22 août 2015

Des candidats à des années-lumière

Puisque les États-Unis sont nos voisins immédiats, la brigade des candidats démocrates et républicains briguant la présidence en 2016 attire notre attention.

J’ai retenu quelques propos significatifs au sujet de deux candidats diamétralement opposés, Bernie Sanders et Donald Trump, puisque le restant de la cohorte c’est du déjà vu... (1). J’ai aussi écouté l’interview d’Ezra Klein avec Sanders, tel que suggéré par David Seaton qui écrit : «...je me suis mis à penser que je n’avais jamais entendu de toute ma vie un politicien s’exprimer de manière aussi lucide, sensée.» (Lien ci-après).

Nos politiciens pourraient s’inspirer à profit de cet homme intelligent et réaliste – nous avons désespérément besoin de substance... Je me permets de rêver mais pas de m’illusionner... Les Américains, tout comme les Canadiens, ont une peur atavique du socialisme qu’ils confondent encore avec communisme. Le socialisme est un système démocratique plus équilibré et respectueux de l’ensemble de la société, tandis que le capitalisme et le communisme sont des systèmes autarciques où une minorité d’individus domine la majorité. Simpliste, mais c’est ça.

23.08.2015 -- Gros effet beurk : Sanders approuve la possession d'armes à feu individuelles. Ce qui, dans mon échelle d'appréciation, le fait passablement dégringoler. Dommage. Comment peut-on rêver de paix sociale quand tout le monde est armé jusqu'aux dents?!

Les passages en bold sont de mon initiative. Si vous avez besoin de traduction, essayez : http://www.freetranslation.com/  

BERNIE SANDERS

Sweet 2016 - Sanders + Warren? We can dream!
David Seaton, American journalist who lives in Europe 

http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.ca/2015/08/sweet-2016-sanders-warren-we-can-dream.html

I wonder if America deserves such a good POTUS as Bernie Sanders would make. Watching his thorough, at length, interview with Ezra Klein, I found myself thinking that I had never heard such a lucid, sensible politician speaking in my entire life.

Truth to tell, I can't remember ever finding myself in such total agreement with an American (or any other nationality) politician before... and I go back quite a bit by now. I kept thinking as I listened to him talk, "Bernie, where have you been all my life?"

Please take the trouble to watch this video with complete attention and mentally compare it with the steady, endless, diet of bullshit that you are normally being fed.
(...)

Bernie Sanders: The Vox conversation (Posted July 28 2015)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5vOKKMipSA#t=82

Vox: In a wide-ranging discussion, Bernie Sanders discusses his views on socialism, single payer, open borders, Zionism, and more with Vox Editor-in-chief Ezra Klein. Table of contents:
0:00 – Socialism
3:20 – Universal health care
5:50 – Global poverty & open borders
9:29 – Unions
11:31 – Grassroots organizing
16:04 – Race
17:56 – Oligarchy and campaign finance
21:14 – Foreign policy
23:10 – Iran
25:12 – Rwanda
26:04 – Zionism & Israel
27:24 – Climate change
31:33 – China
34:04 – Greece
35:24 – Universal basic income


On the Issues
https://berniesanders.com/issues/

The American people must make a fundamental decision. Do we continue the 40-year decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or do we fight for a progressive economic agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all? Are we prepared to take on the enormous economic and political power of the billionaire class, or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy? These are the most important questions of our time, and how we answer them will determine the future of our country.

