pinkfloydpsw's Blog

This guy may be trying to get all us inconsequential people killed. I personally fear our lives, anyone’s lives, everyone’s lives. We are clearly a sacrifice he is willing and happy to make, but who gave him this right to affect me and the world? Some of the American people elected him, not the rest of us. There may come a point when a decision is needed and can’t be avoided, we may be close to that point now. If that decision is not made the consequences could be dire.

I re-watched the HBO series Band Of Brothers recently. There’s an episode where the young recruits realise their company is led by a man who lacks courage, “he’s nervous in the service” one of them remarks. His weaknesses are apparent, his bullying and willingness to abuse his granted power are just as obvious, and that makes him a liability. This is what happens amongst what we might label “real” men, that they know and they recognise who the authentic lion is. They respond accordingly with hesitancy, they know who the fake lion is and they are dismissive of the bluster and posturing. Trump talks it, but people don’t use the term TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) for no reason.

Power, however, often skews a relation. An office of state we would hope would be occupied by a person of ability, a man/woman who would command respect seriousness and dignity, even if they did not have the vested power of that office, is replaced with a weak lion by a weak lion. The reason is likely the weak lion does not want to be surrounded by the strength that might expose their weakness. Plato proposed this problem in his political writings, that power often decides what power follows it, leading to political systems that are creeping into failure, Machiavelli bolstered it in his.

Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela, Karl Marx, and many others have embodied real power, persuasive power, by creating personal followings and powerful movements based on ideas and without beginning with advantages, being enabled by existing power, or misrepresenting the truth as populist charlatans always do. They just started being courageous, spoke the truth as they saw it, and as a result galvanised some people.

“Some folks are born, silver spoon in hand” to quote a more modern critique – from a CCR protest song.

Realising their officer’s limitations, Sobel’s troops (Band Of Brothers) imagine he may present a real danger to their lives if they are led into battle by him, and so they begin to strongly speculate on his and their future, even imagining that they would be lucky if he became the victim of an accident, hoping he might be, thinking that one of them might be the cause of some unfortunate incident, and discussing it so. “Fragging” this was called in Vietnam, the officer did not return from the patrol and everyone’s story was suspiciously similar.. a necessary measure at times I suppose.

If you imagine a situation where you would maybe start to think it’s him or me, one so serious that you then felt compelled to intervene to prevent your own potential demise, because of course nobody wishes to die in folly… What lengths would you then go to to protect your life and the lives of your comrades? And, would thinking you might do something drastic, to mitigate something drastic, be so unreasonable? We can all sit back in our armchairs, or lean over our keyboards, clear in the knowledge of what the right thing to do is in all scenarios hypothetical (the Kantian thing), but if it was real we might think differently. This is why it’s not as easy as it seems to some leftist voices to conduct an inquiry thoroughly and correctly.

For the Mill learners out there we might say that the outcome dictates the moral necessity of the act, and that attitude might be of some use here I’ll grant you. Embodied problems require understanding after-the-fact, so we can know what a person faced when the decisions they made were made. Easy to say never to shoot the surrendering combatant, but what if he just killed your buddies? Easy to say not to bomb the city, but what if you know for a near certainty this one act will end the conflict and save many more lives in time than it maybe takes now?

I’ve said before, there’s a big difference between a manager and a leader. One issues orders, the other inspires followership. The implications of power structures depend on the situation. For matters of a personal nature, like a club or team, these things grate but they are likely not so consequential, sometimes it’s better in the long run to bite the tongue and live with bad decisions that are out of your control, even if they affect you. For the world of work the effect may be more important and words might have to be stated, though battles must be picked because we all must put food on the table and hay in the barn. For matters more grave, of life and death, actions might be necessary and we may not be able to stop ourselves because the prospect of living forever with the cowardice of now may be overwhelming.

