- As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!). They must, with Europe and others, watch over...
(1) A sage publicly touting his/her own wisdom is probably a contradiction in terms.
(2) Trumpspeak probably has its roots in WWE-style kayfabe and smack-talk. If you don't get that, then you miss out on a lot of the dynamic between Trump and his fans. (If you're an elitist you might tend to look down on both of these entertainment genres and their fans.) (Incredibly enough, I didn't encounter a dropdown menu option for "trumpspeak" in google search.) (Are Demo rats and leftists all too easily trolled by Trumpspeak?) (Last but not least: is it wise for a POTUS to engage in WWE/kayfabe smack-talk regardless of whether some or all people are "in on the act"? No, I don't think so; I think it indicates a degradation of the political, but a degradation rather commensurate with the intellectual bankruptcy of both our politics generally and of Trump's opposition especially; that is, Trump is more a symptom rather than cause, bringing the intellectual bankruptcy to the fore of everyone's attention in an undiluted, unapologetic fashion. It's not the kind of shit you'd see Marcus Aurelius, an actual historical ruler-sage, engaging in. Speaking of Trump's intellectually-bankrupt left-opposition, shouldn't the public-sector "educators" be all over the example of Marcus Aurelius like flies on shit, on the assumption that they want/need historical examples of non-intellectually-bankrupt politics to point to for inspiration/instruction? If they're not all over that sort of thing - and it appears they're just somehow not interested - then ain't that just fucking ridiculous? These are the people to whom the nation should be entrusting the next generation's education? I mean, it's one thing for unionized public-sector employees to face perverse incentives, but just how fucking hard can it be, exactly, to learn and teach about Marcus Aurelius? Or Plato and Aristotle, for that matter? A philosopher's question: Just how bad does it have to be in this regard, before the People really begin finding this situation to be most unacceptable? 50% worse than it is now? 100%? What's the breaking point; that's all I'd like to know. And how can the "educators" really complain about having a Trump as president when they fail to know and teach about serious counterexamples? It's not just Marcus Aurelius, either; all the key American Founders were seriously philosophical people, a fact which the "educators" seem to bury underneath such facts as the Founders having been slave-owners, say.)
