Memoryhole-o-matic!
By Mitch Berg
A regular reader writes:
A year ago, Slate asked if the civil war could have been avoided and went back decades before the war to point to events leading up to and potentially giving rise to the civil war, as well as potential ways conflict might have been diverted.
Today, I’m told that it is a stupid, crazy thing to ponder and that the civil war happened in 1861, not decades earlier.
I’m not excited about Trump talking up a pro-slavery Democrat. But, I think the Left’s reaction is funny.
In the late thirties and early forties, after the USSR and Germany signed the Molotov/Von Ribbentrop Pact, folk singer and communist Pete Seeger wrote a series of songs castigating FDR for criticizing Stalin’s new bestie Hitler. Then, when Hitler abrogated the pact by invading the USSR, Seeger withdrew the songs from circulation – literally, asking fans to return their copies to the store – and wrote music praising FDR and the war effort.
If Big Left couldn’t flush it’s own past down the memory hole on demand, the entire movement wouldn’t be intellectually sustainable.
May 5th, 2017 at 7:56 am
In March 1940 Dalton Trumbo published Johnny Got His Gun in the Stalinist rag Daily Worker. Daily Worker was an imprint of the Communist Party USA. The CPUSA was controlled by Stalin’s Comintern.
After Barbarossa, Stalin ordered its printing stopped. Trumbo complied. Johnny Got His Gun was made into a film in 1971, when the US was at war with different Russian ally, North Vietnam.
I don’t feel bad at all about Trumbo’s blacklisting in the 50s. Hollywood is private companies! They got a right to hire and fire who they want to! Ask Brendan Eich!
May 5th, 2017 at 9:23 am
I don’t whether it’s more disturbing that a president doesn’t know the history or context of the Civil War, or that he thinks that a man who owned slaves and massacred Cherokee Native Americans “had a big heart.” Trump is the epitome of someone suffering from the Duning_Kruger effect. A cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is.
May 5th, 2017 at 9:26 am
So, in other words, the Media?
May 5th, 2017 at 9:46 am
Emery, Trump made a mint in NY real estate, made a mint in entertainment, and destroyed two political dynasties.
Go ahead, keep thinking Trump is a dummy.
May 5th, 2017 at 10:05 am
Emery with unwitting self-diagnosis!
May 5th, 2017 at 10:11 am
I think Trump’s real estate only matched the S&P 500. Who knows what he makes from leasing his brand.
May 5th, 2017 at 10:43 am
Don’t confuse history with business. Trump is a big fan of Alternative History because he can make it up as he goes along with no study required.
May 5th, 2017 at 10:47 am
To be clear, real estate, farming, some banking etc. when people make or lose money it has a lot to do with government and Fed issues. Monetary cycle etc.
May 5th, 2017 at 11:04 am
Trump reads history like 13 year old boys browse YouTube and tell you about this great band nobody’s ever heard of called Pink Floyd.
May 5th, 2017 at 11:07 am
Emery: Would Clinton have made you happier?
May 5th, 2017 at 11:07 am
Emery
Please keep pushing the “Trump is a dummy” canard, trust me its working!
May 5th, 2017 at 11:11 am
Who in the hell wants more liberal judges? Hell, even the ACA is bad leftist policy except for the destructive way it drives us into single payer.
May 5th, 2017 at 11:24 am
SF: It would be a mistake to confuse Trump’s business credentials with his knowledge of history and fact.
That said: It is not lost on me that Trump has delivered optimism to a group of people that were pessimistic for the past eight years. Time will tell if their optimism is any more justified than their pessimism was.
May 5th, 2017 at 11:26 am
Clinton would be worse. Admit it, Emery. Irreversible damage to the Republic.
May 5th, 2017 at 11:27 am
TFS: A very small number of high risk patients can double or triple pool cost, thereby making the proposition unattractive to those carrying ordinary risk. This is exactly why the ACA fell apart. Wants will always exceed the resources to pay for them.
May 5th, 2017 at 11:29 am
Look at @Shabbosgoy’s twitter feed. Trump is a political monkey wrench in our new, very bad system that the Founders never intended.
May 5th, 2017 at 11:31 am
Emery: All you are saying is the truth: the ACA is the dumbest insurance edifice ever invented.
May 5th, 2017 at 11:32 am
TFS: It would appear I’m a comment behind you. I don’t know about Clinton. Supreme Court aside, we are where we are and in a few years we’ll have a better idea to judge outcomes.