A man does not know what metal is in him until the time comes, we each harbour the idea that we could be an Arnie character, but we won’t know unless a point where we are tested happens along. Bravery is not an attitude it is in the person, and cowardice (self preservation) is not a trajectory to be shameful in regard of, but the sort of cowardice where power is uncoupled from personal responsibility or integrity is weakness. California Governor Gavin Newsom accuses Trump of being “weakness masquerading as strength” and I know what he means. He’s highlighting the guy that is strong because he has the strength of the mechanisms of power, not that he is strong because he has strength within him. In the absence of that bolstering force the man would be a weakling and we can all see it because we have seen it before, in the high school playground when the guy that confronts you has some older guys with him. The world can clearly see that trump is a weak willed, ego driven, intellectually lacking, spineless, bigoted, pretend leader who just happens to be good at one thing, harnessing and exploiting the feeble minded.

Folks are often emboldened by their support group. A moral objective does not require your adoption, right and wrong are attempted to be expressed in laws, and laws are agreed by men it is true, but some moral edicts are apparent without power, ideas work the same way. If ideas weren’t then all truth would be relative to power, but we build societies to be egalitarian so they do not fall to revolution immediately because we know only a compact between the masses that have little, and the few that have much, one which is agreeable, can sustain. I think Trump is a relativist, but even this idiot must know that relativism is a dead theory, people make social relevance but not objective truth. Gravity cannot be undone by force of social truth, neither can the attraction of magnetic objects nor the spherical nature of the earth. The horizon does not get any closer the harder you look, and no king can command the tide.

Many Ukrainians would have thought less of themselves, not knowing they could ever be what they are now, running about like John J Rambo fighting the Russian aggressors. Courage comes from inside, you may have it or you may not, and you may never need to find out. It is a society’s great hope in building itself that it would never need the brutality of courage again, it strives for Utopia unless it is a society of sickos. If your courage only shows up when you have power at your back then it is not courage at all, it is the expression of your personal frailty in not having the courage of your convictions in the absence of power. I will grant that strength can of course be shown in the pursuit of folly, I personally think that anyone that goes in with lions or handles snakes because they think their piety will inspire their chosen deity to save them is a fool, but that doesn’t mean I doubt their bravery or conviction.

In early 2026 one man has already tried to make people who are not enemies, folks who believe in the same western menu with slightly differing flavours, into combatants that would face each other on the field of battle and for no other reasons than to enrich his family, distract from the trouble he himself created concerning the US economy and international trade, and take the public eye away from the insurmountable Epstein evidence we can now confidently speculate there’s a big him stink all over (given his efforts to keep the evidence suppressed). Like a magician he will create an explosion and a flash of light on one side of the stage so you aren’t looking at the other side. People need to keep focussed on the the things that matter, the real corruption rather that the accusations that come the other way. Simple projection is what is happening, whatever they, Don’s goons, are accusing someone of you can guarantee it is they that are up to it.

This wannabe king has already invaded another country and removed its leader. Granted he was not a legitimate leader, and granted he was a tyrant, but not granted is that those considerations give the US president the right to decide to depose him without international or even national agreement, which he didn’t feel he required. The motivation behind this is, I am not defaming since that is what has been stated clearly, capturing resources. The tangerine nitwit has no intention of imposing or fostering democracy, no intention of helping the Venezuelan people, he has every intention of taking their oil, and it has transpired he was already in negotiations with US oil companies before action was taken to secure it. He’s also going to control the sale and the storage of the cash, using it as leverage to make personal wealth by inviting courtship from those that wish to profit. The oil companies will not lobby government for the opportunity to extract and refine the oil, they will sweet talk Donny. Bear in mind also that Trump intends to subsidise the oil extraction with Tax dollars from the US people. So in essence he will charge the public to get the resource that they will then buy again without any subsidy from a firm that pays him to get the deal. How is this not the corrupt use of the machinery of state to serve personal interest?

That’s what all this is about, Trump wealth. It is definitely not about is freedom, peace, capitalism, morals, history etc. We know Trump well by now, we know he does not seem to value anything other than power and ego and personal wealth, we could speculate that if he did then he would act differently than he has been. He seems to act for self and not other, he doesn’t appear to respect anyone, or care about anyone outside his friends and family, he seems willing to impoverish anyone to gain for himself. A person is not their propaganda, they are their actions, his actions indicate who he is clearly, and it is stunning to the observer, me, that a lot of people cannot see it.

