Seccession, symbolism, smears and sex

Hypocrisy, thy name is Trump.  The NYT asked accused sexual predator Harvey Weinstein to release all potential accusers from their non-disclosure agreements. To which Donald Trump Jr. replied:

Phenomenal idea, let's hear about real Hollywood... New York Times wants Weinstein to release accusers from NDAs -

The Trump family has everyone sign NDAs. I'm sure that if Donald Trump released Ivana from her NDA, we'd hear all sorts of juicy stories.

(Yet the mainstream media routinely accuses Hillary of being too secretive. Do the Clintons make everyone around them sign NDAs? Apparently not, judging from the example of Dick Morris)

I agree: Weinstein should toss all NDAs aside and let the truth be heard. Along the same lines, I presume that Donald Trump Jr. has no objection to the release of those Apprentice outtakes in which his father is said to make horribly racist comments. You know why we haven't seen those tapes? NDAs.

According to multiple sources, people who worked on “The Apprentice” were forced to sign a thorough nondisclosure agreement that prevented them from discussing or releasing information about the show. Several former staff members declined to speak to HuffPost, with at least one citing a NDA.

A copy of the agreement that HuffPost saw confirms that there is a $5 million penalty for disclosing such information. A GoFundMe campaign launched Sunday seeks to raise about the same amount of money to reward a whistleblower.

DJT Jr., why won't your father release all relevant parties from those NDAs? Let's see the actual tapes. Let's find out once and for all if the rumors are true.

Speaking of predation: After the release of the Access Hollywood tape, many women accused Donald Trump of obnoxious and even illegal behavior. The accusations against Trump were (arguably) worse than the accusations against Weinstein.

Remember when Donald Trump insisted that he would sue the women making those accusations? Whatever happened to those suits? In which court were they filed?

Should we take Trump's refusal to file any lawsuits as an admission that the women were correct?

An "Anglo-Celtic" elitist. Roy Moore's patron and friend, Michael Anthony Peroutka, is the worst sort of seccessionist.

Peroutka, a 2004 Constitution Party presidential nominee who in 2014 won a seat as a Republican on the county commission in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, spent years on the board of the Alabama-based League of the South, a southern secessionist group which for years has called for a southern nation run by an “Anglo-Celtic” elite. The Southern Poverty Law Center designates the League of the South as a hate group (a designation Peroutka regularly jokes about). That organization, after Peroutka left, was one of the organizers of the Charlottesville protests last summer that ended in bloodshed.

How dare these people criticize the NFL players who chose to "take a knee" during the playing of the national anthem? These Trumpists don't give a damn about patriotism. Given the chance, they will honor other flags -- the stars and the bars, the swastika, the Russian tricolor.

The problem with symbols. Rightwingers seem fascinated by symbols. Example: God help any Democratic politician who fails to adorn his lapel with a sufficiently hefty flag pin.

Many ill-educated people fundamentally misunderstand what symbols are.

A symbol is not the thing-in-itself.

All symbols -- religious, national, hermetic, artistic, scientific, philosophical, whatever -- are intrinsically meaningless. The cross around a Christian's neck is not the cross; the "male" and "female" symbols are simply circles and lines, not actual men and women; the symbol for Saturn is not the actual ringed planet.

Similarly, the flag of a nation is not the nation itself.

A symbol is something that stands for something else. That "something else" is the important thing. The symbol is just an exercise in design. At best, a symbol helps us to organize our thoughts: Think of how difficult math would be without math symbols.  

The film The Deerhunter is about the uneducated person's propensity to mistake a symbol for the thing-in-itself. That's why the wedding scene goes on so long. That's the true reason why DeNiro holds up a bullet and says: "This is this. This ain't somethin' else. This is this." In that scene, DeNiro is starting to understand the difference between symbol and reality, although he doesn't know how to articulate his thoughts. The wedding is a ritual, laden with symbolism; the reality is fucking and reproduction. The hunt is also a kind of ritual; the reality is man's inherent death wish -- the urge to kill and the urge to die. People often rely on symbolism and ritual because the thing-in-itself is primal, brutal, and terrifying.

Think my interpretation of the film is off the mark? Watch the movie again.

Facebook. Remember when Trump apologists were laughing at the proposition that the manipulation of Facebook helped win the election? Now we have this.

"Twitter is how [Trump] talked to the people, Facebook was going to be how he won," Parscale tells Stahl. Parscale says he used the majority of his digital ad budget on Facebook ads and explained how efficient they could be, particularly in reaching the rural vote. "So now Facebook lets you get to…15 people in the Florida Panhandle that I would never buy a TV commercial for," says Parscale. And people anywhere could be targeted with the messages they cared about. "Infrastructure…so I started making ads that showed the bridge crumbling…that's micro targeting…I can find the 1,500 people in one town that care about infrastructure. Now, that might be a voter that normally votes Democrat," he says. Parscale says the campaign would average 50-60,000 different ad versions every day, some days peaking at 100,000 separate iterations – changing design, colors, backgrounds and words – all in an effort to refine ads and engage users.

Parscale received help utilizing Facebook's technology from Facebook employees provided by the company who showed up for work to his office multiple days a week. He says they had to be partisan and he questioned them to make sure. "I wanted people who supported Donald Trump." Parscale calls these Facebook employees "embeds" who could teach him every aspect of the technology. "I want to know everything you would tell Hillary's campaign plus some," he says he told them.

Both campaigns used Facebook's advertising technology extensively to reach voters, but Parscale says the Clinton campaign didn't go as far as using "embeds." "I had heard that they did not accept any of [Facebook's] offers."

"Embeds." That's a term straight out of a dystopian novel.