May 5th, 2017 at 11:36 am
TFS: We have systems for the less fortunate, but they are not unbounded, not in the US or anywhere else. Our expectations of what the government can provide us are running about three years ahead of reality.
May 5th, 2017 at 11:43 am
People need to be careful about thier enthusiasm for Trump. the economy is beyond his control, IMO.
Emery: We have been allocating resources health care and health insurance in a terrible way since WW2. The ACA made it worse. The Democrats will try to stop an honest approach to fix it. Or, alternatively, they will let the GOP do a system that they can hijack later, like the Swiss system.
May 5th, 2017 at 11:58 am
Moron central: https://twitter.com/MEPFuller/status/860534974423977985 Proud Democrats.
May 5th, 2017 at 11:59 am
Duning_Kruger said: A cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is.
Exactly.
May 5th, 2017 at 12:14 pm
BTW, do you think Mrs. Kruger will ever find a way back to Mitch’s good graces so you two may again double team the effort, Duning?
I dont think so.
May 5th, 2017 at 12:22 pm
What the heck is it with lefties, like Emery (1 and Emery 2), that their comments are invariably attempts to hijack the original thread? Worse, they usually succeed.
It must be enormously frustrating to DG that her threadjacks get caught out and she’s effectively banned. Perhaps she could learn from the E & E Boys about how to employ subtlety and guile when threadjacking. And fewer words.
May 5th, 2017 at 12:26 pm
This is absolutely brilliant from Kevin Williamson on the Left. Start at 35:00 http://bit.ly/2p4YVfH
It Reminds me of an article King Banaian recommended “The people’s Romance.”
May 5th, 2017 at 12:57 pm
It must be enormously frustrating to DG that her threadjacks get caught out and she’s effectively banned. Perhaps she could learn from the E & E Boys about how to employ subtlety and guile when threadjacking. And fewer words.
Good observation. The difference, I think, is this — Mrs. Teasdale would just dump a steaming pile on a thread and then wouldn’t stick around to defend her position. She also became increasingly foul in her comments. Emery (in his guises) may be a thoroughgoing sophist who specializes in putting casters on the goalposts, but at least he stays nominally engaged in the discussions he hijacks. That has the benefit of getting Mitch some clicks. In short, Emery actually adds value to this feature, in the same way a piñata improves a kid’s birthday party.
May 5th, 2017 at 1:11 pm
It must be enormously frustrating to DG that her threadjacks get caught out and she’s effectively banned.
She just dumps and runs, and she’s known she has been in moderation purgatory for months and months. I doubt she reads the comments at all, so she probably doesn’t know that her posts don’t appear. Unless Mitch has had some external communication from/with her, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she has no clue that we have only been able to read a couple of her comments in the last several months.
May 5th, 2017 at 1:13 pm
Bad grammar.
She just dumps and runs, and she has known for months and months that she is in moderation purgatory.
May 5th, 2017 at 2:18 pm
Mr. D,
LOL on the piñata analogy!
May 5th, 2017 at 4:34 pm
Developing sensible, intelligently run, reasonably generous welfare programs for those who cannot or simply have not done it for themselves is a relatively small project, but trying to have government impose some kind of political discipline on the entirety of the health-care system — which is as explicit a part of the current daft Republican health-care program as it is of Obamacare — is a different kind of project entirely.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447361/heath-care-reform-no-cure-scarcity
May 5th, 2017 at 6:22 pm
Review Trump’s press conference of Feb. 16. He considers the MSM his enemy, and an enemy that is not interested in coming to terms.
Once again, we have evidence that Trump’s trolling level is Galactic Overlord.
May 5th, 2017 at 6:58 pm
“Review Trump’s press conference of Feb. 16. He considers the MSM his enemy, and an enemy that is not interested in coming to terms.
Once again, we have evidence that Trump’s trolling level is Galactic Overlord.”
Watch @Shabbosgoy and John Nolte (Now Daily Wire, ex-Brietbart) on twitter. Read Mises.org
You won’t get the new system without doing that.
May 6th, 2017 at 8:19 am
Woolly: Remind me which of Trump’s resorts he’s golfing at and promoting this weekend? Trump gets far too much criticism and too little recognition of his successes. His two most important achievements so far? Lowering his golf handicap and boosting the bottom line of his properties while getting the rest of us to pay for it.
May 6th, 2017 at 9:13 pm
The purpose of Trump’s trolling, Emery, is to get people talking about things that don’t matter. So the Dems and the cultural left are over here, talking about the latest completely goofy thing he’s said, while over there he’s doing stuff.
