SKL
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Sep 15, 2007
- Messages
- 14,632
Certainly I hope most of us don't take this as a monomaniacal single identity. Especially as relates to marijuana, nobody likes a pothead. Personally I hope he rolls back the mottled Federal approach to dealing with marijuana, if only to taste the salt in smug "legal state" tears. That's a sideshow. Ordinarily I'd see this as a positive State's rights issue, but it's not, because if a State were to otherwise not enforce provisions of the Controlled Substance Act, that would go no where, and it's a legitimate "commerce-clause" issue, anyway, as we can see by the unfortunate impact on marijuana markets in non-legal States. As far as Hillary Clinton or any other plausible candidate would be easier on serious drugs is insane, unless they were Black and it could be used as a racial wedge, as it was under Obama.
Now, the crack cocaine sentencing laws were ridiculous, terrible laws, but let's keep in mind that the "reform" of the ratio was 1:100 → 1:18, not to equity; half an order of magnitude towards sanity is certainly better than an order of magnitude of insanity, but even Jeff Sessions actually worked to make this happen. Jeff Sessions happens to be one of the appointments I'm particularly happy with because he stands to back a rather noxious trend of the federal government under Obama undermining law enforcement in a variety of ways including pandering the racialized concerns of "Black Lives Matter," etc.
(And I don't think it was wrong because of race. I don't give a shit about disparate racial impact. "Disparate impact" is a ridiculous legal standard applied towards otherwise non-race-based laws that has given us things like less competent Black firefighters hired over more competent Black ones. It's one than it can only dream of a Trump court overthrowing.)
What kind of person makes drugs a single issue vote? A really tiny minority of people who care that much about drugs vote because they're busy, well, doing drugs.
Exactly. There are considerably bigger concerns as to whether we have to worry about the police when we're getting involved with the drug scene, which has been the baseline for all of our lives; meanwhile, things are going to shit socially in any number of other issues.
"Eradication" is all talk and the only reason that I think his approach to the Terror question will be better than his forebears is because he appears willing to work with Russia. If I were really hopeful, I'd hope that he'll be able to compromise with people like Assad, the late Qaddafi, etc. and avoid disturbing the status quo further, but that train has largely left the station, as an enormous black mark against the outgoing administration, for which it will be judged by history. I further worry about Trump's Mideastern policy given his Zionist ties even within his own family.
His rhetoric does contain a lot of promises that are beyond the ability of the President to achieve alone. One thing that a lot of both Trump enthusiasts and Trump haters fail to take into account is the he does have to deal with a Congress that will probably be equally recalcitrant to many of his more unique proposals than they were to anything of Obama's, although of course amenable to more standard-line Republican policies.
But, thanks to Bush and Obama before him (in particular, although this stretches back in one way another quite a long time, Reagan to Nixon to FDR and beyond), he does inherent an executive branch with a set of powers vastly increased relative to what it has in the Constitution or what is imagined even in the most Federalist of the Federalist papers. So he does have the ability to, by executive action, make quite a few changes, especially undoing various things that the prior administration dig solely by executive fiat (with regards to, for example, immigration) and, of course in combination with his new cabinet, making real impacts from Day One as regards to the various agencies.
Trump can't even be totally arbitrary if ↓ this guy ↓ is actually living in the real world, though, and he quite clearly isn't.
Laughable and probably underscores something about Trump's comments on the state of our educational system. I'd say offensive, but it's too laughable to really be offensive. Probably more offensive to Nazis than anyone else though.
I dislike the term outside of strictly comical contexts. But you have to call the great number of histrionically and exclusively identity-preoccupied people on the left something, "left-identitarian" is probably not a bad term. I have in mind in particular people who are preoccupied with "privilege," particularly people who come to this brand of politics with "privilege" to attend liberal arts colleges, which really have become occupied, in many departments, with a very, very radical, toxic, and (often self-)hateful identity politics, people who feel the need to bring racial, "gender" and "LGBT" stuff into even totally unrelated political conversations, people who are unduly preoccupied with those political causes, and so on.
Indeed. I saw in passing in some article that, like Obama, who was also resistant, he was made by the Secret Service to give up his phone and use a secure one, but which still includes Twitter—yes, Obama apparently could tweet from his phone, once Twitter came around and he switched from Blackberry to Apple, too—but clearly Trump is using it in a completely different, Trumpian way. Gives a whole new meaning to the idea of "3 AM phone [calls]." But on a more serious note, his ability to and disinhibition around Tweeting everything will put an interesting set of wrinkes in the whole "bully-pulpit" thing, or bunch of historical footnotes, in the whole thing, basically an exponential increase in the trolling facilities available to the office … but in the field of foreign relations, it poses some rather more troubling possibilities. I'm not a fan of the uninhibitedly tweeting Presidents but, somehow, though, it feels our just deserts in the toxic social media world we now inhabit. While it will give some new dimensions to the "bully pulpit," though, but does rather seem poised to diminish the dignity of the office with it's sheer banality. Which, again, is not so much a Trump thing but a post-post-modern society thing. I'm not terribly surprised with it though.
