to do this. HRC legitimately lost the votes that Trump won from her in four swing states and that's correct and her loss and on her, but that doesn't change the fact that the RNC plank is way less popular with the people. Again, you know this and that is why you are too afraid to discuss it. This is why fools like Michael K divert with a Schoolhouse Rock lesson on the EC, as if everyone didn't know that already. The point is to get an EC win that reflects popular will, not to keep losing the popular vote and say, that's ok - gerrymandering will save us. Gerrymandering is what's losing your country. Your country is not with you, and that's that. It's not with the DNC either, but it's certainly not with you. Face reality. Time for partisan BS to end.
"Someone in Hollywood should’ve given him ... just to keep him out of the right wing."
So Clowney is saying that a persons politics can be bought or extorted?
Was Clowney bought? Was Clowney extorted? Is Clowney an extortion or payoff facilitator in Hollywood?
Did he leave the USA for Italy because of Mafia connections?
He loses all credibility with that foul mouth of his. No class at all.
Ritmo, none of your parties are mine, nor are any of your ideologies. I am a foreign observer. This is a good position because it yields perspective. I can see America and Americans without tribal attachments, and in context.
You are lost in the forest, seeing only leaves. But I see the whole forest. And you terribly misunderstand both the American people and the distribution of power, because you cannot achieve perspective.
And now no doubt you will say something racist, because you have nowhere else to go. You are, besides everything else, in the American trap of intense parochialism and arrogance. You cannot argue because you have nothing to argue with.
The answer to your personal and political problems - grow up.
Listen to your old men, they really truly know more than you, they have dealt with more people (vastly so, often) and have solved more problems, and their in-skull expert systems are way more complex. You resent it but it is the iron truth.
I'm an old man, getting ready to leave this country and have nothing personal to gain, here, really. We all have options and are well insulated (as well as anyone on earth can be) from your political troubles. I am not a US patriot, but I wish you all well.
Our hostess holds forth …
The fact that there's a big audience for Hollywood horror movies and super-hero stories suggests that it should be no surprise when we vote for fascists.
And also, in the comments …
Never underestimate the capacity of malevolent con men to seduce or gull the public, or the public's willingness to go along with extreme or hateful policies.
Why bring Obama up at this late date?
I have no idea what you just said, "old man" buwaya. But it sounded like gibberish. And terribly arrogant and condescending.
Does George Clooney's wife know and approve of his homoerotic desire for men to lick and kiss his ass? Is this why he married an Arab, the anal thing?
buwaya said...
"Ritmo, none of your parties are mine, nor are any of your ideologies."
You'd figure that if a guy has to have a fantasy life it would at least be a happy one. Personally, I blame the booze and drugs.
"That, I think, is illustrative."
Yes, it is illustrative that we haven't gone over the edge just yet. This is a good thing. However, that a figure such as Trump could be elected President, could even be taken seriously as a candidate, is also illustrative, (to me, at least), that we're heading down a path that could see a Hitler figure emerging and taking power in this country, especially, as I said, if the economy and availability of good jobs continue to get worse for more people. I believe that if Trump himself were to take a turn toward becoming a Hitler figure during his tenure, many or most of his present supporters would continue to support him.
Hitler was a creature of the left, and Trump is left in his social politics, but pretty right in the power of the government. He's cutting regulations, limiting the power of the government, and trying to limit U.S. military involvement overseas.
The US culture and government structure is very different than Germany. The bill of rights is such a huge differentiator as a start. Freedom of the speech is just one. What Germany is doing with anti Islamic and/or immigration censorship/ charges on social media is scary. U.K. Seems to be doing something similar. U.S. and Germany fo share the government practice of hiding un-PC news.
Cook to J. Farmer: "That, I think, is illustrative."
Yes, it is illustrative that we haven't gone over the edge just yet.
Cleanly and serenely missing J.'s point about what's illustrative of what here. And then proceeding to provide yet more material illustrative of J.'s point.
"Hitler was a creature of the left...."
No matter how many times this is repeated, it remains nonsense.
Cook to Ray: "Hitler was a creature of the left...."
No matter how many times this is repeated, it remains nonsense.