Trump’s golfing is far less a scandal than Obama sending $400 mill in stacks of cash to Iran in trade for god knows what, on no authority other than his own.
May 6th, 2017 at 9:34 pm
Trump is on pace to pass the costs of 8 years of Obama personal trips in 6 months.
/Donald Trump’s regular jaunts to his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida appear to be costing taxpayers a small fortune. The president’s three trips have probably cost the federal Treasury about $10 million, the Washington Post estimates, based on an October 2016 Government Accountability Office analysis of White House travel.
By comparison, Barack Obama’s travel expenses averaged just $12.1 million during each year of his presidency. In total, Obama’s eight year travel bill came to $97 million and unbelievably, Donald Trump is on pace to outspend him in less than one year. Before he became America’s commander in chief, Trump frequently criticized Obama’s travel expenses on Fox News and via his Twitter account./
“President @BarackObama’s vacation is costing taxpayers millions of dollars——Unbelievable!”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/02/22/trumps-family-trips-cost-taxpayers-nearly-as-much-in-a-month-as-obamas-cost-in-a-whole-year/#2ff0d22636e4
May 6th, 2017 at 10:25 pm
Let me repeat myself:
The purpose of Trump’s trolling, Emery, is to get people talking about things that don’t matter.
The Lefty websites are amusing. These things whip through them like a fever plague. It burns out, and they go on to the next outrage that no one outside the fever swamp cares about.
You should have enough sense to know that if Trump is anything near as bad as his haters make him out to be, the cost to the taxpayers of his retinue is nothing. There are educated mad men who believe Trump is about to set up camps and intern furriners and homos.
May 7th, 2017 at 4:56 am
This is what is going on. It’s short https://twitter.com/Monster_Dome/status/861136493695254528
May 7th, 2017 at 8:54 am
Woolly: Let me repeat something I commented on several months ago: “Trump trolls the media like no one else”. You appear to have reached this conclusion just recently.
Try and keep up.
May 7th, 2017 at 2:30 pm
OT: Perhaps the French did learn something from our elections.
May 7th, 2017 at 9:55 pm
I’m not talking about just the media, Emery.
May 8th, 2017 at 5:48 am
What grenade is Trump going to lob before Yates’ testimony to create a smokescreen? The midnight tweeter will be at full steam just before her testimony. I also notice they are digging through the Iran deal — hoping to find something to fill the front page.
May 8th, 2017 at 9:07 am
Hey, SFB eTASS piñata, go start your own blog and stop jacking! You miserable piece of white toast.
Back to memory hole. My son was doing his history homework last night. He was doing a timeline. Under the “Collapse of Communism” the description was, and I am not kidding, “Gorbachev came to power and peacefully and gradually changed the economy”. Yep. Straight from the textbook. He had to use it or else he would be graded down. This is how you change history. This is the brainwashing our kids are subjected to.
May 8th, 2017 at 11:17 am
Perfect! Teach him some of your “Alternative History” ;^)
May 8th, 2017 at 12:37 pm
So based on your comment, the absurd smiley notwithstanding, you believe what my son’s text book is teaching. Yep. More reason for everyone to understand when they engage with you that you indeed have an SFB syndrome and is neither capable of cognitive thinking, nor separating fact from fiction.
May 8th, 2017 at 1:36 pm
Emery paraphrased: “I said something obvious months ago. Try and keep up.”
Or keep ignoring most of the crap posted by Mister Thread Jack.
That seems like a more worthy effort.
May 8th, 2017 at 1:39 pm
Emery, while I grant that school textbooks are going to necessarily oversimplify things, you should indeed realize that Gorbachev was not “gradually liberalizing” things out of the goodness of his heart. He was trying to pull the system out of its death spiral, and thankfully he failed.
May 8th, 2017 at 4:09 pm
BB, you are falling for SFB’s diversion and misdirection. USSR did not collapse from anything Gorbachev did. Nothing. He did not cause the collapse – period. What he did do, and should be given full credit for (maybe even as much as Yeltsin), that he managed the landing of the collapse without undue bloodshed.
May 8th, 2017 at 4:30 pm
JPA; that’s why I characterized things as being in a death spiral. Agreed that Gorbachev does not deserve credit for ending the system, but he does deserve credit for not mobilizing the Red Army in a desperate attempt to preserve it.
I would still guess, though, that he was (as did the Czar about a century before) trying to give the people just enough to preserve the system, and again, thankfully, he failed.