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Pete Wolf's avatar

Thanks but reading this I'm still no more advanced. And watching the Apprentice, which I didn't, given what you say about it, will not help either. I am still at a complete loss to even start grasping how someone like that can become what he is. I've understood quantum mechanics, general relativity, even a little quantum field theory, not to mention some Wittgenstein, Kant and others. But this is just beyond me. Humans..... beats me. I need help!

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Rowan Davies's avatar

Let me know if you work it out. I saw someone the other day saying 'I was able to have some understanding for Trump voters the first time around, but this time -- given January 6 -- there's no way they didn't know exactly what they were signing up for', and I thought: yup. Still doesn't explain WHY they voted for him though.

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Pete Wolf's avatar

May be Jan 6 is precisely why they voted for him? This is a land of confusion...

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Harry Freedman's avatar

Woody Guthrie had the measure of Fred Trump long before any of us knew anything of the monster he spawned. Reading his lyrics now they seem unbelievably mild. https://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Old_Man_Trump.htm

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Rowan Davies's avatar

What a family. Hope things are good with you Harry (apart from all of This)

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Liz Ryan's avatar

Media bubbles are amazing things. I find myself approving the man who has successfully sealed the US-Mexican border to prevent the flow of arms, drugs, slaves and gangsters into the States. And I'm sure the American taxpayer will survive just fine without the taxmoney-USAID-NGO-dodgycausesanddemocratswives grift machine. Both Trump and Elon have stated that any funding that turns out to be genuine and useful will be reinstated.

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Rowan Davies's avatar

Obviously we have a political disagreement (which I generally like to think is ok), but I know quite a lot, for a layperson, about what the effects of the USAID cuts have been and will be, and there’s nothing ‘media bubble’ about it; they are absolutely catastrophic for humanitarian aid.

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Liz Ryan's avatar

I think this might be an occasion when two halves of a complex story need to be fitted together. That's possible -- and if there's a demonstrable need it can be reinstated eg Ebola-control funding was when it got deleted in error. But one of the issues they uncovered was that payments weren't coded or labelled. In the resulting black hole there was a lot of misappropriation. Both arguments can be true at the same time!

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