I would love to ask a MAGA buffoon what it is that has been done for them or their community, and I’d likely get back some nonsense about something they were oblivious to in the first place until the fire of it was lit under their feet. People who have no power have the luxury of saying what they would do if they had any chance to, people who do have power get the opportunity to prove to us who they actually are. Trump is the bullshitter that doesn’t believe his own lies but thinks you just might, he is the child that wants the gifts at a birthday party that’s not his just to get the attention he needs. He doesn’t want what he has or gains, he just wants you to know that he has it and you don’t. For him that elevates his ego.

Let’s take a few examples as proof of my conjecture that this is an idiot we are witnessing (bringing the receipts as MTN calls it) …. He suggested that during the American Civil War one side attacked the other side’s airports – that conflict predates the invention of the aircraft… He suggested the US had been allies of Israel for thousands of years – Israel has existed for less than a century, the US just 250 years… he suggested that Islam and Judaism had been fighting for 3000 years – Islam is 14 centuries old… I could go on.

The Washington Post clocked Trump at 2000 lies for his first 11 months in office, which is an average of just over 5 lies a day, an impressive bullshit level I think we’d all agree. Even one of the first claims he made at the podium after getting sworn in was a lie, he claimed it wasn’t raining, the crowd can be seen wearing raincoats, people who were there remember it raining, the forecast was for rain. When a person lies so much it becomes hard to believe anything they say, at this point if Trump said the sky was blue most people would have to look up. I can’t help but think that this guy cannot be this stupid, that the stupidity on show must be part of a strategy, that he needs us to not think him serious, to be on the back foot or arguing over the ridiculous while the serious is lumped in without notice.

It is because of the so often witnessed expressions of personal will by single individuals in history, who held a power they did not merit and used it unwisely, that constitution builders installed checks and balances into western nations structures of governance. What this mendacious oddly-coloured fellow has done is to expose the weaknesses of the US constitution, and highlight what the next administration will need to fix. Humans maybe cannot hold power alone, we learn from the past they will inevitably fall to corruption even if they begin with noble intentions; we know that power corrupts because we have seen power corrupt. There are very few benevolent unchecked powerful actors in the history books, most were tyrants. “No kings” is the cry from the people of the US, and it’s hard not to support those that are protesting because the effect the US has on all peoples of all nations.

Trump threatens tariffs from the largest most influential economy, these threats of potential financial relationship changes have an affect on confidence in global markets. Confidence is the primary factor in investment, so little will progresses because few investment actors are confident there will be enough stability to return profits in an ever changing business landscape. There are a multitude of reasons why the stock market might boom even if the country is not financially doing well at the level of people who have bills to pay, one of these is that there is movement to sell or accumulate US assets or currency before things change further. So the stock market is not a ubiquitous indicator of a nations financial health. Economists call this phenomenon a melt-up.

Inflation is a lagged measurement, it will show up the year after it has been generated, the FED guess on what interest rate to set so as to control future inflation by affecting the value of borrowing now, an inexact method, one that requires intellect and experience. Trump is treating the people who make these decisions as if he knows better than them in such matters – “nobody knows more than me about X” is his usual cry, where the X can be anything. Apparently, the usual tactic of this man is to not read anything, not study anything, take a few minutes to think about something, decide he is a smart person (which he is not), shun anyone who would know better, treat them as the problem, then try to act on his misaligned confidence while spinning the whole thing to the delight of the dumb American voter, and he gets away with it because there will always be someone that is willing to go on TV and support whatever is his latest lie.

The Mooch hit on where Trump is actually brilliant, in that he sees what people fear, but this is not a new tactic. Populists don’t need to be expert political actors, they just need to know what you fear the most, and make you fear it a bit more. Trump pointed out that people were financially suffering under Biden because they were. He didn’t dissect why, nor did he offer any solutions, he just pointed upset people at the thing they were upset about and the rest did what it does. The herd is stupider than the person, a movement arises and it supports the angry sounding man with the vague promise that he will definitively do better, the populist. History tells us this is not likely to be a good decision.

