/lit/ - Literature

The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump

>>11308221
Greatest. President. Ever.

>>11308263
Honestly if this deal goes through I see him being remembered far more kindly than the presidents before him (or the also-rans). NK is a humanitarian crisis that American presidents have largely either ignored or exploited for political gain.

>>11308259
thicc

>>11308259
>berg
Fitting.

How will history remember this timeline, bros?

>>11308304
>Fitting
yeah she has trouble with that

Since it opened in Berlin in 2015, Ferdinand von Schirach’s Terror became a global hit, with hundreds of stagings all around the world, as well as an unending flow of ethical debates in mass media.

It is a court drama, the report of the trial against Lars Koch, a German fighter pilot who has shot down a Lufthansa plane that has been hijacked by a terrorist; the plane was heading for a stadium of 70,000 people (watching a Germany-England game), and Koch’s pragmatic decision – one in which he broke the constitutional law – was to end the lives of 164 people on the plane rather than allow the terrorist to slaughter a far greater number at the stadium.

At the end, the audience must vote: guilty or not guilty. Each spectator is provided with a small gadget with two buttons, 1 (guilty) or 2 (not guilty), and the audience learns its verdict. Predictably, the majority (at least in the Western theatres) proclaims Koch not guilty.

We are undoubtedly dealing with a genuine antinomy of moral reason (to use a Kantian turn) here: if we formulate the dilemma in this clear way, there simply is not an unambiguous solution. Any play with certainty and percentages – in the style of “If I am absolutely sure that by killing one man I will save at least 50, then…” – amounts to an obscenity.

However, our gut feeling that there is something deeply wrong and false with the choice staged by the play is fully justified: the choice is ideology at its purest, mainly because of what it leaves out in order to present a clear and simple picture.

Basically, we are addressed as individuals, confronted with a tough choice whose very clarity (shoot down the plane or not?) obfuscates all other relevant features. What about emptying the stadium (there was enough time); what about the geopolitical causes of such terrorist acts; what about our military interventions into Arab countries; what about our alliance with Saudi Arabia? Did we choose any of that, were we asked to choose any of that? Why do we feel all the pressure of the choice only when we confront a consequence of all these previous choices?

>>11308307
>>>/his/

>>11308263
>>>/pol/

>>11308282
>>11308304
>>>/lgbt/ you closet cases

>>11308314 cont
But there is another, more basic, feature of the play that we should address. Upon a closer look, it becomes clear that, when Koch chooses to shoot the plan down, he does not really make a unique existential decision but just follows the implicit social injunction.

His conversations with military superiors made it clear that they suppose he will shoot down the plane. They even implicitly put pressure on him to do it; they just don’t want to tell him to directly do it.

The situation reminds me of my recent stay in a hotel in Skopje, Macedonia: my companion inquired if smoking is permitted in our room, and the answer she got from the receptionist was unique: “Of course not, it is prohibited by the law. But you have ashtrays in the room, so this is not a problem.”

This was not the end of our surprises: when we entered the room, there was effectively a glass ashtray on the table, and on its bottom there was an image painted, a cigarette over which there was a large circle with a diagonal line across it designating prohibition. “No smoking”, written on an ashtray.

So this was not the usual game one encounters in tolerant hotels where they whisper to you discreetly that, although it is officially prohibited, you can do it carefully, standing by an open window or something like that. The contradiction (between prohibition and permission) was openly assumed and thereby cancelled, treated as inexistent – in other words, the message was: “It’s prohibited, and here is how you do it.”

>>11308316 cont
Was Koch’s situation not exactly the same? The repeated message from his superiors was: “It’s prohibited by the law – and do it!”

This is how armies function. I remember a similar incident from my military service. One morning, in our first class of the day, the officer running the session mentioned that it is prohibited to shoot at parachuters while they are still in the air, i.e. before they touch ground. In a happy coincidence, our next class was about rifle shooting, and the same officer taught us how to target a parachuter in the air (how, while aiming at it, one should take into account the velocity of his descent and the direction and strength of the wind, and so on).

When one of the soldiers asked the officer about the contradiction between this lesson and what we learned just an hour before (the prohibition to shoot at parachuters), the officer just snapped back with cynical laughter: “How can you be so stupid? Don’t you understand how life works?”

Recall also the debates on torture – was the stance of the US authorities not something like: “Torture is prohibited, and here is how you do a water-boarding”?

>>11308318 cont
One should note here that, in the case of the nuclear war, the popular imagination is haunted by the opposite constellation: that of a single officer who resists the command to press the button and thus saves the world.

