Monday, January 16, 2017

Merkel and Trump

As we are bracing for impact, here's a question for Brave New Trumpworld: Philip Oltermann, 'Europe's fate is in our hands': Angela Merkel's defiant reply to Trump Guardian 01/16/2017

Does this mean if we don't like Merkel now we're Russian dupes? On the other hand, Merkel's Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economics has done more than anything in memory to undermine the EU, spread nationalist hatred between EU countries instead of solidarity, and made it impossible for the EU do develop a common foreign policy. Oh, and Britain left altogether. But I hear that weakening the EU is something that Putin wants to do. So that means she's a Putin supporter, too, right? Except she's criticizing Trump for being pro-Putin, so does that mean Trump is really an anti-Putinist masquerading as a pro-Putinist?

It's going to be hard to adjust to the post-truth that goes with post-democracy.

But if our politicians and pundits can't get a little better at processing the complications in all this, every political position is going to spin off immediately into a exotic conspiracy theory. Herbert Hoover economics is a disaster because it's proven to be so since, oh, 1929 or so. Having a blowhard narcissist as President is also a bad idea, though we don't really have direct US experience with the scale of it we're about to experience. And the Rick Perry Principle still holds: Even a stopped clock is right once a day.

We're all going to be very confused if we go into "we've always been at war with Eastasia" mode everytime Trump broadcasts a brain fart over Twitter.

These two tweets refer to another dilemma for the far-right "Nationalist International" of far-right parties that view nationalists like Trump and Putin as models to emulate.






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