Just when you thought you’d seen everything, here’s Guardian Readers for Donald Trump.
Perhaps it’s not so surprising. The sleazebag is even attracting born-again Christians. If people believe the other options are worse for them, they go with what’s left. Whatever they feel about Trump’s all-round odiousness, the temptation to reject the man’s conventional and establishment enemies is too great to resist. This is a backlash against donors and insiders and being taken for granted – there are people backing Trump on the assumption that Bernie Sanders won’t be on the ballot. Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of what is happening. It is possible to envisage a better nation after voters give entrenched elites a good kicking.
Contrast that with Xi Jinping. Xi is deliberately steering China towards greater authoritarianism, harshness, intolerance and ignorance. He isn’t fortuitously swept up by or opportunistically exploiting public disgust at a corrupt and bankrupt economic structure. He’s actively, ruthlessly suppressing it – doing whatever it takes to preserve the rotten kleptocracy and keep himself on top. No-one knows how this ends, but the long-term flow of Mainland wealth and family members to havens like the US isn’t petering out.
I declare the weekend open with inspiring and entertaining insight into just one angle of this overall theme: how China’s censorship and propaganda machine would have grappled with Godzilla.
People get the government’s they deserve. Hong Kong got what it didn’t deserve for so long, it thought it deserved it. It forgot that rights are never given, they have to be fought for. Xi is not only being more authoritarian, he is arming China to the teeth and throwing his weight around. World War Three now looks even more likely although I pray Trump will implode and not be elected. Imagine a new Pacific War. War didn’t really go away because we continued to feed armies. And then people will ask if they deserved it. A million people will die in Hong Kong within weeks because they have no physical resistance. I don’t think it is very likely to happen. But it is getting more likely. One day sabres stop rattling and the game is real.
Another Guardian article:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support
Lei Feng was definitely made out of whole cloth. Heroic, revolutionary cloth.
Comrade Lei Feng is my favourite Communist hero ever — an illiterate soldier who wrote a 200,000 word diary full of pure communist propaganda; a humble everyman who was strangely surrounded by professional photographers taking shots of him performing mundane yet heroic tasks such as darning other soldier’s socks; a model soldier who was so good at his job that when he helped an army truck to back up, he made them hit a telegraph pole which then fell on him and killed him. What a shame he didn’t get to live long enough for a job on the politburo! Imagine how much better China could have been! 对待同志要像春天般的温暖 – Be unto your comrades like a warm spring day! (I think that means: start out cold, with a promise of fine things but end up pissing all over them later).
According to reliable reports,
The high-speed rail, which everyone supports,
Was calmly, even rationally, debated.
Although the cost originally estimated
Has been perhaps a little bit exceeded,
Everyone agreed that it was needed.
Although not ready till a distant date,
Everyone was quite prepared to wait.
Wishing to confer, a member stands
With others. The chairman quickly understands,
And tells the seated members, “Raise your hands!”
They do, and that is how the bill could pass.
A silly cynic murmurs, “What a farce!”
But all the happy people say, “It’s fine,
And it will be a lovely railway line!”
He may be a sleaze bag, but to my knowledge he hasn’t droned any hospitals or wedding parties in the past 8 years.
@George: Tell that to the Uighurs who are systematically being ethnically cleansed into harmony
@Enid ‘Blytwell’: “I don’t think it …..very likely ….. but…. more likely”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, the age of wisdom….. the season of Light, …. the season of Darkness, ….the spring of hope, the winter of despair.
Suggest you stick to writing Secret Five books. They are not yet banned.
@GCG – “yet”.
That was all I intended to write, but Hemlock’s blog software rejected my comment, telling me it was too short. Not content with twice labelling me a spammer for no reason and forcing me to use a different name for comments, it now critiques the brevity of my writing!