Recall a frightening detail from the Cuban missile crisis: only later did we learn how close to nuclear war we were during a naval skirmish between an American destroyer and a Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba on 27 October 1962. The destroyer dropped depth charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing it had a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the conference in Havana that the submarine was authorised to fire it if three officers agreed. The officers began a fierce shouting debate over whether to sink the ship. Two of them said yes and the other said no.

“A guy named Arkhipov saved the world,” was the bitter comment of a historian on this accident. Do we not all silently count on something similar in the heated exchange between the US, North Korea and others – that, at a decisive moment, a single individual will find strength to cut short the mad circle of nuclear threats and counter-threats?

The fact that we tend again to put our hopes on a single individual demonstrates the madness of the entire situation. We can imagine a series of choices along the lines of von Schirach’s play: if a North Korean missile on its way to Guam falls apart, should the US respond, and how?

But what we should always bear in mind is the madness of the entire situation: while we are all threatened by ecological catastrophes, we continue to play the games of self-destruction. The decisions our leaders consider are not on the scale of “How many innocent people am I allowed to kill to save many more?” but: “How many millions of innocent bystanders am I ready to kill, directly and indirectly, in order to strike back at the enemy?” This is what they are really talking about when they evoke the catastrophic consequences of a nuclear conflict: millions and millions will die, but, somehow, we will have to do it and strike back.

What further complicates the image is that, if one listens to Kim Jong-un when he talks about dealing a devastating blow to the US, one cannot but wonder where he sees his own position. He talks as if he not aware that his country, himself included, will be destroyed; he talks as if he is playing a fantasy game.

>>11308323 cont
So is he bluffing? If the basic underlying axiom of the Cold War was the axiom of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), the axiom of today’s nuclear games seems to be the opposite one, that of NUTS (Nuclear Utilisation Target Selection): the idea that, by means of a surgical strike, one can destroy the enemy’s nuclear capacities while the anti-missile shield is protecting us from a counter-strike.

More precisely, the US adopts a differential strategy: it acts as if it continues to trust the MAD logic in its relations with Russia and China, while it is tempted to practice NUTS with Iran and North Korea.

The paradoxical mechanism of MAD inverts the logic of the “self-realising prophecy” into a “self-stultifying intention”: the very fact that each side can be sure that, in the case it decides to launch a nuclear attack on the other side, the other side will respond with full destructive force, guarantees that no side will start a war.

The logic of NUTS is, on the contrary, that the enemy can be forced to disarm if it is assured that we can strike at him without risking a counter-attack. The very fact that two directly contradictory strategies are mobilised simultaneously by the same superpower bears witness to the deluded character of this entire reasoning.

The only thing we can do in such a situation is to directly criminalise any talk about the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. Leaders and states who even consider it should be treated as pariahs, as obscene subhuman monsters. Anything should be permitted against them, from mass boycott to personal humiliation.

end

I wonder what all those people who predicted war with Korea if Trump was elected are thinking right now.

Man, I really miss being a mentally ill NEET in 2016 going through my /pol/ phase, eating up conspiracy theories one by one and following the elections. The hype was fucking real, and when all peaked with Trump unironically really being elected as president it was so surreal. Too bad I got on medication shortly after so I didnt enjoy the after game. Now it all seems so normal, there are no happenings and I can't see how could something top the level of crazyness that was in the air back then.
Now here I am, trying to LARP as a normalfag, trying to educate myself, but its all so tiresome, none of it gives me that dopamine rush. I don't know what to hope now, but it is always like this, the ride just never ends, and the present is always grey.

Did you know that nk is such a bullshit country because the us and others pressure on that little bullshit country so that either it plays their game or no game at all, so it needs a nuclear weapon and it needs a strong leadership cult to sustain itself, otherwise pressure would collapse it little system. The ones outside are just as guilty as those inside because the logic is the same "just give in". It is in fact Kim's credit more than anything to try out diplomacy at this very moment, using Trump's fragile relationships to other countries and an excuse for good press. Kim is profitting from this more than anyone and NK in general too. It says less about Trump or the US than people tend to think. It's a phony agreement and we actually need more of those.

>>11308334
haha we shure showed them kek
shadilay brother

>>11308364
Shadilay

>>11308349
Go back to what you were. Embrace the insanity. The sane won't survive in this world for long, not any more. Look at all the fucking normalfags on Twitter and Facebook saying how much they hate the state of the world right now. Look at them all, suffering from depression and committing suicide.

