I fixed the link sorry. And it sounds a little familiar, except the underdog won! In the case of the Kurds, we’ll see.
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Deep-staters can’t understand POTUS45’s strategic genius. Without his great and unmatched wisdom they’re unable to bend reality to their will. Look at the pattern of POTUS45’s stable brilliance:
In 2016: “I’m a big fan of the Kurdish forces.”
In 2019: [The Kurds are] “probably worse at terror and more of a terrorist threat than ISIS."
On General Mattis in 2016: “Mad Dog. He’s great.”
In 2019: [General Mattis is] “the world’s most overrated general.”
Choosing Rex Tillerson as secretary of state in 2016: “I have chosen one of the truly great business leaders of the world, Rex Tillerson… to be Secretary of State.”
In 2018: [Rex Tillerson is] “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell”.
Now I find out some Limey goofus named George Orwell is plagiarizing POTUS45! I was reading this in an old book written in 1984:
“… the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats…The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different… The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong!..posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot… The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone…had gone straight on with his speech…The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of DOUBLETHINK he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated.”
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Today’s propaganda does echo Orwell in many way but is different in important ways as well.
The techniques we are seeing today are the same as what is/was used in Putin’s Russia. The more lies Trump spreads the less people can trust any source of information.
From here:
But the Russian spin doctors and media strategists discovered long ago that when you open the information space to every kind of conspiracy theory, you destroy reality.
Professor Timothy Snyder is worth looking into on the similarities and connections between Putin and Trump.
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A compact overview of Trump’s last week’s adventures. To be continued.
Brad Simpson, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut, tweeted: “I am a historian of US foreign policy. I have read many, many letters from US presidents to foreign leaders, and I have never read a letter from the US president so unhinged, so threatening, so bizarre, so completely lacking in basic etiquette. Trump is deeply, deeply unwell.”
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What is so cynical is that the troops are withdrawing to Iraq where they will be reemployed in that area, not returning home as was promised. So the the mantra ‘bringing our soldiers home’ was another deliberate lie.
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Some sight, an army retreating with their tail between their legs…
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Europeans should be used to seeing that
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Edward Tufte will be all over those people like a cheap suit for not starting the y axis at zero. As far as he’s concerned that’s the same thing as lying because it gives a wrong impression of the slope.
Not familiar with his work, but as long as the increments on the x and y axis are equidistant (which they appear to be to me), then slope is just dY/dX and not subject to impression.
If one has doubts about the slope, just use the endpoints…+7 trillion in the last 7 years. That’s the point.
As soon as you render it in a visual format it becomes subject to the ways we process visual data – or in other words, impressions. Leaving the bottom off the graph makes it look much more dramatic and is one of the bag of tricks of people who wish to misinform while using real numbers.
Another thing is that not using constant dollars (tied to some date) in a historical graph also makes it look more dramatic but less informative.
If you have any interest in this sort of thing I heartily recommend Tufte’s book(s). Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a steal at ~$40 ($10 less in paperback).
bottom of the graph or not, 7 trillion in 7 years (+ or -, 2012 dollars or 2019 dollars) is dramatic (and traumatic) regardless of the visual format used or “bags of tricks” employed.
How about this:
zero on the Y-axis inclusive, equal increments on both axis, no skull-duggery or David Blane-worthy tactics employed…still 22T and climbing. Not many ways to polish this turd.
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This is public debt as a percentage of GNP since a long time ago. According to that we’re still well under WWII level. Of course we paid that off promptly.
Your point about inflation adjustment creating distortion is valid so just as a reference point, let’s raise the amount in 1997 to 2019 dollars from 5T to 8T (based on what this https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ told me) and the slope would certainly flatten some.
For me, the important fact is not the actual magnitude of the slope, but rather the undeniable trend of the slope (very much upward) and the current value of this graph (22.9T as of 11pm CST).
That’s like saying an airplane that has lost all power and decending past 10,000 feet is still “well above the ground”.
Plus, post WWII we were an industrial powerhouse that had the means in place to PRODUCE things to get out of that debt…where is the light and the end of our current tunnel?
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So the upward trajectory really started with Ronnie Raygun, took off like a moonshot with W and progressed into plaid with Obama. I’d say we have a governmental spending problem versus a my party is better than yours problem. We are all screwed in any scenario.
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exactly…which gets back the origin of this whole graphical presentation…get out of endless, expensive, pointless wars abroad.
specifically, I would point to the response to the 9/11 attacks as the fuel for the moonshot…aka, the beginning of our “presence” in the middle east and Afghanistan…which is still going on almost 20 years later…which is the topic of this thread