It's nonsense, in the sense of "an idea repeatedly flogged by people who have wandered off into the swamp of sterile political theologizing, wherein categories and distinctions of great emotional resonance, but little or no real-world explanatory utility, are endlessly fumed over." Dogged adherence to these these iconic (in the literal sense) categories is an impediment, if not a complete barrier, to understanding.
In that sense, it's just like the "1930s Germany and the rise of Hitler=2017 America and Trump's election" analogy currently being eagerly consumed and retailed by so many fixated ninnies.
Donald Kagan wrote an excellent history, "The Pelopponesian War", worth getting regardless of your opinions of Kagans strategic ideas. It is the best, easily available single book on the subject. If you want more depth, you can hunt down academic works, including Kagans, that are much more heavy on the inside baseball textual analysis of obscure sources and misc speculations on minor points.
Thank you, buwaya. Always looking for good book recommendations.
Does Trump paint??? Well, does he???
Oh! I'm sorry I missed this post yesterday. A rap movie about the riots sounds pretty dumb until you realize all these same people are falling over themselves about a rap musical featuring the Founding Fathers.
Ritmo asserts: You will always be divided from the mainstream.
Ritmo, if YOU are mainstream, our country is in a lot more trouble than anyone imagined,.
sigh...
Nazi = Nationalist Socialist Workers Party
What part of Socialist Worker is Right?
>>"Hitler was a creature of the left...."
>No matter how many times this is repeated, it remains nonsense.
We'll know Trump is really Hitler when the likes of George Clooney and Rob Riener are found hanging from light posts and there is an unexplained rash of NYT and WAPO reporters jumping off their penthouse baloneys. Then Trump is Hitler, till then this is all BS.
NYT and WAPO reporters jumping off their penthouse baloneys.
I'm sure that was an autocorrect errorl, Mac, but I do like seeing NYT, WsPo and baloney in the same sentence. ;-)
Yes, "sigh."
The Robert Wilde article is as so many of these things are, very deficient. It comes from, as usual, a failure of perspective.
The root of the misunderstanding, as is usually the case, on one side, is a deliberately narrow definition of "socialist". On the other side there is a lack of appreciation for the appeal of corporatism, and the already-existing welfare-state ideas of the German system, which were functionally "socialist", and actual socialists certainly have adopted them in their platform in countries that didn't have them. Its very difficult to distinguish the Nazi-ish from the Socialist-ish sources of, say, Argentine Peronist corporatism. Carlos Menem got on famously with Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, for good reasons.
The Nazi's certainly were socialist in fact, in as far as many other "socialist" states have gone, as they imposed a managed economy, nationalized industries, greatly expanded the social welfare systems that pre-existed them, etc. Some parts of the Nazi party were far more anti-capitalist than others, Goebbels for instance, but this is not unusual in other similar cases.
Part of the problem is that the Nazis were competitive with explicit Socialists, in that time and place, like the SPD. They promised much the same things, and cultural markers and foreign policy (and Jews) aside, their domestic policies would have been very similar, but under different "brands". They were competing for the same people by offing a similar product, protection from the misery of the Great Depression, described by both as a failure of capitalism.
In another country with different antecedents (such as, very importantly, the ideology of the military) the Nazis, as the populist party, could have had the field to themselves and would have been the only socialists on offer. This is the usual case in the third world. Nasser, Sukarno, Chavez, Peron, Tito and a host of others were all nationalist-socialists cut from the same cloth.
None of these systems would satisfy some idealistic definition of "socialist", but its not the idealists that get to define categories.
Agree with Buwaya. Nazi was more focused on Nationalism (German, or Aryan), where theoretically Socialists at the time were focused on Internationalism. Another challenge is the definition of Right vs. Left in the US, not to mention how this is different than in Europe. Would you qualify Woodrow Wilson as a Rightest, or Leftist? He did cause the Palmer Raids, and believed in Eugenics? Or a Liberal Fascist? What is exactly Socialism? Is North Korea socialist and the best example?
I forgot the word German, in the meaning of Nazi - National Socialist German Workers' Party.
Good article that offers some historical prospective on Mussolini, and his journey from the Left to Fascism.
The Mystery of Fascism by David Ramsay Steele
From the article:
From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left.
