Nobody is compelled to click a link
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You can post all the links you want, no-oneās going to censor anything.
However, I reserve the right to think youāre a cunt if you link to Twitter. 
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Iām fine if people want to soil themselves in public, Iām perfectly capable of resisting the urge to click.
Please just donāt hide the link target behind text, as was the case earlier.
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At a distance thatās fine but would you welcome them into your local to shit at the bar whilst they profit from it? Or broadcast them shitting onto your friends screens? (Whilst they profit from it) The itās OK I will only go near soil man responsibly is missing the back link point.
This guy shits a lot
Two or five or ten thousand years from now people will pause over their history books and ask -
āWhy did they just sleepwalk into a second Dark Age?!ā
āWhy did they let eveything simply slip away? Let billions die for nothing? Nearly destroy life itself?ā
āWhy, when they had the wealth and knowledge to set the whole of mankind free did they do the opposite?ā.
That book will be full of pictures of contemporary archaelogical excavations of vast technological ruins - the shattered concrete roots of giant cities scores of miles wide, the decayed husks of great machines that could think, or travel at unimaginable speed, even across the deadly vacuum of space, even unto whole new unexplored Worlds: the bare bones of a vanished age of vaunting ambition, industrialised greed, delusion, lies, egomania and most-of-all, hubrisā¦
Theyāll know that we once pored over similar accounts of the even-more-ancient Roman Empire, where we learned that for all of its extraordinary degree of organisation, technology, science, art and civilisation the masses ultimately stood aside helpless while bad leadership and the feral viciousness of human nature repeatedly destabilised and then destroyed what had taken a millenium-and-a-half to build leaving nothing but ignorance, and superstition, and ruination. Theyāll know we once asked the same questions as they do now -
āWhy did they just let it happen and set mankind back a thousand years?āā¦
And they will know how incredibly stupid, and feckless, and selfish, and irresponsible we once were.
That is, if thereās anyone left to ask.
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They might pause but they wonāt learn any lessons from it. Theyāll just repeat the same mistakes again.
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ā¦ nobody paid much attention 
.
They are paying attention, of course. Unfortunately itās to āmaking sure we come out on topā without realising that just coming out at all might be harder than they think.
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To be fair, this will completely vindicate my limited retirement planning.
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The best, most cogent and elegantly simple explanation into the inexplicably destructive negotiating processes of the president,by Prof. David Honig of Indiana University.
āIām going to get a little wonky and write about Donald Trump and negotiations. For those who donāt know, Iām an adjunct professor at Indiana University - Robert H. McKinney School of Law and I teach negotiations. Okay, here goes.
Trump, as most of us know, is the credited author of āThe Art of the Deal,ā a book that was actually ghost written by a man named Tony Schwartz, who was given access to Trump and wrote based upon his observations. If youāve read The Art of the Deal, or if youāve followed Trump lately, youāll know, even if you didnāt know the label, that he sees all dealmaking as what we call ādistributive bargaining.ā
Distributive bargaining always has a winner and a loser. It happens when there is a fixed quantity of something and two sides are fighting over how it gets distributed. Think of it as a pie and youāre fighting over who gets how many pieces. In Trumpās world, the bargaining was for a building, or for construction work, or subcontractors. He perceives a successful bargain as one in which there is a winner and a loser, so if he pays less than the seller wants, he wins. The more he saves the more he wins.
The other type of bargaining is called integrative bargaining. In integrative bargaining the two sides donāt have a complete conflict of interest, and it is possible to reach mutually beneficial agreements. Think of it, not a single pie to be divided by two hungry people, but as a baker and a caterer negotiating over how many pies will be baked at what prices, and the nature of their ongoing relationship after this one gig is over.
The problem with Trump is that he sees only distributive bargaining in an international world that requires integrative bargaining. He can raise tariffs, but so can other countries. He canāt demand they not respond. There is no defined end to the negotiation and there is no simple winner and loser. There are always more pies to be baked. Further, negotiations arenāt binary. Chinaās choices arenāt (a) buy soybeans from US farmers, or (b) donāt buy soybeans. They can also (c) buy soybeans from Russia, or Argentina, or Brazil, or Canada, etc. That completely strips the distributive bargainer of his power to win or lose, to control the negotiation.
