OT: Cracking Speech by JDV!

Die Fuhrer vill like dat

Vance would make an excellent #48.

I think that common sense is now called "far right".

As is keeping the electricity on.

A candidate nobody had ever heard of, who wanted to turn the whole country over to Putin, suddenly appeared at the last minute and won the election by an incredibly large majority. Doesn't that sound suspicious to you - and worth putting the result on hold while the circumstances were checked?

It certainly worried the other countries in the E.U. and made them realise what could happen in their elections if they weren't careful.

If an unknown pro-Chinese Communist candidate had won a sweeping victory in the American presidential election, would everyone have meekly believed there hadn't been any interference?

Vance droned on about social media censorship for quite a while, the Biden economy was so bad that millions of Americans consider perceived lack of ability to talk s*it on the Internet the greatest problem they have in life.

Sounds symptomatic of being bored and not having enough problems, they'll likely get their wish to have a lot more.

I'm sure it was designed to appeal to right-wing lunatics, and Cursitor Doom's response demonstrates that it worked.

Europe doesn't have the American military-industrial complex spending lots of money on persuading the electorate that it really needs a baroque arsenal.

J.D.Vance and Trump can encourage Europe to spend more on buying American weapons - it's self-interested advertising - but Europe isn't quite that gullible.

American businesses have been spending money on right-wing propaganda for years, and it got them Reagan and Trump. Now they are hoping that the same trick will work in Europe - Europe does seem to educate it population more carefully than America does - universal education was impractical back when the US constitution was written, so education in America is basically paid for by local school districts 12,546 of them. Rich ones spend enough to be able to deliver very good education - though they can't be relied on to spend the money wisely - and the rest scrape by.

The US electorate seems to be unfortunately susceptible to lying fantasists like Donald Trump. The UK had Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, so they aren't immune, but at least they got rid of them fairly quickly.

Ignorant prejudice does get labelled "common sense". Whatever "common sense" might be, neither Trump nor J.D.Vance has much of it.

You left out the rest of that proposition - "keeping the electricity on by burning fossil carbon" is a sentiment that climate change denial propaganda spreads with enthusiasm. Keeping the electricity on by installing lots of wind turbine and solar panels (and the short term storage to cover the time when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing) isn't a message they have any interest in spreading - they don't make money out of either of them.

It was clearly aimed at the home market; he was supposed to be there to talk about security in Europe and never even mentioned Ukraine. All that this speech has done is to turn most European countries against the kind of ignorant, thuggish, self-serving America he represents. Fortunately there are still many Americans who are not like that.

Trump doesn't seem to realise that you can make friends with a bear but he will still eat you when he wants his next meal.

Big changes to the old post-war order coming fast. Should be *very* interesting. I've ordered extra beer and popcorn. :-)

I should have posted the URL for the full speech. It's under 20 minutes long and I'm sure Bill will want to see the whole thing. ;-)

https://x.com/i/status/1890529020892058055

America shooting itself in the foot was a regular feature of the post-war era. Vietnam and the invasion of Irak come to mind. Trump is even more ignorant and insular than the average US president, and he gets his advice from sycophants who echo his ignorant opinions with added extra flattery.

He does seem to be inept enough to wreck the American economy, which would be a big change, if American business was silly enough to let him do any real damage.

This seems unlikely. The main message from his first term was that he was ineffectual. His supporters are working to make him more effective, but if you are silly enough to admire Donald Trump the quality of the support you can provide is limited.

But that assumes that the normal mechanisms that deliver your beer and popcorn won't get messed up by one of Trump's silly ideas.

As a businessman he was responsible for a lot of bankruptcies.

You don't have to bother. The Australian equivalent of the BBC - the Australian Broadcasting Corporation - has a twice a week TV show called "Planet America" which is currently mainly reporting the stupid things Trump and Vance say every week. They do get serious commentators to explain the more bizarre stuff, but they do high-light the more comic idiocies. Sitting through the un-edited originals would clearly be very tedious.

They had a lot of fun with J D Vance's "childless cat ladies" story, and Trump's claims about immigrants eating peoples pets (though they did go to the trouble of finding out that his claim was entirely baseless).

Nice work.

The history of Europe is millenia of warfare. And it's not over.

When I was working in the USSR, we'd go into a restaurant and ask for a beer. They'd often snap "Nyet piva" which meant "we don't have beer tonight." The mind boggles.

Same for things on the menu. Most were actually not available on any given night.

And nobody wanted to drink the Russian beer anyhow. The Polish and Czech stuff was OK, if you could get it.

The history of the world includes a lot of wars. It's a stupid way to work out who controls particular resources, but if you kill off enough of the people who don't want you to control them, you can get control if you don't get killed off in the process.

There are cheaper and less destructive ways of settling differences of opinion, and there have been periods when they've worked. Sadly, it's hard to keep psychopathic idiots out of power. Free elections with proportional representation have done well recently, but there are techniques to mislead the voters - and if you have enough money you can buy experts who will help you get elected. A good education system produces less gullible voters.

Western Europe has had that for a while. The US education system isn't all that good, Eastern Europe is even worse, and Russia is dire.

China has had to cope with a truly terrible writing system. To get access to Western technology they've had to train a lot of people to read an alphabetic (phoneme-based) writing systems, and it may yet save their bacon, but it's a pretty recent change. Computerised text processing may be starting to help them cope with the defects of a syllable based writing system.

JD Vance would make a good Republican candidate for 2028, I think in large part because he's one of the few high-ranking people in the Trump administration who didn't spend most of their lives as a Democrat..

These elections were in Romania, which is a European country on the borders of Russia and is terrified that they will be in Putin's sights after Ukraine. The official line is that there was evidence of 'State-sponsored interference' in the elections, but it is obvious which state is the most likely one.

Vances speech spinning this as some undemocratic cabal blocking a candidate who was freely elected is utter hypocracy in view of what happened when Trump was kicked out the last time.

Yeah, the usual bogie-man (we're supposed to automatically assume). The bald fact is that there is not a single Western democracy you could not claim has been unduly influenced by Russia: not one. You can claim whatever you want and get *any* election voided if you're going to go down that route - and all on the pretext of "defending democracy." It would be laughable were it not so serious.

Czech light beer is among the best in the world, but probably tastes weird to an American. Russia does make some fantastic vodka, though.

Getting Europe's military up to the job would take at least a decade. But there's no money available. Germany - once the economic powerhouse of the continent - is on its knees and France likewise. And even if it could be afforded - which it can't - we now know Putin can call upon China and N. Korea, so if push ever came to shove, continental Europe would be toast.