Trump's CEO councils disbanded

Just yesterday, Trump was talking big about being able replace all of the CEOs who were fleeing his American Manufacturing Council, claiming that he had lots of CEOs that he could call up to replace them. Like so much of what Trump says, however, that was a bald-faced lie, and today he basically admitted as much.

From HuffPost:

The White House’s two advisory councils of top business executives disbanded on Wednesday amid intense public blowback against President Donald Trump’s response to the deadly attack by an accused white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The move came two days after executives began resigning from the dwindling American Manufacturing Council and hours after the billionaire financier who headed the separate Strategic and Policy Forum hosted a call with the 15 members of that panel.

Trump took credit on Twitter for dissolving the councils in order to alleviate pressure on the executives. 

Time will tell if Trump succeeded in "alleviating the pressure" on the likes of Michael Dell; personally, I think that Dell will still burn in hell, having chosen to stand with the neo-Nazi, domestic-terrorism-supporting Trump rather than taking a stand against the resurgence of actual Nazism in the U.S.

Trump and his supporters had a clear and simple choice to make, between the side with the neo-Nazi domestic terrorists on it, and the side with everyone else on it. When it mattered, though, they chose the neo-Nazi domestic terrorists, and nothing they ever do will erase the stain of that choice from their reputations, or from their souls. I'm serious about hoping that a special hell exists, just for them to burn in... and I'm an atheist.

Bringing this back to tech blogging for a second... I urge everyone reading this to boycott Dell Technologies, unless and until the oust Michael Dell as their CEO. Dell stood with the Nazis and the terrorists, and you should refuse to support the company that he leads. Anyone who works at Dell... I'm sorry, but if you're staying on there, then you're standing with Dell and Trump, and I have no sympathy for you at all. This is the moment when you must decide what you stand for, and take a stand, even if it costs you. You cannot opt out of this; to stay silent is to aid the neo-Nazis.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

There is no such thing as an "alt-left" movement.

The terms "alt-right" and "alternative right" first came into widespread use during last year's U.S. Presidential campaign, and most people know very little about where they came from, but it you remember nothing else about these terms, remember that they are not generic; "alt-right" is neither a media invention, nor an academic label. "Alt-right" is not some label that people outside the movement have coined to describe them; it is a term that white supremacists invented themselves, to describe themselves, as a safely euphemistic alternative to being called white supremacists. 

From Wikipedia:

White supremacist^[6] Richard Spencer coined the term in 2010 in reference to a movement centred on white nationalism, and has been accused by some media publications of doing so to excuse overt racism, white supremacism, and neo-Nazism.

Excusing overt racism is exactly what Spencer was doing, by the way. "Alt-right" pure branding, a PR exercise by white supremacists to hide the worst of their ugliness from public view, allowing Republican politicians to pander to them in stump speeches, and at campaign rallies, and in their legislative agenda. It is a convenient fiction, a fig leaf that has no left-leaning or progressive equivalent. There is no moral equivalent to neo-Nazism on the left. There is no practical equivalent to the "alt-right" on the centre/left of the political spectrum.

So when Donald Trump spoke today about how the "alt-left" was (somehow) also to blame for last week-end's lethal violence in C'Ville, he was talking right out of his asshole, and spewing nothing but shit.

From CBC News:

A combative U.S. President Donald Trump insisted Tuesday "there is blame on both sides" for the deadly violence last weekend in Charlottesville, Va., appearing to once again equate the actions of white nationalist groups and those protesting them.

The president's comments effectively wiped away the more conventional statement he delivered at the White House one day earlier when he branded members of the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists who take part in violence as "criminals and thugs."

Trump's advisers had hoped those remarks might quell a crush of criticism from both Republicans and Democrats. But the president's retorts Tuesday suggested he had been a reluctant participant in that cleanup effort. 

Donald Trump is a morally bankrupt, intellectually impoverished, egomaniacal, pathological liar. If nothing he ever did before now served to convince you that he does not deserve to occupy the Oval Office, this should. Last November, when America's racists all supported Trump's presidential campaign at the polls, it could still be said that not everyone who voted for Trump was a racist. That is no longer true. Anyone still supporting Trump today, after this performance, is a racist. Period.

Continuing to support Trump is a racist act. The same applies for his presidency, or his businesses, or his reality TV career, or his family, or anything else that he touches. To stand with Trump is to stand with America's neo-Nazis. There is no morally equivalent opposing movement that you can point to and say, "they're just as bad." We're talking about literal Nazis; nobody else is as bad.

There is no substitute for the right word

In polite discourse, one should generally try to avoid unnecessarily incendiary language. Dropping f-bombs, for example, can be very effective when done sparingly, but loses its impact if you do it all the time, so cluster and carpet f-bombing should be avoided... except where circumstances warrant it. Because sometimes, the only word of sufficient plosiveness, power, and pungency, the right word to express what you think and feel... sometimes that word really is fuck.

And sometimes, even in online fora, it really is OK to call someone a Nazi. Like, for example, when that someone is actually a swaztika-waving, Sig Heil-ing, Hitler-idolizing neo-Nazi. And it's not just me saying that; it's Mike Godwin himself. Yes, that Mike Godwin.

From Gizmodo:

We’ve all been there. Maybe you were discussing Naruto, or Vince the Slap Chop guy, or comparing saxophone brands on a message board. But then an argument broke out and both sides dug their heels in, and someone got called a Nazi. Then someone else mentioned Godwin’s law, and the conversation was over.

In this case, however, the discussion concerns “alt righters” marching in Charlottesville who were, well, flying swastikas, Sieg Heil-ing, and wearing shirts with Hitler quotes. And Godwin himself took to Facebook to let everyone know that if it walks like a Nazi and talks like a Nazi, you better let people know what it really is.

Godwin said in a comment that the post didn’t come from nowhere, and was in response to a Facebook message from a concerned follower. As you may have personally experienced, people often invoke Godwin’s law to derail conversations where the opponent draws a Nazi comparison. We have reached out for comment.

Take it from Godwin himself: when the subject of discussion is a group who clearly idolize the Nazis, you can safely compare them to Nazis. Doing so is not needless, or incendiary; it is merely accurate.