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Sanders Versus Trump Would Be Fun
Chris Weigant, political writer and blogger
Huffington Post US

[Excerpts] 

Bernie Sanders is closer to the idea of a party purist, since on pretty much every single issue, he's been out there fighting for years for things that other Democrats have just recently gotten on board with (such as gay rights or reining in Wall Street, to give just two examples). While Trump is mostly all about style, Sanders is mostly all about substance. 
   If there was no safe choice (sorry, Jeb; sorry, Hillary) for the voters, then they'd have to weigh the populism of the right (which is now almost entirely nativist and xenophobic, thanks to Trump) with the populism of the left (which Bernie Sanders would define as "Democratic socialism," of course). 
   Hey, welcome to the world of the true believers, where every four years the choice is to hold your nose and vote for someone who you know is going to disappoint you -- or watch the other team win. Especially with Trump as a major party nominee, a whole lot of people would just throw up their hands and say "this is ridiculous, the choice is between a socialist and a carnival barker." But I also wonder if the opposite might happen. If "the other guy" is seen as so apocalyptically catastrophic that America would be downright unlivable if he won, then a lot of centrists might vote out of sheer terror of the other guy winning. This could actually drive voter turnout to new highs. A vote cast in fear counts exactly the same as a vote cast with rampant enthusiasm, after all. And both Trump and Sanders would certainly give rise to an enormous amount of fear from their opponents.
   Again, this is just a lazy thought exercise for an August afternoon. I make absolutely no claim that this is likely to happen. But it has now entered the realm of possibility, and it certainly is fun to think about. For once, the fervent base of both parties might get to pick their favorite candidate. For once, the RINOs and DINOs and the party bigwigs would be stymied. If it happened on an equal basis ("Sanders versus Bush" or "Trump versus Clinton" would be an entirely different situation), then we might get the most entertaining and interesting presidential race in a long, long time.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-weigant/sanders-versus-trump-woul_b_8012570.html  

Le bruit ne prouve rien. Souvent lorsqu’une poule vient juste de pondre un œuf elle caquète comme si elle avait pondu un astéroïde. ~ Mark Twain

Je ne serais pas étonnée d’apprendre que Trump ait été payé par le parti républicain pour créer une diversion – ce qui permet de rabaisser au niveau de la dérision les graves problèmes socioéconomiques et géopolitiques auxquels les Américains font face. May God bless them all... 
   Le milliardaire propose de déporter les 11 millions d’illégaux (par avion, par bus ou par trains menant directement vers des crématoires? s’interrogent certains journalistes), et de construire un mur à la frontière du Mexique, semblable à celui érigé par Israël en Cisjordanie. 


   Qu’est-ce qui nous fait croire que nous sommes supérieurs? Notre fortune, nos châteaux-forts, les tours de béton de nos mégapoles? Notre capacité de forer le monde entier, d’éliminer tout ce qui barre notre route, sur terre, sur mer et dans les airs? J’ai l’impression que notre indécrottable complexe de supériorité ne disparaîtra qu’avec notre propre extinction. 
    Enfin, pas besoin d’être féministe pour être répugnée par les propos de Trump... quelle femme sensée voterait pour pareil goujat misogyne?!

DONALD TRUMP

On publicity
“Publicity is important because it creates interest in my hotels, residential buildings, and other projects. But sometimes it gets out of hand, and my every move is scrutinized by the press to the point of absurdity... The Trump Organization is in some ways like the Disney Company: Image means a great deal to me. If people don’t associate my name with quality and success, I’ve got serious problems.” (Surviving at the Top, Donald Trump with Charles Leerhsen, 1990)

Bad press doesn't matter as long as you have a sexy girlfriend:
“You know, it really doesn’t matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” (TrumpNation)

En tout cas, on peut dire que Trump ne manque pas de toupet (facile celle-là, je sais). Mais le plus ironique est que le monsieur a la mèche courte!

His “tremendous fear of baldness”:
“For Donald, image and reality were always in conflict. The Windsor knot in his tie was always pulled tight to his throat. At the same time, he let his sand-colored hair dip down to his eyes and curl over his ears and collar, and he plastered it on the sides with a greasy gel that he believed fostered hair growth. He had a tremendous fear of baldness. He swept his hair across the front of his head like a man trying to hide a thinning patch. He once observed to Mark that he considered baldness a sign of weakness. He gave a tube of the gel he used to Mark, warning him, 'The worst thing a man can do is go bald. Never let yourself go bald,’ as if nature could be circumvented through sheer force of will.” (O'Donnell, writing in Trumped!)