We have one of these in the UK, Nigel Farage is a man, to my mind, with no real solutions to our obvious problems, yet he can gain a crowd of unhappy people and may even gain a big office for nothing more than assigning blame where it likely rightly should be. The problem is he gets the symptoms right but the disease wrong. Inequality, economic disparity, is the cause of the state to crumble, but the cause of the inequality felt by the citizen is often deliberately disputed. One side, Farage’s, points at people who are different to us white European folks and says it’s them that ruin the UK ideal, it is not the upper classes whom he would say we need desperately to create wealth and opportunity. For Farage we just need to take the restraints off the money people (his people) and let their rising tide lift our boats also. But if this was going to work it would have worked by now, after all we have been capitalists for a long long time.

The other side is maybe Polanski who says that the inability to satisfy the greed of the already wealthy causes inequality to increase, and that restraining the top will lift the bottom. This is a compelling argument since it has a working example, Denmark. Farage and Trump do not have a working example of their political ideology, but we can find many examples that don’t. At least they don’t work for the many that is, they do always work for the few. The important thing to remember when listening to the populist, is to question who benefits, cui bono in Latin. The populist will promise the earth if you let them take charge of all things, then when it’s too late, and they have all the power, they will disappoint. This is exactly what the US is feeling right now. Their cult leader has captured and corrupted every facet of government, then used it to consolidate power, control opportunity, capture wealth personally, and shut down detraction. He has his judiciary violating the US constitution (1st, 2nd, and 4th amendments) for citizens, and he has used his executive power to bypass the branches of government that are there specifically to restrain his position. He sold a vision to the US people that didn’t transpire, and now it may be too late for them to do anything about it.

The republican party needs to think, do they have a boss or a leader, are they enabling a wannabe tyrant? Their guy has never really gotten out of his childhood in a psychological sense. He’s jealous, bitter, capricious, spoiled, he feels put-upon like a middle or unfavoured child might. He’s a man-baby that has bluster until confronted by men of real courage, he surrounds himself with people of low morals so he does not feel so despicable, he shuns intellectuals and intellectualism so he can feel smart, he makes his closest company from the weakest of the persons available, those that do not have conviction, his executive branch is a who’s who of brigands, charlatans, and nitwits. He is a dodger of military duty, yet he will often talk of “fight” and “courage” as though he might have ever shown any. He’s an example of brave in rhetoric weak in person.

This is a guy who prosecutes the individually strong with his corrupted department of vindictiveness (justice), attacks foreign nations with his department for theft (defence) led by bad social commentator who feels he can lecture a room of battle hardened warriors on what conflict is. Hegseth also said “no quarter” in describing potential US military actions against Iran, which is the indication of an intent to enable war crimes. He uses his executive power to override the judiciary in pardoning horrific criminals. He projects his own failures on others, often blaming what is clearly the result of his decisions on the previous administration, yet simultaneously takes credit for the result of that same previous administration’s actions that bore delayed fruit.

The hope for the rest of the world, and a majority of the US populous, is that there is a reckoning coming, starting in 2026 and ramping up in 2028 when there will likely be a new Democrat POTUS. That one day soon these people, these awful humans, will get the payback they deserve in custodial sentences or some form of personal ruin. I personally hope that Kristi Noam is at the very front of the queue. I’m not a man of violence, nor do I support it, but I’d have no sympathy if she was sentenced to spend the rest of her days being periodically hung upside down and beaten about the torso with a bat. How did such a vile human get to such a position of power? Willingness.. .Trump does not vet for ability, he vets for loyalty.

I don’t like that about myself, that I could will harm on any person, but for some people there can be no redemption for what they have done and then been unrepentant toward. We all feel like there must be some crimes that cannot be forgiven, the crime of having no humanity at all, of being a psychopath in the face of human suffering and being so happy to also be the origin of it, profiting in money or prominence, is exploitation of weakness, bullying full stop. Noam is everything that is wrong with the current administration embodied in just one person, she appears strong because she has a bunch of thugs at her back, she spins the narrative into lies we cannot argue with because we have no platform, she cosplays the role of the thugs she could not be.