People always seem to grab for Hitler as an easy analogy to Trump where I think the bombastic George Wallace is a much better analog. Please don't misunderstand me i do not believe for a moment that Trump has a racist bone in his body but both Trump and Wallace continually bashed the press to gin up support and excitement in often funny and crude ways.
Clooney is just a tool who has long since past his sell by date. He's irrelevant like the corpulent Michael Moore. 2004 called and they want their show business air heads back!
Ray, this is an excellent, very thorough article, full of references to follow up. It is a much more nuanced and complete analysis than is found in, say, "Modern Times" (Paul Johnson).
The Mystery of Fascism by David Ramsay Steele
It ends, very accurately -
"But in substance Mussolini's prediction was fulfilled: most of the world's people in the second half of the twentieth century were ruled by governments which were closer in practice to Fascism than they were either to liberalism or to Marxism-Leninism.
The twentieth century was indeed the Fascist century."
Gk1 asserts: People always seem to grab for Hitler as an easy analogy to Trump where I think the bombastic George Wallace is a much better analog. Please don't misunderstand me i do not believe for a moment that Trump has a racist bone in his body but both Trump and Wallace continually bashed the press to gin up support and excitement in often funny and crude ways.
Oddly, I don't think Wallace was a racist but the Democratic Party insisted that was the only way he could run and win. He later apologized to blacks for his actions and words.
Personally, I blame the booze and drugs.
Of course you would! You work with what you know.
Ritmo, if YOU are mainstream, our country is in a lot more trouble than anyone imagined,.
Not to challenge your very active imagination, but go poll them on the issues. Ask yourself why it is that they don't agree with the ones that you believe in.
And then ask yourself how you can keep a country from disintegrating when the power that you support and defend is so opposed to what is supported by the popular will.
Example: Your ACA-repeal effort had a 17% approval rate. Figure out what you did wrong on that one. All just "messaging", right? No good reason why twenty million Americans shouldn't want to see themselves priced out of the insurance market?
The right-wing disease is to make an arbitrary hierarchy out of American (and every) society and then wonder why the people it assigned to the bottom aren't happy with their lot. Probably for the same reason that you myopic hypocrites didn't like being called "deplorable."
How blind can you be?
I'm starting to wonder if the focus buwaya and ray put on a supposedly socialist Nazism vs. the racist features that made it much more acutely, obsessively concerned with German ethnicity than with any typical, nationalism-neutral socialism is because it is with those very racist, right-wing features that they naturally identify anyway.
Socialism doesn't give a fucking fig about pedigree and blood types and ethnic nationalism or the organic "blood ties" of a community that the right cares about. You right-wingers have been duped the same way those Germans were duped by the party brand makers.
Get real. Believe in reality for a change.
"Socialism doesn't give a fucking fig about pedigree and blood types and ethnic nationalism."
These people (and this is ubiquitous to some degree or another in modern third-world socialism) don't agree -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_Way_to_Socialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cleanest_Race
Read the Steele article, it is interesting. These things are not simply mutable but they exist in great varieties, across nations and cultures and time.
You need to learn how to link.
But thanks for citing the outliers. I don't see the dozens of socialist countries of Western Europe engaging in any sort of Hitlerian ethnic cleansing. Nor do I see its leaders making common cause with the "blood and soil" types of the far right. They are liberal, tolerant and enlightened, the very way a responsible country that has avoided Germany's WWII fate should be.
Ethnic nationalism/nazism and right-wing extremism are only expressed when the elites fail to tend to their social welfare system and economic mobility ladder properly. Right-wing populism is sloppy and nonsensical; it only happens when people don't have enough in their pockets or enough fairness that they retreat into ethnic nationalism and identity politics as a different answer/last resort. Western Europe's social democracies were specifically designed to prevent the fascism that befell Germany after its post-WWI economic calamity. And in that regard, they've worked brilliantly.
But right-wingers like you hate reality and facts and just like being contrarian because you'd rather do irrational things to a society - consequences be damned. I think you look at society like a fly whose wings an eight-year old might be tempted to pluck off. Just very sadistic.
