Politics

President Donald Trump, after weeks of fiery rhetoric aimed at Kim Jong Un, abruptly reversed course Wednesday morning and praised the North Korean dictator, suggesting that the country is backing down from its nuclear threats against the United States.

“Kim Jong Un of North Korea made a very wise and well reasoned decision,” Trump said on Twitter. “The alternative would have been both catastrophic and unacceptable!”

But Trump’s praise was almost certainly premature. His tweet followed reports that Kim had inspected his country’s missile program and said he would watch the “foolish and stupid conduct of the Yankees” for a little longer before deciding whether to launch missiles at the U.S. territory of Guam. But Kim, in remarks reported by the Associated Press and The Guardian and attributed to the country’s official news agency KCNA, very much left open the possibility of a nuclear attack.

“The United States, which was the first to bring numerous strategic nuclear equipment near us, should first make the right decision and show through actions if they wish to ease tensions on the Korean peninsula and prevent a dangerous military clash,” Kim said. He warned that a nuclear attack was still a possibility if the U.S. continues to take “extremely dangerous, reckless actions.”

Kim Jong Un of North Korea made a very wise and well reasoned decision. The alternative would have been both catastrophic and unacceptable!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 16, 2017

Trump swapped escalating threats with North Korea last week, promising to unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” as North Korea said it was preparing to fire missiles near Guam.

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Source:: Time – Politics

Late-night TV hosts went after President Donald Trump for remarks on Tuesday in which he defended those linked to white supremacist groups and said “both sides” were to blame for the clashes in Charlottesville over the weekend.

“I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either,” Trump said during his press conference in Trump Tower on Tuesday. The remarks, which were praised by white supremacists and condemned by both Democrats and Republicans, became the target of late-night TV.

“The only thing I’m doubting right now is whether you’re still going to be President by Friday,” Stephen Colbert said on Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show.

Colbert also called out Trump’s remarks comparing George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Confederate generals and asking whether their statues might be taken down next.

“Spoken like a guy who’s suspiciously worried that racist presidents don’t get statues anymore,” Colbert said.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Kimmel suggested that a Game of Thrones leader might be preferable.

“I’m not joking when I say I would feel more comfortable if Cersei Lannister was running this country at this point,” Kimmel said. “The President is completely unhinged. The wheels are off the wagon and hurdling towards the moon right now.”

Trump said Tuesday that “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides” in Charlottesville.

“So here’s the thing: If you’re with a group of people and they’re chanting things like ‘Jews will not replace us,’ and you don’t immediately leave that group, you are not a ‘very fine’ person,” Kimmel said.

And Seth Meyers described Trump as “fully out of his mind.”

“President Trump this afternoon gave a press conference that can only be described as clinically insane,” Meyers said. “You know that list of side effects at the end of a pharmaceutical ad? He apparently has all of them.”

“Trump is like a bad waitress in a crappy diner who’s trying to get fired so she can go to a concert,” he added.

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Source:: Time – Politics

One of the most welcome political developments of my lifetime is the growing suspicion with which attempts to cloak even the most detestable utterances under the mantle of “free speech” is regarded.

From the misogynistic obscurantism of #GamerGate (years later I still can’t find anyone who can tell me what the “-gate” was) and the painfully unfunny parody of stand-up comedy performed on college campuses by the expatriate employer of ghostwriters known as Milo Yiannopoulos to the latter-day phrenology of the so-called alt-right and the unabashed Holocaust denial of Stormfront, there are expressions that most of us consider on their face unacceptable and undeserving of a platform. The difference is that now increasingly it looks as if people have concluded that it is our duty to make sure they are denied one. Thank God for SJWs!

This was not always the case. There is a long history in this country of making grandiose blanket defenses of freedom of speech that extend to bigots, frauds, pornographers, genocidal enthusiasts, propagators of terrorism and sedition, and kooks emotionally invested in nonsense and villainy of every conceivable variety. People who make arguments defending, say, the rights of pseudo-historians to argue that the Nazis did not murder millions of European Jews or the ancient liberty of perverts to create simulations of child pornography call themselves “free speech absolutists.” Their position has never been tenable, but it has long enjoyed a mainstream currency in the United States, in classrooms, and in the pages of newspapers and magazines — and even on the bench of the Supreme Court.

This is because freedom of speech in the way that is usually discussed in this country is a cartoonish fantasy. There has never been a community in which certain ideas have not been considered open for discussion or debate. As Stanley Fish argued in his famous essay “There is no such thing as free speech, and it’s a good thing, too,” the liberal concept of freedom of speech is not some kind of immutable principle woven into the fabric of reality; it is an idea and a very new, albeit frequently misunderstood one.

As Fish points out, the ur-text for what we think of as freedom of expression, quoted on a monument familiar to those who visited the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, is John Milton’s 1642 treatise Aeropagitica. There the Puritan poet and pamphleteer …read more

Source:: The Week – Politics