However bleak a picture this article paints, in a sense it is a tiny ray of hope.If the real bottom line for Arabs is personal or tribal power rather than ideology, it may be possible to manipulate them in one way or another if we are just not total fools (as the leaders of the West are to.ta)dBotyom line still is that we non-Muslims may be able to buy some time, but we have to have some intrinsic goal that we are buying the time for.

You’re dead right on that score–he’s delusional and flunked civics. The president and Congress have no say on divorce laws, and federal courts would only hear some kind of Constitutional claim.

This chap is so enamoured of Trump he thinks he will change the divorce laws in his favour. I don’t think it’s going too far to describe that as delusional.

It seems a bit churlish to get all sanctimonious about Mr. Trump’s idiosyncrasies in a day and age when *everything* has been “normalized”, and declared a “right” and an “identity”.

You’ve captured the Democrats’ dilemma: Whether to demonize Trump as uniquely evil, or to demonize him as merely a Republican. Any other Republican would (and does) get 80-to-90 percent of the same flak. After two terms of Obama’s extremist appointments and policies, a sharp contrast was inevitable.

There are some whose reaction to Trump is hysterical. Otoh, I also think it’s dangerous to normalize someone like him.

He was elected legally, though I do think Comey’s announcement just before the election about “new evidence” which actually didn’t exist kept Democrats at home on election day.

I’ve always said that the problem with getting rid of Trump is that USians would have the extreme conservatism of Pence to deal with. It’s always been true though that Pence is better internationally as he’s more stable and you can mostly trust his word (even if you REALLY don’t like those words).

However, the extremists are in control even without Pence in charge so getting rid of Trump wouldn’t mean a lurch to the right. That’s already in train. DeVos, Pruitt, Carson, Mnuchin, Mulvaney etc. It’s not looking good.

There’s a UN conference about women’s rights going on at the moment and Trump has appointed the Heritage Foundation and C-Fam to be part of the US delegation. I don’t like Heritage’s social policy and don’t agree with some other things, but at least they’re a valid organisation. But C-Fam! Talk about extremists. US women should be horrified to be represented by them. It’s another example that Trump is no better than Pence when it comes to social policy.

Swallows and summers, these mayors. If even half of the Dutch Muslims would integrate nicely, we still have a 2.5-3% of the population that despises and hates the society they are living in. That is not negligible. I wonder why they would integrate after a generation now, when so few have done after 2 to 3 generations.
Nevertheless, how do the Dutch say? Ek help jou hoop!

Getting 100% of the vote certainly makes for a “calm and sensible” election! (Though it seems to miss the point of having an election in the first place.) German engineering is better applied to cars than democracy.

While we in the USA do need to find a better system for selecting a president (a point that gets lost in all the anti-Trump hate), going back to the old days when party establishments annointed nominees with no popular input is untenable in a digital, post-institutional age. We never cared much for parties anyway. As 2016 showed for those who needed a lesson, parties are on the way out, and the genie’s not going back in the bottle.

Which brings us back to the theme of the original post. If hysterical hatred of Trump serves to tighten the establishment’s grip on power, that will be a shame.

Sorry it took me so long to do this. Here is a link the latest annual Index of Ignorance study. NZ wasn’t included in the latest one. The US came 5th (1st is the most ignorant) though there are probably many countries that weren’t studied that are more ignorant because their reality is warped by lack of access to information.

https://www.slideshare.net/IpsosMORI/the-perils-of-perception-in-2016-ipsos-mori?ref=https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3817/Perceptions-are-not-reality-what-the-world-gets-wrong.aspx

Yes. I understand the reasons and history behind the way they choose a candidate in the US, but to me it seems an expensive waste of time and money. Imo the focus should be on the actual presidential election. I think the current process means good candidates on both sides are put off running and a candidate’s ability to raise money is too high on the list of priorities. I think the raising money part should be up to the party. Because she’s so good at raising money is why Nancy Pelosi is still leader of the House. She certainly isn’t the best voice of the party anymore.