I really didn't want to write about @ecotrain's question of the week this week, as I am fed up with politics. I decided it was far better for my mental health to stay away from it. However, it did lead to this conversation in the outdoor firebath on Saturday night, which I recorded and have just transcribed particularly for the train passengers, who may find it amusing. And I can't let a QOTW slide.

For the purposes of this, my husband is @beaker303 or 303 for short here. Don't bother following him - he has one post on Steemit. He can talk ten to the dozen but typing is beyond him, so I'm going to scribe what he has to say about it. Up until bath politics, it was a lovely evening under the full moon, and though it was cold, the bath was hot, the candles were lit, and we had a lovely bottle or two of Cab Sav to share.

303: You know, I was on an online forum the other day because I was looking into buying some pipe tobacco, you know, good stuff, like we used to get in England?

RF: But you don’t smoke anymore?

303: Yeah, but I really fancy just smoking a pipe once in a while. I was reading about Syrian latakia, which was first made in Syria – they smoked it over fires of wood and herbs and you can’t get it anymore – there’s been too much unrest in the region, wars and stuff. I mean, imagine how long that tobacco had been growing for? That’s quite sad really. America has a lot to answer for, going in to fuck up those countries. You know, Syria was quite an amazing country you know, not like it is now.

RF: Oh god yeah, give me a TARDIS, I would have loved to have seen it before they bombed the shit out of it.
303: I know. So you can’t even get Latakia anymore, I think they do a version in Greece or something but it’s not the same thing.

RF: Oh, that reminds me, speaking of bombing other countries and America - @ecotrain’s question of the week was how Trump rose to power?

303: Ah, right, well, pass me another glass of wine then. Trump rose to power because of the American Military Industrial complex – you know, Bush and the neo-cons, neo conservatives. All very self-centred, you know, very rich and running the arms and the oil. So we had them. They were the biggest arm traders and many believe that they engineered 9/11 to get the impetus to invade Iraq. So we got into the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war – it doesn’t matter where you’re really having a war, as long as you’re selling arms. Then we had Obama, and everyone thought oh yeah, he’s gonna be great, a black president and he’s going to be amazing and liberal. And his wife had a vegie patch, blah blah blah. But of course you don’t get to be POTUS unless you’re towing the party line. I mean, he was all really nice and etc, but of course under him more wars were initiated. So look at how, under this kinda history, they walked into Libya, killed Gadaffi, stole all his gold and now Libya is a complete fucking wreck, you know. How could we forget about that?

And then you look at the NRA and the gun situation, I mean if we lived in America we’d probably have a gun too.

At this point the conversation digresses, and there’s a lot of splashing, and I had to run in to get another bottle of wine and 303 had to put some cold water in the bath so we didn’t cook under the stars. Conversation then moved to the wreck that is Australian politics at the moment, which I also didn't want to talk about in the bath, but there it was, ugly and messy, in the bath with us)

RF: Ok, right, let’s forget about Australia for now, back to Trump.

303: So then you’ve got the election, you got Bernie Saunders who was fucking brilliant – left wing, socialist, fucking brilliant candidate. But the problem was you had Hilary Clinton on the same side as him, and she was very powerful and not only that, she was trying to take over. She was in the pocket of the neo conservatives in a way. She openly she said she wanted to attack Syria, I want to continue those war zones. No matter what you say about Trump, all that stuff over in Syria, that was just awful.

RF: Yeah, I remember you being really upset about that. And I remember those conversations about ‘well, which evil do you choose?’ because those wars were still continuing, and that’s why if you could have you probably voted Trump if you were American. Which nearly made me divorce you, but I can see why you were coming from that angle.
303: Well, yeah, because Trump wasn’t interested in those wars. And he hasn’t got there. The only people attacking Syria now is Israel, but that’s a border dispute and it’s not the Americans.

RF: Okay so back to Trump, let’s not go there – we only have so much wine.

303: So many people were like, why are you still spending so much money on fighting wars in other countries when blatantly we haven’t got any jobs, our bridges are falling down and all that, and this Trump comes along and goes, I’m gonna fix all of that, I’m going to make America great again. I’m gonna stop all of that, I don’t want to get involved unless it benefits America in a massive way. So what I could see was the conniving of Clinton and everyone else.

RF: Yeah, there was the whole what you see was what you got with Trump, and people saw that as honest and refreshing after all the blatant lying and political posturing of past presidencies I guess. He said what he thought.

303: Behind Clinton was the expansion of American expansionist policy. She said she wanted to depose Assad, to do the same thing we did to Gadaffi, to go and kill him in a hole. You can’t do that to other people. You can’t do that to other countries. You just can’t walk in there, doesn’t matter what you think about them, you can’t walk in and bomb the shit out of it and kill their president. Since then, Assad has been elected again, not with fixed elections, and a majority elected him!

RF: So the whole thing about the Assad chemical attack?

303: Fake. No evidence at all, and lots to say it was bullshit. Like the Russian chemical attack. Fake. And it’s been proven that that stuff comes from elsewhere.

So what we’ve got in America, is.. what’s the phrase for it – it was like less of a bad choice. I always looked at it as what’s the less people who were going to die? Who has died from Trump being in power? No one.

RF: But my fear is that they will – the more of this fear mongering and divisive politics and the fear of the other and we’ll end up with more wars and conflict because no one is leading in a visionary way that takes into account humanity, not just power and economies.

303: Yeah, but you’ve gotta separate what’s going on here in Australia with what’s going on there –

And at that point, the recording stops, and my memory is things got more and more heated, and @beaker303 got so feisty and fiery that he wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise, resulting in me getting angry for not letting me speak, and bathtime was well and truly over.

Maybe some of that Syrian latakia would have calmed things down a bit.

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