A telling bit, from Steele -
" Fascists did with their eyes open what Communists did with their eyes shut. This is the truth concealed in the conventional formula that Communists were well-intentioned and Fascists evil-intentioned."
Or, rather, the Communists (or socialists) with the shut-eyes were not the actual communists in power, or those willing to do what it took to get it, but unworldly academic theorists. Real communists, or their socialistic fellow travellers, who actually did have power, did what they had to do.
Modern communist-socialist theory has actually expanded on the proto-fascist emphasis on engineering rhetoric (the irrational "Psychology of Crowds" business), leveraging this explicitly. This is why you have third-worldish tribal politics of the sort that Kwame Nkrumah or Robert Mugabe would have found familiar attempting to band together under a banner of intersectionality, which is a necessary thing given a disparate coalition.
But modern European socialists do run third worldish tribal politics when they have to.
This is very visible already in British politics, now that they have a large multiethnic polity.
"when the elites fail to tend to their social welfare system and economic mobility ladder properly."
But they do fail - the problem of disparate social status is a massive problem in Europe.
"But thanks for citing the outliers."
They aren't outliers, they are extreme cases, but not that extreme. These matters are typical. Sukarno promoted Javanese; Nasser wanted a pan-Arab ethnic socialism, the Mugabe regime did not merely oppose whites, but he ruled explicitly for his Shona people, opposing the Ndebele minority. Over and over and over.
Mac McConnell said...
We'll know Trump is really Hitler when the likes of George Clooney and Rob Riener are found hanging from light posts and there is an unexplained rash of NYT and WAPO reporters jumping off their penthouse baloneys. Then Trump is Hitler, till then this is all BS.
9/11/17, 10:48 AM
Oh s***, there goes my weekend! Thanks a lot Mac.
But modern European socialists do run third worldish tribal politics when they have to.
Hilarious. Compared to the example in the thread of the Nazis? Ok, I guess you're right. Modern European social welfare democracies are as "tribal" as the Nazis. Whatever you say, buwaya.
This is very visible already in British politics, now that they have a large multiethnic polity.
Again. Fucking hilarious. You're talking about UKIP and BNP? What percentage of the vote do they get? British politics is deliberately multicultural - 'cause it's hard to defend a kingdom "united" by Scots and English and Welsh if you're going to be a tribal assmuncher. They can't even de-Anglicize James VI and I, despite a number of referenda regularly. And if they do, it will be the Scots breaking away to assimilate into the multiculturalism of greater Europe - not the other way around.
"when the elites fail to tend to their social welfare system and economic mobility ladder properly."
But they do fail - the problem of disparate social status is a massive problem in Europe.
Not as big as in America - Mr. Fact-Denier.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_economic_mobility_sawhill_ch3.pdf
http://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobility/
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-mobility-america/491240/
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/america-social-mobility-parents-income/399311/
Your motto should be, "Assert first, research never!" I don't think you ever look into the facts of something before asserting. Just how you can spin them to be twisted into your ideological prerogatives.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2013/dec/19/steven-rattner/it-easier-obtain-american-dream-europe/
How is Islamic in Britain not tribal?
The Left in the U.K. Seem to be focused on creating more tribalism, and against assimilation and the melting pot.
Prime example is what the U.K. Is doing with the Pakistani grooming of White girls scandal. I view this as a form of racism, and a class issue.
Socialism kinda works when you have a homogeneous population, that don't have a huge amount of people who take advantage of the system. Of people of a high trust culture. Unfortunately the refugees that just got imported to the so called Socialist Countries, are from low trust societies. Just wait till the refugees bring over the rest of their families...
Juche ideology in NK is very racist.
Khemer Rouge were also very racist.
Europe and the US are probably among the least racist places in the world, especially the U.S.
"Socialism doesn't give a fucking fig about pedigree and blood types and ethnic nationalism."
Does this square with state-directed outward mass movements of Han Chinese and Russians?
Trump lost the "popular vote." Is there a point to endlessly repeating an assertion about an outcome of a game that was not played? The behavior is sort of pathetic, particularly with so much sass.
This is very visible already in British politics, now that they have a large multiethnic polity.
Again. Fucking hilarious. You're talking about UKIP and BNP?
Tooth, he means Asians.
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