On beauty pageants
"Nobody cares about the talent. There’s only one talent you care about, and that’s the look talent. You don’t give a shit if a girl can play a violin like the greatest violinist in the world. You want to know what does she look like.” (TrumpNation)

Women are essentially aesthetically-pleasing objects
A woman MUST be hot in order to be a journalist:
"I mean, we could say politically correct that look doesn't matter, but the look obviously matters," Trump said to a female reporter in a clip featured on "Last Week Tonight." "Like you wouldn't have your job if you weren't beautiful."

"I think that putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing. There was a great softness to Ivana, and she still has that softness, but during this period of time, she became an executive, not a wife... You know, I don’t want to sound too much like a chauvinist, but when I come home and dinner’s not ready, I’ll go through the roof, okay?" (TrumpNation)

Sexual assault in the military is totally expected
Because what else could possibly happen when you put men and women together:
“26,000 unreported sexual assaults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?” (Trump’s Twitter page)

[En particulier pour les militaires de la même trempe que Trump...]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/donald-trump/

Ce personnage extrêmement stéréotypé promeut haine, violence, suprématie, ségrégationnisme, misogynie, etc.

Alors, en guise de conclusion : 

The Hidden Brain: How Ocean Currents Explain Our Unconscious Social Biases
By Maria Popova

“Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers; those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.”

Biases often work in surreptitious ways – they sneak in through the backdoor of our conscience, our good-personhood, and our highest rational convictions, and lodge themselves between us and the world, between our imperfect humanity and our aspirational selves, between who we believe we are and how we behave. Those stealthy inner workings of bias are precisely what NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam explores in The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives (public library) – a sweeping, eye-opening, uncomfortable yet necessary account of how our imperceptible prejudices sneak past our conscious selves and produce “subtle cognitive errors that lay beneath the rim of awareness,” making our actions stand at odds with our intentions and resulting in everything from financial errors based on misjudging risk to voter manipulation to protracted conflicts between people, nations, and groups.

In the introduction, Vedantam contextualizes why this phenomenon isn’t new but bears greater urgency than ever: 
   “Unconscious biases have always dogged us, but multiple factors made them especially dangerous today. Globalization and technology, and the intersecting faultlines of religious extremism, economic upheaval, demographic change, and mass migration have amplified the effects of hidden biases. Our mental errors once affected only ourselves and those in our vicinity. Today, they affect people in distant lands and generations yet unborn. The flapping butterfly that caused a hurricane halfway around the world was a theoretical construct; today, subtle biases in faraway minds produce real storms in our lives.”

Underpinning his exploration isn’t a pointed finger but a compassionate understanding that our flaws make us not bad but human – and give us the opportunity to be better humans. Vedantam puts it beautifully:
   “Good people are not those who lack flaws, the brave are not those who feel no fear, and the generous are not those who never feel selfish. Extraordinary people are not extraordinary because they are invulnerable to unconscious biases. They are extraordinary because they choose to do something about it.”

One of the most pernicious and prevalent unconscious biases Vedantam explores has to do with gender. Some may roll their eyes and consider the plight for gender equality dated or irrelevant or solved — but, of course, one quick glance at our alive-and-well cultural gender bias renders such eye-rolling the worst kind of apathy.

The Hidden Brain is an altogether spectacular read, the kind that gives the best possible hope for changing our minds in the most necessary direction there is — toward more fairness, greater self-awareness, and a vital integration of our intentions and our actions.
[...]  

Article intégral :
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/09/the-hidden-brain-shankar-vedantam/ 

Page Facebook de Shankar Vedantam
https://www.facebook.com/HiddenBrain

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(1) Plus ça change plus c’est pareil!
Artiste inconnu; qu’on aime ou non le couple, voilà un coup de génie d'humour graphique. 

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