One of the risks of distributive bargaining is bad will. In a one-time distributive bargain, e.g. negotiating with the cabinet maker in your casino about whether youāre going to pay his whole bill or demand a discount, you donāt have to worry about your ongoing credibility or the next deal. If you do that to the cabinet maker, you can bet he wonāt agree to do the cabinets in your next casino, and youāre going to have to find another cabinet maker.
There isnāt another Canada.
So when you approach international negotiation, in a world as complex as ours, with integrated economies and multiple buyers and sellers, you simply must approach them through integrative bargaining. If you attempt distributive bargaining, success is impossible. And we see that already.
Trump has raised tariffs on China. China responded, in addition to raising tariffs on US goods, by dropping all its soybean orders from the US and buying them from Russia. The effect is not only to cause tremendous harm to US farmers, but also to increase Russian revenue, making Russia less susceptible to sanctions and boycotts, increasing its economic and political power in the world, and reducing ours. Trump saw steel and aluminum and thought it would be an easy win, BECAUSE HE SAW ONLY STEEL AND ALUMINUM - HE SEES EVERY NEGOTIATION AS DISTRIBUTIVE. China saw it as integrative, and integrated Russia and its soybean purchase orders into a far more complex negotiation ecosystem.
Trump has the same weakness politically. For every winner there must be a loser. And thatās just not how politics works, not over the long run.
For people who study negotiations, this is incredibly basic stuff, negotiations 101, definitions you learn before you even start talking about styles and tactics. And hereās another huge problem for us.
Trump is utterly convinced that his experience in a closely held real estate company has prepared him to run a nation, and therefore he rejects the advice of people who spent entire careers studying the nuances of international negotiations and diplomacy. But the leaders on the other side of the table have not eschewed expertise, they have embraced it. And that means they look at Trump and, given his very limited tool chest and his blindly distributive understanding of negotiation, they know exactly what he is going to do and exactly how to respond to it.
From a professional negotiation point of view, Trump isnāt even bringing checkers to a chess match. Heās bringing a quarter that he insists of flipping for heads or tails, while everybody else is studying the chess board to decide whether its better to open with Najdorf or GrĆ¼nfeld.ā
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Trump got Mexico to increase troops, police, drug and immigration forces at the border and froze the tariffs for at least 30 days.
Trump got Canada to increase troops, police, drug and immigration forces at the border and froze the tariffs for at least 30 days.
Looks like his policies are working
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He reports them as a win (Bullies like to brag) but lets see in a year how much of a win politically and ecconomically they actually are for the common man.
When has that ever counted for anything?
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I think he has won already. He wanted stronger border controls, threatened tariffs, neighbours complied. Itās a massive victory in the views of the supporters and Fox News. Whether it turns out to be a material win for the US or not doesnāt really matter a fuck.
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That isnāt how it is being reported or viewed
I discovered in my interactions with him over the years that he is manipulative, yet extraordinarily easy to manipulate. He has an unfillable compliment hole. No amount is too much. Flatter him and he is compliant. World leaders, including apparently Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, have discovered that too.
He got them to say they would do those things. Delivery, howeverā¦
Iām prone to similarly verbose windbaggery as Prof Honig, though nothing like so well expressed - but it really is as simple as Trumpās own monochrome-mindset, best exemplified by his father having to bail-out all Juniorās early efforts because Donny is incapable of nuance, ignorant of complexity, immune to to mutualism. Heās a boor, a blackguard, a bumbler, a bluffer, a blagger, a bloviating blowhard, a blunt instrument in a brain surgeonās bagā¦
Heās not actually good at any of the things he takes credit for, ALL he has is a gigantic, distended ego, bloated taut by limitless delusions of adequacyā¦
Itās bad geopolitically, and itās very, very dangerous, because manchildren like him have the kind of emotional frailty that when thwarted - or someone hurts their fee-fees - makes them reach for the biggest, reddest button they can findā¦
Thereās a kind of self-loathersā schadenfreude in us Westerners finally getting the sort of āleadersā that the poor benighted sods in most of Africa, Asia and South America have so long suffered under - serves our insufferable sanctimonious smugness right I supposeā¦
There is a whole world outside of the Guardian.
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