The world belongs to the mad now. Join them.

>>11308315
why are they closet cases? she cute.

>>11308381
Holy.... more....

>>11308381
My insanity was suicidal depression and mixed episodes. I always contemplate dropping my meds but I know that would make my family sad, you know, if I actually did something far out crazy.
You don't know how much I want to get a ton of LSD and start fooling around until I get into PKDmode, but now that I'm "stable", morals start creeping in.
I fucking hate my life.
Also, I don't want to go back to /pol/. That would be retarded.

>>11308349
you are me?

>>11308381
Edgy as all hell
Id dare to say that the 4chan userbase is more lonely and suicidal than your average normie

>>11308417
Hopefully

>>11308418
Case in point: >>11308409

>>11308423
It’s the fluoride in the water.

>>11308418
Thats because we deal with black pills on a daily basis. Just look at Anthony Bourdain for what happens when reality hits hard at you all at once
Normies are doomed

>>11308449
Boy that brings back memories
I only drink bottled water now just out of the habit that was born from the paranoia

>>11308456
I miss being up to all the going-down-the-rabbit-hole stuff going on everyday on /pol/

>>11308409
PKDmode is not fun fucking idiot

>>11308477
I know it isnt, but it was an interesting experience, he made something of worth out of his suffering and hardwork

>>11308471
The real rabbit hole starts here

>>11308492
I have tried reading Being and Time. The introduction was quite a trip, and the part where he talks about the concept of logos kind of blew my mind. I have tried to keep going, I can keep the rythm, but I'm just getting nothing out of it. I'm kind of disappointed of philosophy and myself, so I'm sticking to literature. My two favorite authors right now are Proust and PKD.

>>11308314
>>11308316
>>11308318
>>11308323
>>11308329
Can I get a quick rundown?

>>11308221
I have hated him since lifestyles of the rich and famous, but im gonna vote for him in 2020. Fuckin guy keeps winning, I've made like 20% on my investments since he came into office, and he keeps tweaking the nose of the regressive leftists. The tax bill has given me a 5 figure break with my rental properties, and he is obviously doing what he can to placate hawks and still keep us out of wars. Plus he is endlessly entertaining.

>>11308576
Read the last post for the conclusion, otherwise just read it all.

>It took donald fucking trump of all presidents for this to happen

I fucking love this shit tbqh. Best timeline

>>11308618
Syria: SOLVED
North Korea: SOLVED
ISIS: DISSOLVED

He's on a fucking rampage

>>11308632
i dont know about syria solved, but hes done his best to shove it all the way to the back burner. Waiting for Tehran Treaty and the inevitable Kish Island Trump Hotel, which democrats will rightly call corruption, and no one will care.

Damn America is a joke

>>11308681
t. Buttblasted Eurocunt

>>11308221
>goes golfing with Kim
>tells trudeau he is a security risk

glorious

>>11308684
I just say that because
a) they elected some down-and-out celebrity as the highest ranking official in the country
and
b) that celebrity may be the first president to bring peace to the 70 year old issue of North Korea

>>11308721
also he labeled justin trudeau as a security risk this week over dairy tariffs. I laughed

>>11308728
Good, hope he sends the CIA to take out that faggot

>>11308221
>two power-hungry liars, out of touch with reality talk about things they really aren't familiar with
not to mention the US is giving NK legitimacy

>>11308259
She deserves that after Buffy.

>>11308349

I think the Great Meme War took something from all of us, Anon. Gods those were the days.

>>11309238
being this mad at success of someone you wouldn't/didn't vote for

>>11308457
Have fun destroying your endocrine system with plastics seeping with xenoestrogens

>>11308457
>drinking plasticized estrowater

>>11308329
why did Slavoj zizek exactly think like that a year ago

>>11308403
it's gay to lust for a zaftig woman because they are an ancient, primordial symbol of human fertility

rhetoric by aristotle

>ruin your relationships with your closest allies in North America and Europe
>suck the balls of Kim and Putin

Any American who is ok with that is indeed a moron.

>>11308606
>he is obviously doing what he can to placate hawks and still keep us out of wars
inb4 venezuela

>>11309397
Because he knows what's up my niBBa

>>11308349

>being a trump supporting retard

come on pal i know it was a phase but come on

>>11309515
You are a moron if you think he "ruined" US's relationship with Europe

OBVIOUSLY THIS

The OG: Benedetto Cotrugli – The Book of the Art of Trade

>>11309515
>Yurop
>Relevant

Once we get in good with the chinks wtf are you fags going to do?

