人渣trump上場，身邊人公然散播alternative facts，令george orwell的政治寓言小說1984重登流行榜。The challenge facing the organizers is how to channel the resolve and outrage of an organic protest into action that produces political change at the local and national level. It is a goal that has eluded other popular movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter. And it is a daunting task, given that Democrats were unable to defeat President Trump in 2016 despite an emerging demographic majority.
希拉蕊在電子郵件中表示「放任中國併吞台灣以換取美國對中國債務減免」很「CLEVER」
在台灣，有許多人表示對於美國民主黨總統參選人希拉蕊克林頓女士（Hillary Clinton）飲恨落選感到惋惜，但TPS小編希望在這裡提醒大家：「美國總統不管是誰當選，他或是她的任務就是捍衛美國的國家利益。為了這個利益，美國隨時都願意出賣其他國家，包括台灣。台灣要成為主權獨立的『台灣共和國 Republic of Taiwan』，台灣人要保衛台灣的自由與民主，最終靠著還是自己。」
在 Wikileaks維基解密所公布的希拉蕊私人郵件中，有著這麼一封對於台灣人來說讀起來特別殘酷的信件。再五年前的今天（2011年11月11日），希拉蕊克林頓的顧問Jake Sullivan分享了一篇Paul V. Kane所撰寫的名為《拯救我們的經濟，拋棄台灣吧！To Save Our Economy, Ditch Taiwan》文章，文章中建議歐巴馬政府讓任中國併吞台灣，藉此換取中國政府註銷對美國的1.14兆美元債權，讓美國政府在不增稅的情況下減緩可能到來的國債危機。
然後當時為美國國務卿的希拉蕊克林頓簡短地回覆「I saw it and thought it was so clever. Let’s discuss.（我看到了這篇文章，我覺得這想法很聰明，讓我們來討論吧）」。希拉蕊克林頓即使在檯面上說著要重返亞太，但私底下卻也對於「拋棄台灣以拯救美國國債問題」表示「so clever」，讀到這裡，您應該可以感受到，美國對於台灣問題的態度有多麼現實吧！
台灣社論對於哪一位美國總統候選人選上，「對台灣比較好」，有許多討論。TPS小編建議，我們可以換個角度想想，台灣人要爭取獨立，當前與其寄望外來勢力的幫助，不如先整建好台灣的實力以及紛紛擾擾的內部共識。讓成立「台灣共和國 Republic of Taiwan」成為台灣人的主流意識，讓台灣民族相信自己可以決定台灣的未來，讓台灣成為一個民主自由、注重人權、富足發達的國度，才是我們目前最必須要積極努力的方向！
For your reading pleasure while you endure open governance and try to steal glances at your blackberry:
I saw it and thought it was so clever. Let's discuss.
Also, we only have 15 minutes left in here.
What is hilarious is that some academics in Taiwan and elsewhere stayed up late at night reading the piece literally and trying to build cases to refute its content, and castigating my logic and morals, and cooking-up deep financial analysis of how a deal would impact the U.S. Treasury Bill markets… Take your wife out to dinner! Professor or Joe Blogger, it was time miss spent.
There are two messages US political elites should be hearing. The simplistic neo-liberal market-fundamentalist theories that have shaped so much economic policy during the last four decades are badly misleading, with GDP growth coming at the price of soaring inequality. Trickle-down economics hasn’t and won’t work. Markets don’t exist in a vacuum. The Thatcher-Reagan “revolution,” which rewrote the rules and restructured markets for the benefit of those at the top, succeeded all too well in increasing inequality, but utterly failed in its mission to increase growth.
This leads to the second message: we need to rewrite the rules of the economy once again, this time to ensure that ordinary citizens benefit. Politicians in the US and elsewhere who ignore this lesson will be held accountable. Change entails risk. But the Trump phenomenon – and more than a few similar political developments in Europe – has revealed the far greater risks entailed by failing to heed this message: societies divided, democracies undermined, and economies weakened.
What do the coup attempt in Turkey, Donald Trump’s US presidential candidacy, the Brexit referendum, and the rise of populist parties in France, Germany, and elsewhere have in common? They all reflect deep anxieties among many citizens about the functioning of their democracies and the openness of their societies.
We are accustomed to thinking of our political system as a set of countervailing forces, in which discontent among one segment of the population leads to corrective action, like a social program to ease their problems and defuse their anger. But once the system becomes sufficiently dysfunctional, countervailing forces may give way to mutually reinforcing feedback loops.
This implies that redistribution and compensation of globalization’s losers will not be enough, and that liberal democracy is likely to become an increasingly unstable political compound. As the conflict between liberalism and democracy escalates, we should expect two new regime types to emerge. One is illiberal democracy, in which public policy reflects populist frustration and anger, regardless of the cost to economic health or the rights of minorities. The second is what I have called “undemocratic liberalism,” a system in which rational economic policies and the rule of law are upheld by technocratic elites who routinely overrule their supposed constituents.
Either way, Lévy’s “bling brigades” herald more than an age of bad taste. They remind us that the political epoch in which we could trust that the champions of continuity would ultimately defeat the agents of disruption is over, probably for good.
The age of Erdoğan, Trump, and Putin, with its representatives’ contempt for rules and norms, is generating serious challenges to global peace and prosperity with alarming frequency. Is there a way forward that doesn’t lead backward?
liberal societies are in trouble today because they are vulnerable to being hijacked by groups or individuals who take advantage of the very freedoms upon which liberal societies are based. As Donald Trump has been proving all year (and as Jean-Marie Le Pen, Recep Erdogan, Geert Wilders, and other political entrepreneurs have shown in the past), leaders or movements whose commitment to liberal principles is at best skin-deep can take advantage of the principles of open society and use it to rally a popular following. And there is nothing about a democratic order that ensures such efforts will invariably fail.
BREXIT WAS NOT FUELLED BY A VISION OF THE FUTURE
Crucially, [researchers of the Doncaster project] observed that – in strong contrast to the Scottish ‘Yes’ movement – Brexit was not fuelled by hope for a different future. On the contrary, many Leavers believed that withdrawing from the EU wouldn’t really change things one way or the other, but they still wanted to do it. I’ve long suspected that, on some unconscious level, things could be even stranger than this: the self-harm inflicted by Brexit could potentially be part of its appeal.
This taps into a much broader cultural and political malaise, that also appears to be driving the rise of Donald Trump in the US. Amongst people who have utterly given up on the future, political movements don’t need to promise any desirable and realistic change. If anything, they are more comforting and trustworthy if predicated on the notion that the future is beyond rescue, for that chimes more closely with people’s private experiences. ... it seems clear that – beyond the rhetoric of ‘Great Britain’ and ‘democracy’ – Brexit was never really articulated as a viable policy, and only ever as a destructive urge.
Thatcher and Reagan rode to power by promising a brighter future, which never quite materialised other than for a minority with access to elite education and capital assets. The contemporary populist promise to make Britain or American ‘great again’ is not made in the same way. It is not a pledge or a policy platform; it’s not to be measured in terms of results. When made by the likes of Boris Johnson, it’s not even clear if it’s meant seriously or not. It’s more an offer of a collective real-time halucination, that can be indulged in like a video game.
The Remain campaign continued to rely on forecasts, warnings and predictions, in the hope that eventually people would be dissuaded from ‘risking it’. But to those that have given up on the future already, this is all just more political rhetoric. In any case, the entire practice of modelling the future in terms of ‘risk’ has lost credibility, as evidenced by the now terminal decline of opinion polling as a tool for political control.