i've never seen anybody make this argument that there's nothing wrong with having a conflict of interest, so long as you don't act on it. i don't really know how to react to it. i mean, it's obviously disingenuous. but, it's audacity is befuddling. this is trump level bullshit, really.
i guess what you have to take away from it is that she thinks she's above the law.
....and she thinks we should agree that the law doesn't apply to her.....?
it's just astounding to hear this from a serious candidate at this point in the cycle.
"stop white people" is obviously completely moronic.
but, then you look at the racist reactions.
and, then you realize that that's the point: divide and conquer.
there's no use in bothering until people are cognizant of how they're being manipulated. so long as people continue to push back and forth with emotions driven entirely by identity, we will continue to get the conflict that's desired.
i'm just uneducated, i guess.
it's all that reading up on marxist histories. it's left me a hopelessly unread buffoon.
get this, guys: the second amendment. they wanted y'all to shoot each other. really. it's documented, even.
you can imagine these upper class land owners (farmers....slave owners....) trying to figure out how to stop the masses from realizing that - wait a second - there's this class of people that get everything and don't do anything...
"what if we convince them to quarrel amongst each other, instead of quarreling with us?"
"well, that's brilliant."
"it's the oldest trick in the book, actually. but how do we do it?"
"well, what if we gave them all guns? surely, they wouldn't be able to control their emotions. they would fight over their women, their horses - they'd never even get to thinking about us, they'd be so occupied."
"yes! yes! let's get this written into the document. this will be a system that will last into perpetuity, i can tell already!"
"oh, don't get too cocky, now."
and, as things developed, you start to see them using race as a dividing tactic, and then setting the fucking idiots off against each other. it develops very naturally out of the economic system: slavery, then abolition. there's two kinds of slaves: white ones and black ones. how to get them to fight each other, instead of the bourgeoisie? you divide them by race, of course!
there's a rich literature on the topic, actually. but, only the uneducated have read up on it.
so, when you see these minority groups on campus go after the white kids with a lot of overgeneralized nonsense, and the white kids reacting with flat out racist hyperbole, remember: there's a banker at the top of his tower counting his bills and thinking about a slave owner laughing in his grave.
i think there's a lot of confusion about cocaine. is it in the pile of drugs to try, or the pile to avoid?
it may be the only one in the "depends" pile. really. nothing else is "depends". everything else is binary.
marijuana: harmless lsd: not harmless, but go ahead, if you're in a safe space. e: make sure it's actually e. but it's just serotonin. it can't actually hurt you - if it's e.
heroin: evil. meth: evil. crack: evil.
cocaine: meh....?
see, and here's the reason why: it's the underlying conditions. you could use it socially for years and never have it hurt you, or you could destroy your whole life in the space of a week. what cocaine is is a catalyst, in ways that those other drugs aren't.
so, no - you can't really blame it on the drugs. you have to blame it on depression, or loneliness or some chemical imbalance. fucking your life up on a cocaine binge is always a symptom and never a cause. but, it's also a fucking violent catalyst under the right (wrong?) conditions. careful thinking aside, it doesn't make the outcome any less horrific.
i've avoided it. but i've seen it, too. i don't need to prove to anybody i can handle it. i'm comfortable in the realization that i probably couldn't.
so, what is barack obama's legacy? i might hazard a guess that he won't have one at all.
it's foolish to predict the future, but his foreign policy is likely to bleed in between the stasis constructed by bush and clinton. this is exaggerated by the reality that clinton was an active secretary of state. a good history will need to say a word about how john kerry tried (and failed) to change directions on a number of issues, but the consensus is likely going to see a broad continuum in policy from bush through to clinton and more or less ignore that a president named barack obama existed at all.
if the tpp passes, clinton will get credit for it as a part of her asia pivot. the narrative will be how she set this - as well as syria and libya - in motion and then followed through on it, perhaps overcoming dissent from kerry. so, where is obama? just a name on a list...
on domestic policy, his major initiative has been obamacare. does anybody think this will survive very long? the future may be single payer, or it may be a reversal to the previous state of affairs. but the system he set up is doomed to failure and likely prompt replacement. rather than being a good compromise, it's been a failure from all angles - people are losing coverage amidst falling revenues. worse, it's a simple market failure that anybody that isn't a market fundamentalist should have and in fact did see coming.
his attempt to push bipartisan legislation has led to six years of impossible gridlock. i say six, and not eight, because he had the opportunity to plow things through quickly - but he instead opted for compromise and consensus. some histories may say nothing at all about president obama besides the clear stupidity of this tactic.
see, this is another issue where the reality is that trump is right in his analysis: decades of one-party rule has failed, in some cases disastrously. but, he doesn't have any good answers. does urban america need to ditch the democrats? sure. but, it needs to move left, and not right. it needs more socialism and less cronyism. in the sense that trump is right, he's also the exact embodiment of the problem.
i don't know. i haven't looked it up. but, has he ever built a subsidized rental unit to compensate for the low rent housing he's displaced with his casinos? i doubt it. has he ever put money into gambling addiction facilities that is more than a tax write-off? i doubt it.
he's right to point to the democrats as enablers. he's wrong to point to himself as the solution.