She is an example of the Trump government, folks that will manage thuggery but are not capable of courage themselves, coming to believe their own act as Sylvester Stallone once foolishly believed that he could offer his insights on an actual boxing match. That was until a real boxer pointed out to him that he is an actor. Like when Steven Segal started to believe he was an actual government operative working clandestine missions at the same time as making the same low-grade action movie over and over again with differing titles where he was a government operative working clandestine missions. (note: since I wrote this Noam has been given the boot, that’s not punishment enough).

Trump either compromised decent people, or he picked people who were already compromised. They have to know that his pre-granted immunity will not protect them, that what they do will be reckoned, if they think he can or will protect them they need to look at his previous cohort, people that were close are now enemies. Their political futures are likely ruined because of their cowardice concerning standing up to him. Where are their morals, I know they can’t all be brigands, can they?

I am no fan of the Tory Party here in the UK, our republicans maybe, but I do not believe that they are all corrupt (though some of them clearly are), I just think they are dead wrong. Is the US republican party just a bunch of morally bankrupt power seekers, or are they scared of Trump, or is it something else that makes them silent? At some point you hope one of them thinks “I can’t do this”, that was the fork in the road I mentioned at the beginning. MLK said “in the end we will not remember the noise of our enemies but the silence of our friends”. I think we will remember our own silence and how that was complicity.

What we must realise is that we don’t need to fear a third world war of guns and bombs and death because we are already in one that is built of technology, oligarchy, and the pending erosion of the world order by the one man who when told he was once again the leader of the free world set out very clearly to be the leader of the unfree world. What I mean by that is that everything that has been done by the man up until now has been a challenge to all progress that had been established in the 20th century in particular. The rights of citizens of his own nation have been removed as if the US constitution does not matter, the rights of other countries under existing international agreements are no obstacle to his will to control all things, and neither his own government nor his people can stop him, that is already clear.

I had hoped, naively I suppose, that there were collective forces that could restrain individual power, it is clear now that if Individuals of a certain ilk take control of certain mechanisms of the state, and also control the methods by which we communicate with each other and what we can access as far as information, and they can re-write the narrative of history, then they can achieve what Orwell speculated on in 1984, a society that is governed by a totalitarian force, where only a suspicion of freedom based on an inner unconscious desire to be free that every person feels but finds it hard to understand, stands in the way of complete control. This will for emancipation is a weak force, you would imagine that it would take a large army to suppress a large body of people, but history tells us this isn’t so. There were many more citizens in Rome than their were guards, and there were many more Iranian ordinary folks than their were soldiers, but who won?

Only through collectivisation, and a shared agreement to bind power into institutions that have representative public oversight and legal punitive measures, does a people enjoy freedom from a tyranny. The wealthy always have the means of control the world, it is in the rationalisation of the legitimacy to do so where the people act to grant and restrain this. Trump’s goal is to remove the necessity of justifying, or proving the actions he himself deems as morally correct, as legitimate, and in doing so prove correct his recent statement that “the only thing that will stop me is my own morality”. We know, again from history, that tyrants often feel that their capricious will is a necessity for the order they seek. Idi Amin liked to punish directly, beat prisoners to death with a hammer, he thought this was an ok thing to do. Would you like to talk morals with that guy?

Granted Trump is no violent person himself, at least not to men. The guy likes to manipulate the weak, young girls and rednecks idiots are more to his tastes. This does not check his ambition, he wants to hobble real strength for the reason that he doesn’t have it. When you want to be the voice that speaks, and you have little to say that makes sense and a low intellect, then prevent everyone that has an intellect greater than yours from being in the room never mind speaking.

The hopeful aspect comes again from history, that no tyranny lasts, that nobody remembers the guy who takes over from the cult leader because the cult always falls apart as soon as he is dead, that revolution is inevitable, and that the wealthy are never uniformly all cunts.

Paul S Wilson