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Fiona Hill Interview - you wanna read this
#1
A typical Guardian liberal catnip headline drew me in, ''Trump thought I was a secretary': Fiona Hill on the president, Putin and populism'

But that does a disservice to the article. This is an excellent piece. Hill Was born in the UK, went to grad school and moved to the USA and is expert in Russia.

When we talked in May, Hill was back in seclusion but so was the rest of Washington. She was speaking from home, where she had an array of books spread around her feet. She had laid them out to try to piece together an explanation of why the three countries with which she was intimately familiar – the UK, where she was born; Russia, the country she had spent her life studying; and the US, where she has lived since 1989 and risen to the highest level of government – had all failed so spectacularly in handling the health crisis.

She is one of a handful of people to have stood at the nexus of these three disastrous governments, to have been in the room to witness Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Boris Johnson operate.

“It’s a story really about how the US, UK and Russia have all ended up in the same spot weirdly, not just in terms of Covid-19 but also populist politics and many of the same out-of-control inequalities,” Hill said.

In her view populist governments are useless at handling complex problems of governance, almost by definition. If leaders are fit to govern, they generally don’t need populism to get elected.


do yourself a favor and read it - this is a very smart woman with some important points to make.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020...-interview
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#2
Thanks for posting!
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#3
A typical Guardian liberal catnip headline drew me in,

Hah! You think The Guardian liberal, check out The Independent
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#4
Jefferson and Hamilton both feared populism, and that was why Jefferson started the University of Virginia - to make sure we had sufficient number of educated voters.

And why there were 'rules' for voting - land ownership, etc. Ignore the racism issues (much of the North were free states or had few non-whites). We are designed to be a republic, not a democracy.

Nearly all of the core checks against populism have been taken away - starting with the direct election of Senators. The most recent has been the failure of the Electoral College to be the last Bastion of the American Republic. According to the core values of the Founders, George W Bush should not have been elected. Nor should The Orange Emperor.
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#5
sekker wrote:
Ignore the racism issues (much of the North were free states or had few non-whites).

This statement undermines everything else you say.

The myth that any part of America's past, no matter where geographically or historically, can be reasonably considered apart from racism is a racist idea.

America's structure from its inception, meaning the union of all its states, the merging of its economies, and the development of its 'democracy', has been predicated on the racist idea that Black people are inferior to Whites. Trade relationships, military alliances (pre- and post-Civil War), deep financial and banking ties, a common heritage of anti-indigenous genocide, and a shared federal government make all of the United States complicit in its racist policies, past and present.
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#6
There were slave traders, slave owners, and slaves in parts other than the Deep South.
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#7
Faneuil Hall in Boston is named for a slave trader.

When I left there 40 or so years ago, one of the things I was happy to leave behind was the outright racism that permeated the area. Sad to see it hasn't changed all that much.
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#8
Grew up in NY, in a region where most people knew the history of Levittown.

...And revisited that recently when protests hit Merrick.

Racism is everywhere. Our country was built on it.
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#9
Bob Johnson explains racism
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#10
RgrF wrote:
Bob Johnson explains racism

Yeah. “Let’s hear both sides.”

Fair and Balanced

We need All the Facts

All true, and yet all have been used as entry points for legitimizing hate by giving it equal weight.

I’ll say it again: Not all viewpoints have value. This gets people butthurt, but they’ll get over it.
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