>>11308259
>>11309729

Anyone recommending Art of the Deal hasn't actually read it. The first 15 pages is about his negotiation tactics, then the next 250 pages is about pointless shit like zoning issues and construction sites in Atlantic City.

That said, Trump is literally saving the world right now and it makes me laugh that libtards would rather a nuclear war than see Trump succeed as President.

>>11309515
Ruining shit with North America bothers me, Europe suffering is actually a universal dope.

>>11309547
inb4 trump smoking hookah with the ayatollahs and dressing as chavez hanging out with Venezuelan bros

>>11309515
Fuck Europe. I don't give a shit about "pleasing our allies." We give them billions in aid, and they still want us to suck their cocks more. We send 10,000 troops to fight ISIS. Britain sends 8 guys and a humvee. We don't owe our allies shit.
Trump is unironically the best thing to happen to the US in decades.

>literally the same agreement as from 2005 while legitimizing Kim

WELL DONE BIG CHEETO

>muh legitimising
dumb freaks. i bet you guys wouldnt have cried back when nixon "legitimised" china and sold out taiwan ya freakin comies...

>>11309238
NK was already a legitimate nation that participated with SK at the Olympics.

The lack of nuclear war is a stench among itself, like sulfur inside of my nose. When will it ever end?

>>11310068

>mfw I read the treaty

>>11308697
Trudeau is a security risk

>>11309515
The pacific is far more important than the Atlantic
Trump is a true Pacifican

>>11310123
>A New Yorker is a true Pacifican
Now this is damage control.

>>11309983
This
Nixon and Mao didn't talk about much but the fact that he did this was massive and arguably changed the whole flow of history since then (and changed the course of the Cold War)

>>11310130
The Atlantic man was the elite race of the last era
This new era will see the rise of the Anglo-Oriental pacific race

>>11309397
It was after the "I have a bigger button than yours" tweet irrc

>>11310135
As someone from the other side of the Pacific, this is going to my cringe collection

>>11310205
The only issue of the future is who will be the "greater" partner in this relationship
Will it be Oriental-Anglo or Anglo-Oriental

>tfw Aussie-Sino-Japanese-American Pacific Treaty destroys yurop once and for all

>>11309955
No he isn't, is adminstration is destorying our environment and economy. Especially in regards to agriculture and "housing".

>>11309983
I would have been pissed.

>>11309324
>>11309325
Where the hell should I get my water from then you oafs? What do you guys drink

>>11310383
A well, spring, or stream. You alienated urban sunhuman

>>11309915
>The first 15 pages is about his negotiation tactics, then the next 250 pages is about pointless shit like zoning issues and construction sites in Atlantic City.
It's enjoyable as a billionaire slice of life book. It's basically an anime season in semi-literate form.

>>11310389
Sounds like full of fish poo

>>11309317
*snap*

>>11310383
I only drink sugar free monster energy

>>11310439
*snaps behind you*

>It'll totally work this time guys! We promise!

>>11310383
Reverse osmosis with remineralization.
It's well worth it even if you somehow trust the quality of the water you buy. It's cheaper than bottled water provided you remain in the same place for the next two years. You can go full autism on the mineralogical content of your water, and you avoid the gay frog syndrome.

*wins the Nobel peace prize*

>>11310453
My family had something similar to pic related years ago. It had some mineral balls. Is something like this enough?

>>11308263
It's really starting to look like Trump will be remembered among the great Presidents of US history. Even the people that hated him are coming around. He's clearly not the homicidal, racist oaf the left thought him to be, and now they have to actually criticize him fairly. It's been fascinating to behold, and I think Trump will easily win 2020 at this point and he still has 2 years to continue to impress the world.

>>11308349
The fervor of that time was unreal. When Trump won it really was surreal. I remember that moment clearly. It'll be another one of those moments where everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing at the time.

>>11310453
Unironically I want to set this up so my sons won't become traps.

Water quality is fairly good here though. City doesn't use fluoride at least... not sure about the gayfrog shit

>>11310478
>plastic

>>11308315
>>/s4s/
>>/trash/

>>11310503
What are some redpilled materials for water filters?

>What are some books about the art of the deal?

>>11310467
Kek no fucking way will they let this happen even though it is very obvious he should get it.

>>11309970
>legitimizing Kim

What does this mean?

>>11308314
>>11308316
>>11308318
>>11308323
>>11308329
thank you