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Julian Connelly's avatar

Brilliant and comprehensive presentation

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Reginald Duquesnoy's avatar

Excellent! With one reservation, "the insane desire to dominate" is the very logic of empire", that's how it works...oderint dum metuant...let them hate as long as they fear...until Hybris takes over, and then from empire to the pyre...As for our current Caligulaean homonculus, a predecessor of Stormy Daniels, another "Grande Horizontale", perceptively quipped...Big ego, little pego...no amount of stroking will help...nihil novi sub sole, or rather, sub partes inferiores, these dark murky nether parts. Finally, Salvador Dali's anagram attributed to André Breton, the pope of surrealism was "Avida Dollars", how fitting for Trumpf, the grand son of a teutonic gambling/brothel owner and a draft dodger on top. Atavisme...it's in the genes!

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Niall McLaren's avatar

Thanks for that, except I'd say Trump has no ego, no sense of self as a foundation to life, that's why he has to put his name on everything and surround himself with gold: "See my name up there? Dominates the skyline. That means I'm really somebody." Except he's not. He's the Monty Python president except he has his stumpy fingers hovering over that big red button that fires 6000 nuclear weapons

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Steve Wolf's avatar

“A striptease conducted in pink limelight.”

That's brilliant, I'd never heard that quote, it captures the solipsistic flavour of Dali perfectly.

Orwell could be a crotchety and puritanical bastard, but I keep stumbling across these evocative and lyrical sayings of his, usually the import of a paragraph condensed into one lapidary sentence.

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Niall McLaren's avatar

I regard him as the finest writer in English language in 20th Century but a lot of his most memorable work was in his journalism, now largely overlooked.

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Carolyn Quadrio's avatar

Thanks, Niall, your suggestion that the world could bankrupt the US sounds marvellous. Is there any talk of moving in that direction? If the world did that, would it not trigger acts of desperation from the US, like massive military strikes, perhaps even nuclear? I hate to think what they could do if they were in their death throes.

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Niall McLaren's avatar

There are still some realists wandering around in DC, they would know that, if pushed to the brink, the US would be utterly dependent on foreign countries to save them going over the edge completely. The problem is convincing the Europeans that their future lies with the Eurasian landmass, i.e. Russia and China, and with Africa and Middle East, that this bloc would eclipse the US in a flash. They just don't seem to be able to take a rational look at their position, still living in the imperialist past. We lesser mortals can only sit and watch. Nice to know we're in the Southern hemisphere, now all we need to do is convince our pollies that South means South, not faux North.

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